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Are we heading into a good old fashioned oil crisis in 2005? In the last few days, the following caught my attention.

- Brent Crude hits a record high.
- Oil from the the US strategic reserves have been released to compensate for loss of refining capacity after the 3 hurricanes.
- The strategic reserves are now at their lowest level since February. And they were low then. And we're heading into winter not coming out of it.
- China's oil imports are growing at 30% year on year.

Is the Bush administration keeping end user oil product prices down by giving up the future? Note that the effects won't really be felt until well after the election and inauguration. Surely they wouldn't do that. Would they?

An oil price crisis hurts the oil companies in the short term but not necessarily in the long term if it conditions consumers to radically higher prices. But it's also a major source of inflation because transport costs flow through to higher end user costs very quickly.

Here I go again. "It's all doom I tell you, doom" I'm sure it will all work out for the best, really. If you've got spare cash to burn then some speculation on oil prices in say April next year might be a good punt. [from: JB Ecademy]

BBC NEWS | Americas | World 'wants Kerry as president'

A new poll in 35 countries suggests that people around the world would prefer Democratic challenger John Kerry as US president over George W Bush. Global research company GlobeScan Inc and the University of Maryland found clear leads for Mr Kerry among those polled in 30 of the countries.

There's something quite strange going on here. It appears that the world outside America is judging Bush purely on American foreign policy and doesn't like what it sees. Inside America, Americans seem to both like what he's doing on foreign policy and are judging Bush (and Kerry) on something else entirely. The survey was done in July and August so perhaps this is a case of the rest of the world still being in the "Anyone but Bush" camp and they simply haven't seen enough of Kerry to have doubts.

So let's say that Bush is being judged inside America on his domestic policies. Take a look at this fairly superficial analysis "Are You Better Off Now Than You Were Four Years Ago?" Unemployment, Job Creation, the Budget Deficit are all radically worse under Bush than under Clinton and not just a little bit either. If these figures are accurate, then Bush should be really suffering whenever the discussion veers towards domestic policies.

So what are we left with and how can we explain that Bush and Kerry are either neck and neck in the US polls or that Bush has a comfortable lead? The only explanation I have is that Kerry (and the Democratic Party) is losing this election not that Bush is winning it. Because I don't subscribe to the view that Americans are too stupid to see the truth. I'm tempted to say that they are ill-informed, given the superficial and limited views provided by the US media and in particular TV but that's a bit of a cheap shot as well.

There's one more possibility here. And that is that this election is not being fought on rational grounds at all and what we're really seeing is a continuing emotional response to 9-11. It doesn't matter what Bush did or does. It doesn't matter whether it works or not. It doesn't matter whether it makes the world and the US a better place or not. All that matters is that he does something big and brash. And a full scale military invasion of two countries on the other side of the world is nothing if not big and brash. And there's been enough seeds of doubt about Kerry, from his own lips, from Republican spin and from Republican followers, that enough of the electorate thinks he might not have done anything. [from: JB Ecademy]

I was just mousing around while waiting for a massive email delete to finish and came across Derelict London.com via http://www.bloggerheads.com/

The user interface is a bit naff but the pictures are wonderful. I confess that I have a bit of a soft spot for the marginal areas of London and have spent many happy hours wandering around them by bicycle often at odd times of the day and night. [from: JB Ecademy]

As you probably have noticed we changed the way Club Notifications work over the weekend. In response to feedback, I've just uploaded a couple of changes to this. To clarify:-

- The default when joining a club is now Daily

- A Daily message is sent for each club to each member with Daily set for that club when there is at least one message in that club's forum in the last 24 hours.

- Immediate messages are sent to members with Immediate set for that club as soon as a new message is saved. For new threads, the notification goes to all members of the club with Immediate set. For messages within a thread, it goes to people who've posted to the thread and have Immediate set.

If anyone is freaked out by having hundreds of clubs that were set to Immediate and would like them all changed to Daily, drop me a line and I'll do the mass update.

As a user, my approach to this and to blog comment notifications is to create a folder in my email client
for Ecademy notifications. Then I've created a message rule to route anything from noreply@ecademy.com to this folder. For the high volume clubs, I've then clicked on the link in the bottom of every message and changed that one club to daily. I'd strongly recommend doing something similar.

Since the new notifications came in 160 clubs have had at least one message. About 240 have had one message in the last week. If you run a dormant club this is a great opportunity to kick it into life again. [from: JB Ecademy]

Wi-Fi Toys goes to Extremes is a book of cool projects to do with Wifi.

Make antenna cables, build a directional Wi-Fi "cantenna" out of a coffee can, modifying your access point for better signal reception, build an outdoor solar-powered wireless repeater, how to Wi-Fi a TiVo, build a long-haul Wi-Fi link, and how to put together a "dynamic wireless digital picture frame", deploy a car-to-car wireless video link, build a pocket-sized directional antenna out of a couple of paperclips and a flat wooden ice cream cup spoon, Wireless Voice over IP and installing an MP3 player in a car and uploading songs via Wi-Fi

It sounds worth the $24.99 even if most of this is on the web if you're prepared to search for it. [from: JB Ecademy]

philgoinginsane.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object) is a voice mail recording of a Brit who isn't happy about the support he's getting.

This is definitely not safe for work. Wear headphones and don't click on the link if you're upset by the F word. [from: JB Ecademy]

0xDECAFBAD Blog has an interesting article today called "Bootstrapping out into open space"

Russell's Unproven Yet Seemingly Obvious Number One Rule For Web Based Services: Don't launch without a way of making money.

This dovetails in nicely with my thinking about hosting, and with FeedReactor. I look at nifty services like del.icio.us, BlogLines, and Flickr, and think, "Hey, I have some good ideas, too. I could possibly put together something like this. But how the !@#$% do those guys pay their hosting bills? Let alone make a living?"

I think the answer is that sometimes you just have to go live with the prototype and see what happens next. A great example of this is Technorati. If they'd thought about what would happen, they'd never have started. The service has been slow and buggy since it began as they walk a knife edge of never having quite enough hardware and bandwidth to satisfy the demand. But the end result was VC and the money to do it properly.

The key here is I think to get yourself into a position where you've got the hosting and bandwidth and so the incremental cost of the next experiment is minimal and then keep chucking the ideas up there as prototypes.

I've also noticed in talking to a couple of startups, that they seem to have way more ideas than they have time or resources to realize. I've seen this in startups I've been involved with as well. I always wanted to get the management and corporate structure into a shape where these ideas could be floated off into separate companies that shared the boring back office infrastructure. But like all startups the day to day fire fighting and development were too time sonsuming to ever think about launching side projects. This was the basis for the business incubators of the dotcom era but the ambitions were always so large that the side projects were hampered by the need to be sure fire winners. Maybe it's time for the few remaining incubators to re-invent themselves as environments for entrepreneurs to "Bootstrap themselves into open space" [from: JB Ecademy]

at http://www.boris-johnson.com

Also available at
UK Poli Blog via the wonders of RSS.

Hooray! Boris for President! [from: JB Ecademy]

Can anyone recommend a good Banner Ad Agency? I'm looking for an agency:-
- Aimed at Web Banner Ads
- Probably uses Doubleclick for the actual serving
- Can source ads aimed at both UK and international
- Can run multiple campaigns for individual countries and specialist areas
- And as a bonus can provide telesales for in-house served ads. [from: JB Ecademy]