You've got to see this.
http://www.ebxml.org/news/pr_20010308.htm
It refers to the use of SOAP 1.1 in the ebXML Business standard. MS and IBM offer (!) to license the use of SOAP 1.1 and SOAP Messages with attachments. What the hell? And this is an open standard? The document is dated 8th March.

ebXML B2B standard ready for scrutiny. Computer World Mar 27 2001 12:03PM ET [Vertical portals news]
"The Unix/Windows debate is still alive, and one of the things we want to do is drive the standards discussion to make it go away,"
"More than 2,000 people from 30-plus countries have helped develop the ebXML specifications"
"The ebXML organizing body last month agreed to incorporate the transport sequence for the Microsoft-backed Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), making it far easier for businesses to swap information. SOAP is Microsoft's sole contribution to date."
ebXML is due to be ratified in May.

UK PLC leads US on corporate Web sites. Elcom UK Mar 27 2001 10:47PM ET [Internet Europe news]
58% of UK companies have a web site compared with 57% in the US, Ovum says.

Majority of Britons Now Use Internet. Reuters via iWon Mar 27 2001 7:52AM ET [Internet Europe news] But mostly from home?? And not enough for MS to deploy bCentral.

Microsoft and UK e-government unveil progress. Netimperative Mar 27 2001 10:49AM ET [Internet Europe news] "there were no details as to how much the government has paid to licence these technologies", "the Government Gateway is the largest deployment of its BizTalk Server 2000 in the UK", "This evening, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is expected to outline how the project is to reach its goal to have 100% of the government’s transactions online by 2005."
Your tax pounds at work...

Microsoft says UK not ready for bCentral. Netimperative Mar 27 2001 2:29AM ET [Internet Europe news] So there you have it. The lack of always on internet and general apathy in SMEs in the UK mean that MS can't be bothered to implement bCentral in the UK, Germany and Italy. Oh Well.

Salon is now worth $3.1 million. [Scripting News]

Seems about right for a moderately interesting magazine that refuses to syndicate it's news.

British Study Says Fourth Gunman On Grassy Knoll Killed Kennedy [Plastic]
I thought everyone knew there were 5 gunmen from 5 separate conspiracies. Only Justin Case (The world's first quintuple agent) saw what was really going down. cf Robert A Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy. From the same source, anyone who understands how Oswald can be in the book repository, seen outside it and seen on the other side of Dallas at the same time understands the true nature of reality.

Space Fungi. So Mir was inhabited with space fungi. Perhaps they shouldn't have brought it back! Shades of Quatermass, or perhaps Schismatrix (Bruce Sterling).

Oi! Fat Corporate Bastards. Listen up. We want
Cheap, unlimited flat-rate international communication
Hands off: No censorship, no advertisements, no lawsuits
Respect
Privacy

And

Email, WWW, Usenet, IRC, FTP
Explicit adult material
Access to government and corporate information for oversight purposes
Educational services
Free networked multiplayer games

And you know what? We've already got it.

Internet + English = Netglish. BBC Mar 23 2001 7:02AM ET [Cyberculture news] Which is to say that English as she is spoke is the lingua franca of the internet. But in 2008, more than 50% of the internet users will be native Chinese speakers (c Accenture). Given how much they're spending on .net infrastructure in China I wouldn't bet against it.

Apocalypse Cow -- Nevada Researchers Suggest Using Napalm On Diseased Cattle [Plastic] The current British approach to Foot and Mouth is positively mediaeval. This puts a nice 20th century spin on it.

VeriSign screws up. Via /., Microsoft: Erroneous VeriSign-Issued Digital Certificates Pose Spoofing Hazard. "Do you wanna install this Active-X control? It might have been signed by Microsoft!" [Flutterby!]
I wonder if this is one of those old stories that has just resurfaced? I remember something almost exactly the same when ActiveX and Signing first appeared. What, 4 years ago?

From the "Caught in a Hailstorm" Desk

White paper at http://www.microsoft.com/net/hailstorm.asp

Initial Thoughts
1. What? No MyFavoriteSongs? After Napster?

2. Anyone can write software on whatever platform they feel like to
interact with Hailstorm via SOAP. But who gets to run the server side? In Federated Hailstorm they say "In particular, this is designed to allow enterprises to run local instances of applicable services. Future Microsoft products will support corporate federation, making it simple for a corporation to run local instances of appropriate HailStorm services." I foresee a concerted effort to reverse engineer the centre and distribute it. Why should Microsoft have all the fun?

If this happens, I'll further predict that the cost of using non MS
Hailstorm services will drop to zero.

- It's the Drug-Dealer/Pimp business model. The first one's free, the next one's on me, after that you pay.

- MS will actually make their money the way they always have. By selling clients that are factory installed by the PC Manufacturers.

- It's actually client-server all over again. All MS Products will be clients. The communication protocol and callable services are open so anyone else can build clients. Many people will do this on all sorts of different platforms. But the server will be big and complicated and few, if any, will attempt to build one.

- The VCs won't fund server farms any more. But MS will. Perhaps this should be seen as the most extreme case yet of "Volume is its own reward" as a business plan.

- The whole exercise is the most Centralized thing since the Central
Centralizer ran the Central line from CentrePoint.

Since the earliest days of Napster, the prevailing trend has been
towards greater and greater de-centralization. Full marks and a loud
raspberry to MS for bucking this trend.

Those of you still under NDAs can prove me wrong...

Maybe the only good thing that will come out of this is wider acceptance of SOAP.

UK Firms Discover Collaborative E-Business - Report. Newsbytes Mar 19 2001 9:34AM ET [Internet Europe news]
Hmm. I'm sure it's a valid report. But it's curious that it's a joint effort from SAP and Aberdeen.

LA Times: US corn supply hoplessly tainted with StarLink gene [Robot Wisdom]
Oh Boy. So those tree hugging commies and the Damn EU were right. If you grow a monoculture and then let Big Business play with it's genes, accidents happen. Maybe we should just all go back and read John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar"

P2P in B2B A Standards-based, P2P Approach to Marketplaces and Exchanges

Well would you believe it. I made the small print of Need to Know!

www.ntk.net "Registered at the Post Office as  "they stole our slogan, now we're ... 

well, we're a bit stuck, aren't we?"

http://roguemoon.manilasites.com/soap" 

It must be copyright day.

Napster Usage Drops Suddenly. T H E T U C K S H O P Mar 16 2001 5:43AM ET [Cyberculture news]

Bertelsmann imposes deadline on Napster [Geeknews]

Scientologists Force Comment Off Slashdot [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

Record Industry Plays Both Sides. [via Wired News] [Adam Curry: CurryDotCom]

Verio gags EFF founder over spam. Open relay violates acceptable use [The Register]

I've been a fan of the EFF for a long time, but this one's bullshit. John Gilmore is displaying an embarrassing lack of knowledge about how the internet works. To pick up on one piece, he's complaining that his friends need to be able to send email from anywhere in the world. Well almost all closed mail relays work on the basis of Pop3 read before smtp send. As long as you have a pop3 account, you can send your email from anywhere. Spam is such a problem that closed relays are a perfectly acceptable defence and have absolutely nothing to do with censorship.

As expected being Winerized bumped me into 84th place in "Site's most read yesterday"

anyone doing RSS banner ads yet?
I'm a bit uncomfortable with the appearance of graphics links embedded in the 'description' field of RSS. And now BlackHoleBrain suggest this. As I read it, I just know it's going to happen, and I think it's BAD, BAD, BAD! Imagine scanning through the Moreover Vertical Portals feed and item 8 is a rolling animated LINE56 banner for their next conference.

Well, Well. I just got Winered. We'll see tomorrow what it does to the hit rate.

EU encourages SMEs on-line in new GoDigital project. EU Business Mar 14 2001 10:21AM ET [Internet Europe news]
Maybe important, maybe not. I'll check tomorrow...

Financially-challenged surfers start to invade the Net. Rich Americans forced to share cyberspace [The Register]
Typical. Give away free internet access in the public libraries and poor people take advantage of it.

Clay Shirky Explains Internet Evolution Oh boy. What a lot of good stuff here.

Line56: MS link their small business offering "bCentral" with eBay via SOAP. And hence with UDDI. This is B2B for the rest of us and MS wants it. Also remember MS' recent purchase of Great Plains, probably the market leader in MS based mid range accounting.

Palm Won't Hand It to Microsoft. Palm dominates the handheld market and Microsoft dominates the PC market. Which company will conquer the burgeoning PDA-cell phone market? By Elisa Batista. I want one Palm sized device with a screen, fold out keyboard, aerial, Mic and Speaker/headphone jack and maybe a little vidcam. I want an expansion port. And then I want to turn it into a PDA, radio, TV, MP3 player, phone, GPS, camera, webcam, SMS system, WAP system all in software.
And I want it now!


Boston Globe Story about Forrester. "Forrester's continuing success hinges on ensuring that big companies are paranoid about the future, and the havoc that technological change might wreak. It's fear, uncertainty, and doubt - as well as a desire to take advantage of opportunities - that keeps companies tuned in to Forrester missives like ''The New Reality of Online Travel: Zero Commissions.'' Yup, this is how analysis works. Create a research report with 4 FUD questions. Follow it up with 6 paragraphs on how it's not that bad. Finish with 2 Paragraphs of recommendations on dealing with the threat.
Cynical? Moi? With my reputation?

So this is how it works. A Goldman's Sachs analyst talks to some corporate board level suits. They say things aout B2B like "There's a recession coming, delay any deal north of $1 million", "Wait a bit while we double check the potential ROI", "The wheels will not fall off the business because it spends too much money processing purchase orders for office supplies". So he then marks down Ariba, C-1, Verticalnet, ICG and FreeMarkets. The stocks catch a cold and tank. People lose money and the recession becomes more real. But is that last comment stupidity and confusion on the part of the analyst or the suit?

BBC: China plans worlds deepest lab.

2:22:24 PM    And then they're going to fill it with robots running evolutionary algorithms... Was that a Bruce Sterling or Neal Stephenson short story?

Napster Blocking Creates Dan Quayle Effect I love it. The only illegal songs on Napster are the Mis-Spelt ones...

Essential T Shirts from NTK.

USA Today: Europe's music-piracy solution: taxes. The legislation, which takes effect in each of the 15 EU nations after being ratified by the national parliaments, allows countries to add fees for each blank CD or CD burner sold -- mirroring existing laws in Italy and Germany, where additional charges of between 5% and 10% are already being assessed. So if I pay the tax, what rights does that give me? Who gets the money? Can I now copy legally?

Tech Meltdown: Lessons Learned?. There's a reason why news about the dot-com slump is starting to sound old. It is old. As of this week, it'll be a year since the tech stock market hit its high and Net shares began to crater. By Joanna Glasner. So how about a bit of optimism then ;-) The US and UK economies are as strong as they've ever been. You've never had it so good! Remember, "Optimism is a self fulfilling prophesy..."


This Virtual Life with Danny OBrien. Sunday Times Mar 9 2001 12:52AM ET
Fascinating. It takes the Gujurat earthquake and the sizeable Indian population in the valley to get the hi-tech industry involved in political/social activity.
BTW, Danny edits the excellent NTK.

Hotscripts.com's lists of code, scripts and applications that support RSS.

Descramble That DVD in 7 Lines. A new, slimmed-down version of DVD descrambling now exists: a mere seven lines of Perl code. It's so lean, you too can attach it to your e-mail signature file.
Hey, Remember when you could put a munition on a T shirt by printing some crypto code?

Excellent, funny and long review of the O'Reilly P2P conference. Packed with quotes. "Only a developer conference would begin on Valentine's Day. These guys may be cool, but they're too damn busy coding or reading SlashDot to have girlfriends. "
at http://www.gtamarketing.com/P2Pconferencereport.html

The most retro web page ever. Jakob would love it.

"Can I take a momento of my visit to the USA? Yes. Take California."
Probably the best Big Beat song ever, The Propellorheads, "Take California"

Website profitability: an economic analysis. Very interesting article about making or losing money with a content based website.

The internet isn't 10 years old, but right now it feels like a 10th Birthday party is in order. One of my favourite mailing lists (Euro-Moto on European motorcycles) had it's 10th Birthday at the end of last year. I've been on it for I think 7 years. Then The Times posts a story that the famous Cambridge Uni Coffee Machine webcam is 10 years old but is going off the air in a couple of months when the faculty moves. Judging by the photo, the coffee machine may be 15 years old if it's a day.
Happy 10th Birthday, Internet!

Former Netscape duo reunites for P2P start-up. CNET Mar 5 2001 4:51PM ET

Http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-5028061.html?tag=ch_mh
So the big guys from Netscape and Loudcloud are at it again. This time it's selling a better way to distribute the content from major news sites closer and perhaps on to the desktop using a mix of Akamai and P2P style tech. Maybe.

Meanwhile the Slashdot/Kuro5Hin model gets hijacked by a bunch of trad publishers and launched in a "Plastic" imitation. Look it's got
DoubleClick ads! And seeded with stories from trad publishing media by trad editors.[1]

I guess the P2P and P2PJ models must be real if the new old guard is
investing in it.

[1]Sorry, is my cynicism showing?


Napster Alternatives: The Best of the Rest Good summary of the state of P2P file sharing. But note that P2P is not just about file sharing.

The Potlatch Protocol I suspect this one's important. More later.

Meeting on Middle Ground: The B2B Procurement Solution for SMEs?. B2B Markets and Exchanges Mar 6 2001 8:23AM ET
SMEs are a hot topic of mine.

Darwin: Under the Influence. But in an industry that touts objectivity as its primary value and sales tool, research companies do little to encourage or police the objectivity of their analysts. These organizations quietly profit from the same technology vendors their analysts cover...
Hmmm? It's Pimps, Whores and Suckers again.

Jargon overload weighs on b-to-b. UpsideToday Mar 6 2001 4:10AM ET
Adam Feurstein does it again. "B-to-b software companies are floundering because their corporate customers don't know what the hell any of this software actually does."

The FT has a page about B2B today. More doom and gloom about B2B.

Canadian paper buys Napster in Sealand story. 'We got our own Shawn Fanning'
Truly cute story doing the rounds about Napster servers moving to "Sealand". Sealand is a notional extra border ISP, actually 30 feet below sea level in an old 2nd world war contraption in the North Sea.

Bertelsmann set for showdown with Autonomy. Netimperative Mar 6 2001 7:04AM ET
Are Bertlesmann going to go head to head with Moreover, using TopicalNet's auto categorization software?

Bertelsmann Says Free Online Music Services Will Die. IDG Mar 6 2001 2:40AM ET
Hah and Hah! That's what they think.

Sagem joins in launching UK video phone. Netimperative Mar 6 2001 3:23AM ET
I want my pocket vidphone/pda/mp3 player. And I want it now. So is there going to be enough money left to build those G3 auctions? This was a classic case of the winner's curse. The UK Gummint made a packet from the G3 auctions, but they may have destroyed the mobile phone business in the process.

Five Questions...To Put a Smile on Your Face
"And of course, it's not just the media that was guilty of this. I'd turn around and call an analyst at Gartner Group or Jupiter (JMXI, info) and bring this up and very often they'd say, "Well, I'd never heard of that," but just in case the Brazilian Tupperware market actually did take off, they would comment anyway just to make sure. "

UK accounts for 40% of European CRM market. Netimperative Mar 6 2001 3:23AM ET
So why is UK Customer Service so damn bad??

Trace who is linking to your site. Database launched to boot off deep linkers. "There are an estimated two to three billion pages on the Internet, and around 100 billion links. Around a quarter of all pages have one or more broken links, according to LinkGuard" Oh, Linkrot!

NY Times: Companies in No Hurry to Buy Over the Internet. Moreover, purchasing managers are reluctant to learn how to use the various intranet and Internet sites peddling everything from manufacturing supplies to printer cartridges, and they do not necessarily trust those sites to deliver critically important goods on time and at the right quality.

Does this mean online e-procurement won't work? Or that public markets won't work? Or that procurement managers are over cautious?

SJ Mercury: Hollywood putting the squeeze on consumers. Dan Gillmor.

JBRates:9 Why does the Entertainment industry hate it's consumers. We're in the middle of a bloody battle as wqe redefine what copyright means. As for me, everything I do is KopyLeft. Go on, steal this weblog.

Journalistic Standards in Web News Sites: Are They Adequate?. I know a number of people who now seem to get their daily news almost entirely from "new media" sources such as Salon, Slashdot, F***edCompany, and the Drudge Report. These are often sources of interesting information, but in terms of journalistic professionalism, they fall decidedly short of traditional news sources.
JBRates: 7 Yes, but, Why would I want to participate in the hall of mirrors between the pimps, whores and suckers that is mainstream publishing?

Nupedia and Project Gutenberg Directors Answer
"the manuals NEVER MAKE ANY SENSE until you already know what they are trying to tell you. . .and then, and only then, can you understand what they were trying to tell you in the first place. "

"Man, if I were a programmer, I'd love to create a Babblefish-like translation page that would turn marketing blather into the Yada it actually speaks. So —

FirstPeer's solutions enable marketplaces ...

would become —

FirstPeer's yada yadas yada yada yadas to yada without the yada...


How to become a B2B hero. IDG Mar 5 2001 9:24AM ET
JBRates:9 Great article for techies on setting up a B2B Extranet for mission critical supplies.

DaveNet: The next trend: B2R. "It may be an excellent time to release new software, it's so quiet in the Valley you might be able to hear a product ship."
Right on Dave. Geek Power, Geek Power, Geek Power!

When Personal Projects Start To Conflict w/ Work?

Don't all new systems happen like this?

If it's really property, then let's tax it..
Hmm. If Intellectual Property is real, why isn't it taxed? And if it's not real, how come lawyers can sue against improper use?

BrowseUp Unveils Beta Software. The software, which the company says fulfills the original vision of the World Wide Web, allows anyone to add their own links from any Web page.
JBRates: Hemm, Interestink

Dave W posted this.
Tim O'Reilly interviewed Microsoft's Jim Allchin. Here's the gist of Allchin's statement. Microsoft is opposed to the US government investing in software licensed under the GPL, since it would not allow Microsoft, a US company that pays taxes, to use the software. He didn't say it's un-American to do so, but I do. It's a simple obvious point. Software created by the public must be accessible to the public.

Let's be clear what "Use" means. nobody's suggesting that MS shouldn't be able to use the software. But MS is complaining that they couldn't take the source, extend it and make money from selling new set.

The interview is actually excellent and clarifies what everyone was talking about.

WriteTheWeb: The state of the blog, Parts II and III
JBRates:9 Some very interesting comments in an Interview with Blogger.com

Get this. A sea transport logistics exchange starts up based in Rotterdam, Holland. The Name? "GoReefers.com" http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?e16007998&e=6584 eyefortransport.com

Information Anxiety2: A Guidebook for the Information Age. Overwhelmed by the glut of information, Bunky? How about some more information on how to deal with it? Read Laurie Gray's review of Information Anxiety2. 0302
JBRates:9 I think I need this!

Hempcar will introduce 17 billion dollars into the economy. The Hempcar will introduce 17 billion dollars into our economy over the next five years. This alone, along with the green benefits of using hemp, will help manage our planet more responsibly. What is the spearhead of the Hemp Industrial Movement? It is the Hempcar Transamerica Tour.
JBRates:9 Although this looks like a joke, It's real and sensibly argued. Hemp is just another casualty of the "War against Some Drugs"

My first direct e-mail to weblog posting.

Whoops, I just redirected my three email mailboxes to my blog... Now everyone can read my 300 messages a day...
Actually this tech is kind of neat. Hook it to an SMSeMail service and you can blog on the road. Whoops, I just had a car accident, sorry officer, I was blogging while driving...

UK Web Surfers Have 3 E-Mail Addresses - Research. Newsbytes Mar 1 2001 1:08PM ET
Ha and Ha! What? only 3?

OpenP2P.com. I noticed that OpenP2P.com is syndicating P2P-related items from this site.
JbRates:5 What goes around, comes around. When we all start syndicating each other's news more and more of this will happen.

eCompany Now: Personalization Without Popularity. Fast-forward to today. Azer Bestavros, a professor of computer science at Boston University and chief scientific adviser to Allaire, is currently exporting Zipf's linguistic principle into a retail setting. Bestavros's work and ideas might also offer a breakthrough in how we use personalization technologies...
JbRates:7 Veerry interrresssting... Points out why Amazon's "books like us" firefly system just pushes more best sellers out the door.

From the Nerd Desk. Shooting yourself in the foot as programmed in several languages. It's an old joke but a new laugh.

Who is "Skinny DuBaud"


"My family were" Pimps, Whores and Suckers, A joyful rant against the media industry. And about time too.

XML Fund
JBRates:8 A pretty good primer on XML and it's use in business, particularly in relation to UDDI. But what is XMLFund? And Investment fund in XML??

P2P Auctions for B2B e-Commerce
GnuMarkets comes out of stealth mode. Well there you go...

REVIEW: Unchained Value. Want to know what the B2B world can learn from Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay? So would we.
JBRates:1 The book, not the article. "Not that nothing can be gleaned from the B2C set. However, Cronin fails to establish a connection between the Yahoos, Amazons, and eBays of the world and B2B e-markets. And for B2B executives to draw their own conclusions, well, who has the time for that?" Indeed!

The Aggravation of Aggregation. Cold reality is hitting those in the B2B trenches: Aggregating product data, inventory information, and pricing is no easy task.
JBRates:8 Glad to see another article exposing just how hard it is to collate, clean and maintain a catalog. If every e-Procurement system is expected to do this, e-Procurement itself is not going to fly.

And now...
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation

UK firms confident of ebusiness future. Nua Internet Surveys Feb 28 2001 11:37AM ET
Well there you go.

http://www.content-exchange.com/weblog/weblog.htm
"This is the first generation that doesn't need us. They don't read newspapers," Brent Baker, the dean of Boston University's College of Communication,
JBRates:8 A great blog on the e-media business.

InfoWorld's James Borck Weighs in on P2P-B2B
JBRates:9 At last. Somebody else has picked up on the connection between P2P, UDDI and B2B.

A Closer Look at B2B Exchange Revenues. eMarketerNews Feb 22 2001 11:36PM ET
JBRates:8 Good to see a journalist questioning what those figures really mean.

Kat Nagel: Natural Life Cycle of Mailing Lists.
http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/lifelist.html
And others. Follow the links.