Michael Swanwick (author of quite a lot) has set himself a microfiction challenge: write one sci-fi short story about each element in the Periodic Table. At the rate of one a week. New entries appear Fridays. Found at Memepool.

The Times tells a story about Journalistic Integrity.

The New York Daily News do an investigative piece about the awful state of public health in New York supermarkets. Several chains threaten to pull their advertizing, so they publish a fluff piece in a four-page pullout focusing on the wonderful social contributions supermarkets make to the community.

There's been a lot of ranting lately about freedom of the press and journalistic integrity. This is how it really is and has been for years.

Drop In Soap Message Board. First of its kind, claim developers, 2 July 2001, 2 pm GMT [Content Wire via NewsIsFree]

A message board provided as a SOAP Web service to web sites who want to add forum software to their site to try and create a community. How cool, how very 2001. Read to the end of the article and it's built by wrapping SOAP round the well known open source PHP message board Phorum. Really quite neat approach. www.unifiedconsulting.com are finding a new way to monetize open source.


Bikeweb went live yesterday. It's an attempt to combine aggregated news headlines with a community journalism site (like Kuro5Hin) but aimed at a niche market. In this case, "Motorcycling with Attitude" is not so niche. This follows my previous experiment at B2BSlash. The real issue with these sorts of things (like every web based project) is getting from live to critical mass and momentum.

The http://www.voidstar.com/blog/ site is currently in the middle of a re-vamp as I try and move away from using http://www.roguemoon.manilasites.com for hosting of the blog. I'm hitting some barriers in Radio Userland and it's support for FTPing. I'm seriously thinking of building a PHP template so I can get control back with the longer term view of replicating all the blog tools in a self contained system. I love the ideas in Radio Userland. I'm just more and more irritated by the implementation.

What does P2P have to do with Hailstorm?. OpenP2P.com Jun 29 2001 7:15PM ET [moreover...]

There's something I don't get about the recent announcements from MS that they are releasing some code as "open source". .NET and Hailstorm always were based on SOAP with published interfaces. There are plenty of SOAP toolkits available now. Which means that people can write code that interoperates with MS. The announcement only says that they'll have a C# compiler and a C runtime available on other platforms. Well haven't we already got plenty of C++ compilers already?

Road accidents claim 2 young lives in area. Providence Journal Jul 1 2001 8:46AM ET [moreover...]

Injury can land you far from choice of doctor. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Jul 1 2001 11:54AM ET [moreover...]

I've been trying to find motrocycle related news feeds. At the moment, I'm picking up Moreover queries. The problem is that all their data comes from mainstream newspapers and the examples above are typical of the sort of things the mainstream considers to be news. Really quite depressing!

I've been trying to use ftp to upload my blog to a faster server. Radio is proving a bit resistant. But then it just happens. I guess I'm hitting on an Asynchronous process and some cacheing somewhere.

Getting Paid for Content
Getting Paid for Content: from micropayments to shareware models. Discussion of online payment for content tends to be techno-centric: "If we only had micropayments, everyone could get paid for their art." via [kuro5hin.org]

After P2P Business models yesterday, we have content business models today. if it's art we're talking about, then the Patronage model has worked for centuries. Is this really so different from the "Sponsorship" model we have today?

Which country has 4% of the world's population but consumes 25% of the world's resources and generates 27% of the world's pollution?

I've just listened to a radio interview with a typical Californian housewife. "The Taco (sp?) is America's number one sport utility and I'm proud to be an owner", "but it gets 14 mpg. I've been driving a hybrid compact that gets 70mpg. Do you think these will be successful?", "I couldn't comment on that. You see I'm a Type A personality...". Bizarre. A weird combination of Brave New World and a life spent immersed in advertizing. I'm a Beta. I'm glad I'm a Beta. Alphas are too stuck up. Gammas are so stupid. Betas are the best...

You Hate the IT department, and They Hate You Right Back

A look at Consilients Sitelet P2P workgroup solution. OpenP2P.com Mar 31 2001 4:52AM ET [moreover...]
More P2P in B2B

B2B Internet Yellow Pages to Go Live Next Month.

This is the announcement that UDDI has going live. There's a mistaken belief that it allows products to be searched as well as services that is being repeated again. "Right now, there are so few software tools available for suppliers to build Web services that the directory can't be used to its full potential, analysts said." This refers to the current SOAP and is exactly why Dave Winer's attempts to keep SOAP open and to promote validators and toolsets is so important.

What if Anne Frank had had a Weblog instead of a diary... Great Rant about the small mindedness of the current Journalism industry. Could Watergate even happen now?

P2P MemeBag. OpenP2P.com
Excellent. A Glossary of ideas coming out of the P2P Community.

Weird WebVentures in Advertising

NY Times: Corporate Sites Seem to Skimp on the Facts. A new study indicates that corporate Web sites often fail at what might seem most important: getting out the corporate message. It found that in many cases, reporters could not use the sites to get information as basic as a company's phone number. [Tomalak's Realm] This is way too common. It's particularly bad in high end consumewr products. Hey we can't have our users answering back! What do they know?

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.