Inspired by Dave Winer's Convention Bloggers I built a "River of News" aggregator of UK Political Blogs. I was at the Mashup event last night with Marc Canter on Digital Lifestyle Aggregators.

So anyway. Maintaining UkPoliBlogs is a little time consuming and I get the pccasional complaint about the primitive user interface. It occurred to me that any of the online RSS readers could do something like this. They could allow me to drop in an OPML subscription list and then handle all the heavy lifting of presenting the RSS feeds. Of course this should be a barn raising so that other people could add to the list. We'd then have a number of topic focussed composite News Rivers on niche topics. Perhaps something like a dynamic version of Amazon's Lists. "UK Political Blogs" would be just one list within thousands. Now maybe somebody's already doing this. But a quick scan of Newsgator, Bloglines, My Yahoo didn't turn up anything.

This in turn leads on to a problem I have with all DLAs as they have appeared so far. They're all built round the old Portal idea of a collection of reading matter in one place for one person to read. This is all supported and underpinned by very Web 1.0 ideas of sticky eyeballs, monetizing via advertising and so on. There's nothing especially wrong with this, but I want to invert it. I want to build a big Web 2.0 AboutMe page that is all the content I produce for *other people* to read about me, to enhance my online reputation. And I want the DLA people to think in terms of "How can they help me make money" and "How can they help me self-publish", rather than just how they can monetize my eyeballs. My good friends at Opinity are starting to do some of this stuff.

We will be doing some engineering work this evening (Friday 22nd September) and expect some downtime. We plan this to start at about 6:30pm UK Time and last for about half an hour.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Apple Store, Regent Street London! | DefectiveByDesign.org

Oct 3rd. 2pm to 5pm. Wear your Anti-DRM T-Shirt and stick it to The Man!

Music via Google
Another nail in the coffin [from: del.icio.us]

If so, where? I had a look around last weekend.
- All the local record shops have shut down.
- Virgin and HMV have pulled out of the local large towns and their Malls.
- We're left with top 20 in Tescos, WH Smiths and Woolworths and the DVD section is now larger than the audio section. And I haven't bought a top 20 album in 20 years.

Meanwhile, Tower is going bust in the USA.

What hapens to the music industry when there are only really two places you can buy music and they're both online, Amazon and iTMS.

The last couple of days I have mostly been listening to Atmosphere. Chilled, blunted, rap. Imagine the sort of thing that would be the soundscape for amateur grainy skateboard videos on the extreme sports channel at 2am.

Elias Torres » Blog Archive » I'm the lazy web : Now if you want to get some of the OnlineAccount magic, add the following to your foaf:Person:

This is a neat decentralized solution to *publishing* your list of accounts. But from where I'm standing FOAF still looks like a write only format. And aggregating it still looks like a Google sized problem. To
take one example, you can use FOAF to say "Who I know". But you have to aggregate the whole FOAF universe to answer "Who knows me?". If anyone is reading FOAF in quantity and doing something useful with it, I'd love to know.

Technorati and others have shown that it is possible to build a new and innovative search engine. They've done it for blog content. I don't know of anyone who's done it for people. Here's a thought related to the idea of a universal ID convertor. Who's got all the names? There are maybe 10 players with 100m, 100 players with 10m. Anyone of these could
deliberately extend their profile information to be an open ended list of related accounts; not just homepage | blog | AIM | MSN. They could then make this info searchable.

It puzzles me that we still don't have a good schema/format/whatever for wrapping and transferring information about people from one system to another. Most of the talk around Identity is about proof, verification and ownership; Less about standards for transfer of proved information.

We will again be SkypeCasting the Ecademy Event tonight at 7:30. Details here.

To listen to the Skypecast, go to the page for this skypecast at 7:30pm UK time and follow the instructions. If you can't connect, try calling +99001110006940486

Skype Beta 2.6 has a Skypecasting directory built into the client. Recommended. [from: JB Ecademy]

We will again be SkypeCasting the Ecademy Event tonight at 7:30. Details here.

To listen to the Skypecast, go to the page for this skypecast at 7:30pm UK time and follow the instructions.

Skype Beta 2.6 has a Skypecasting directory built into the client. Recommended.


[from: JB Ecademy]

BBC NEWS | UK | Terror charges in full

So after 10 Aug and the War on Moisture along with ever more ridiculous airline security measures, we now have 17 people reaching the end of their 28 days detention. Reading down the list of charges we have:-

1 person possession of a handgun
1 person possession of a map of Afghanistan, and a book on improvised explosives
1 person preparing to smuggle improvised bombs onto an aircraft
11 people conspiring
3 people withholding information

Now clearly we shouldn't pre-judge any trial. And there's all sorts of possibilities here. But just as this could be a terrorist plot to cause unimaginable horror, it could also be a small group of somewhat deluded people with dreams of defending their homeland (Afghanistan) from yet another invasion. And led by somebody with more foolishness than the others who actually got hold of a handgun.

The only information I've seen about the "improvised bomb" was a reference to weedkiller, sugar and ground aluminium found near one of the houses. This isn't a high tech, two part, liquid weapon, this is what the IRA and countless schoolboys[1] have messed with over the years.

You scared yet?

[1]The Amateur Rocketry Society at school was a somewhat underground affair. A 0.22" drill meant they managed to make a 22 Sten Gun using ammunition from the rifle range. It never did go full auto, but did fire single shot. Propellant for the rockets was sodium chlorate, icing sugar and tissue paper. An old life raft gas bottle from Molesworth airfield (when it was a dump for the USAF and before it was a cruise missile base) made a container for an improvised bomb with a fuse wire, zinc and sulphur remote detonator. It made a very satisfying explosion. I always believed that Sodium Chlorate has been sold for years with a stabiliser that stops it being used as an explosive. Maybe I'm wrong.

Niall Kennedy has done a tremendous job of analysing the current state of the art in MyPages:

This area is clearly important because it represents a BIG pot of cash for the majors. But I'm also completely uninterested in it as a customer. My browser is set to about:blank and I would never use a MyPage, though like others I've used them all once. The whole area seems to me to be pure Web 1.0 and to be about lock-in, sticky eyeballs and monetizing via advertising. Bor...ing...

I want to invert the concept into it's mirror image. Not a MyPage with stuff from other people for me to read. But a YourPage with stuff from me for other people to read. Something that aggregates everything I produce all over the web into a page where people can find out about me. Who am I, what do I do, what do I read, what do I listen to, who are my friends, what have I written, what conversations am I in, what am I selling, etc etc.

Blogmusik | Free Internet virtual ipod for Music Albums playlist Mp3 (BETA VERSION)
Another nail in the music industry's coffin? [from: del.icio.us]

ClustrMaps - Hit counter map shows locations of all visitors to your site - free
Another of those blog widgets. This one tracks where your readers are located based on IP address. Free, premium paid. [from: del.icio.us]

BarCamp / BarCampLondon

Bangs head against desk! How did I not know BarCampLondon was happening? As it was I had a dinner on Sat night and attending would have been hard.

But how did I not know BarCampLondon was happening? dammit!

Cory has been talking about : Kim Cameron having trouble with missing tracks from Bob Dylan's CD "Modern Times"

There's another way to get Modern Times and burn it to a CD: you can buy it from AllOfMP3.com

But go here and you'll find AllOfMp3 only have the 10 tracks off the Audio CD. Not the 4 tracks off the DVD.

I think we're going to see more and more of this. A CD packaged with a DVD containing videos of additional tracks. Ripping the audio from the DVD's videos is considerably harder than ripping a CD to MP3. And it opens up an avenue for the record companies (and by implication iTMS) to change the rules.

To a certain extent I admire this. It's a way of making the physical object worth more than the digital download. But it can also be seen as yet another example of DRM. In this case, the stronger DRM present on a DVD than the unprotected audio CD. The big downside of course is that the DVD is only playable on a DVD player. Which for many will mean no playing in the car, on a portable CD player or on the average stereo. That seems quite a strange idea. Music that can only be played on a television.

Opinity
Curious. This needs more investigation. [from: del.icio.us]

What if there were a web service that provided a universal ID lookup. eg

- Give the API a Skype ID get back the Flickr ID for the same person.
- Give the API a Digg ID get back the del.icio.us ID for the same person.
- Give the API an MSN ID get back the last.fm ID for the same person.

And so on in a big matrix of common and popular sites.

Is this a Google sized problem?

Clearly, it would have to be opt-in to avoid horrible privacy issues. It wouldn't find favour with people who want anonymity, but it would be great for those of us who want to be onymous.

I can imagine this being like a huge account profile database as in all those YASNs. And knowing all the IDs would make it possible to build an aggregation page for each person with the latest entry's RSS feed from each service for their ID.

-----

This was prompted in my deviant brain by looking at the Programmableweb website's matrix of mashups. I noticed that the Instant Messenger systems like Skype, MSN, YM, AIM had very few entries. Now an important part of these systems is that they are very large ID namespaces. But there's very little that relates those namespaces to other Id identification elsewhere. Which makes it very hard (say) to relate a Skype ID with a Flickr ID and mashup the related info.

Is Opinity the beginnings of this?

A reminder : Just because Abu Ghraib has been repurposed doesn't mean it's over.

the main factor is propaganda and its cumulative effect on the populace.

We're not being beaten into submission here, folks - we're being smothered. And that smothering is dressed up as love.

The Threat of Terrorism Is Real - The War on Terror Is a Lie

"You must fear the terrorists. They want to hurt you. We will protect you. You must not question us, because this helps the terrorists. Who want to hurt you. We will protect you."

But who are the terrorists? The line has already started to blur, and that beating I mentioned before is yours for the taking if you'd care to step outside of a Free Speech Zone. Yes folks, if you so much as raise your voice, you become a terrorist....

The Alex Barnett blog said : This is what Voidstar said Smart Mobs said The Register said that Sir TBL said: and it's all just Chinese whispers.

Smart Mobs: Berners-Lee calls for Web 2.0 calm along with Dave's rant at O'Reilly and quite a few others are pointing out that Web 2.0 is just Web 1.0 with pastel colours and a style sheet.

You want to see something really revolutionary? Well how about Second life, P2P/Decentralisation and people running their own code on their own servers (especially when it's their own home machine). 50 million blogs is impressive but less so when the majority are hosted by one of 4 companies.

Really, the number two a dot and the letter "Oh" is a crock of BS. But then you've got to admire people who've turned that mnemonic into a conference series, a book and a speaking tour.

Now about P2P, Decentralisation and the end to end principle. Whatever happened to that? Was it too hard, or has it been deliberately buried? Will things like AllPeers bring it back again?

Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog » Phil Becker on Identity's First Big War: a history lesson

How different would the history of the Identity wars been if Passport had used an open protocol and been implementable by service providers without asking Microsoft or using Microsoft technology? In other words, if Microsoft had gone all out to make it an Internet De Facto standard. I wonder if the data ownership issues around Hailstorm would have been seen to be less important if the whole package was easier to bolt into existing websites. As it was, only the very biggest non-Microsoft players even tried to implement Passport and they quickly found commercial reasons for why it was a bad idea. Things might have been very different if a few tens of thousands of sites had supported it.

This was all happening at the same time as the growth of RSS from a handful of sites to thousands to millions. There are lessons to be learnt there.

It's mildly irritating that I can't seem to leave this comment as acomment on the actual blog. Oh well.