Times Online - Newspaper Edition : Times is first in the picture

The Times is using the WiFi at Wimbledon to publish photos direct from the photographers camera via WiFi to the newsroom. In the photo accompanying the story, it looks like the photographer is using a professional Nikon digital camera. He takes the picture, previews it and then posts it via wifi direct to the paper.

Neat. As Wifi becomes more common at sporting events we'll see more of this. [from: JB Wifi]

Muniwireless first anniversary report is a free PDF report that is a pretty good analysis of the state of play in Municipal Wireless Networks. The sort of thing that happens when a town or county decides to flood an area with WiFi internet access, often for free. There are now at least 80 of these worldwide.

This is pretty disruptive for all sorts of players from commercial hotspot owners to broadband suppliers. Well worth a read. [from: JB Wifi]

Feelings of Insecurity is an article about the 4th World Wide War Drive.

288,000 access points found
> 50 percent with no security
30 percent with default SSID

So the Factory Default Community Network is alive and well. Now is this a good thing or a bad thing?
[from: JB Wifi]

Warchalking || London: British Library : The British Library has free Wifi access in their cafe and resturaunt until June 30

Does anyone know which hotspot provider they're using or what the charge will be after 30th June? [from: JB Wifi]

The Wi-Fi explosion: a virus writer's dream | The Register is an article apparently about the way that the proliferation of open unsecured Access points makes it possible to launch a virus with almost perfect anonymity. Shock Horror. But there is another side to the coin.

At the weekend I was at NotCon and there was a talk given on the legal issues of setting up a comunity wireless broadband network. The speakers were still worrying about the same issues as 3 years ago. It was all about signed agreements and T&Cs and commercial, legal entities to provide the access.

The truth is that the genie is out of the box. Wireless routers can be had from PC World or Amazon for less than £75 or ($75). Broadband is relatively cheap and people are buying it. Put the two together and turn on the power and WiFi "just works". Since most people don't have the knowledge or inclination to mess with the sttings any further than that (why fix it if it ain't broke) the "Factory Default Community" is alive and well. In fact it's now ubiquitous in any moderately urban area. Last time I went looking, I had to walk 100 yards in Faringdon to find an open connection. Even in boring, provincial Hertford, there's an open access point every 400 yards or so.

So whether we think it's a good thing or not and whether it's deliberate or not, and whether it's illegal or not, widespread open WiFi is already here.

Which means that the end point of the internet just went completely out of control.

So now what do we do? [from: JB Wifi]

The State Of Wireless London is an excellent analysis of WiFi coverage in London. Particularly interesting is the effect of WiFi APs that have been installed with everything on default. "In fact the coverage is such that just considering the percentage of nodes either open intentionally or by default, there already exists a wireless freenetwork in much of the city." It would seem that the "Default Community Network" is thriving

London and the UK is still very under-represented in the various war driving maps. Can anyone help to rectify this? Can anyone lend me (or buy me!) a GPS?

[from: JB Wifi]

Symbian loophole 'threatens operator revenue' | The Register : The Symbian Series 60 OS works in a similar fashion to a Microsoft Windows PC. The user can install new applications and software while also uploading a range of consumer content such as ringtones and Java games.

From such simple content to complete service offerings such as mobile music or instant messaging, an open OS can bypass, and therefore potentially eliminate, any revenue from these services, according to Mako.

Wait a minute. An open environment on a commodity device means that the supplier cannot make money from the distribution of content and applications? Well Shock Horror! As a consumer, all I can say is "about time". But I guess if the network's business plan is dependent on screwing money out of *everything* a consumer does this might come as a bit of a shock.

If we look to the past and the development of PCs, an open platform was a huge driver to innovation. The difference now is that the networks aren't in the hardware business, they're in the enabling business. And when there's less to enable, there's less opportunity to profit. Over time I think we'll see lots of fairly stupid activity from the networks to try and stop this, but eventually they will become commodity suppliers of connectivity, and nothing else, in the same way as the broadband ISPs. [from: JB Wifi]

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column

He's let his imagination run a little far, but it's a good intro to what can be done with alternate Linux distributions loaded onto a commodity, cheap wireless router. [from: JB Wifi]

Following yesterday's news about record oil prices. OPEC is pumping to capacity. Iraq is effectively off-stream. China is now the second largest oil importer after the USA and ahead of Japan. China's oil imports are growing at 20% a year.

Something's got to give. This wasn't supposed to happen for another 10-20 years. Looks like the curse of "Interesting times" is upon us. So how do we get out of this one?

Detailed analysis here. [from: JB Ecademy]

A few days ago we were talking on IRC about how much RDF and XML there was on the web. We stuck a finger in the air and got 15 Million FOAF and RSS files of structured, machine readable data right now. And its growing at the same rate as the number of Weblogs with spikes as each new major provider joins in.

This prompted a question to which we didn't really have an answer. "What should Google do with RDF/XML/RSS/Atom it finds"?

Then today along comes this mind boggling essay that looks at one possible scenario. August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web

Truly, a mind bomb.

BTW. It's now 2 years since Google introduced their SOAP API. It still doesn't support anything except basic search. There's still no RSS/Atom feed from search, News search, Images, Froogle etc. [from: JB Ecademy]

Download here.

Includes support for Skype-Out to the public phone system. [from: JB Ecademy]

O'Reilly Network: Free Music from Apple

Buy a "Refreshed" iPod form an Apple store. Get 8Gb of free music from the previous owner!

1) http://www.voidstar.com/ukpoliblog is an RSS aggregator of UK political Blogs. I've been trying to find a good aggregated feed of UK Political news so I turned to Yahoo. Unfortunately, there's no UK Politics section. And http://uk.news.yahoo.com/ doesn't seem to have RSS feeds. Neither does http://uk.search.yahoo.com/ And I've been unable to construct a good query in http://search.news.yahoo.com that gives just UK politics.

Then the News search display is broken in Firefox.

And the relevance display doesn't group similar stories so when AP or Reuters send something out you get 30 copies of the same article from all the news sources that just republish them verbatim.

Most of the problems above are the same on Google news and I've been told off for scraping them to RSS so I can't use it anyway.

Boy, there's a lot of borkedness in that lot!

2) After waving fingers in the air, we worked out that there's something like 15 million feeds of Atom, RSS, RDF and FOAF out there. Which raises a big question in my mind of what search engines should do with it all. Mixing it in with the normal search results with links to the raw XML doesn't feel right. It feels like there's potential here for something genuinely new. Or maybe Yahoo, Google or MSN should just buy Technorati, employ the people and ideas and then re-engineer it for scale from the ground up.

3) I'd rather post this on the mailing lists but they all seem to be dead. I went looking for the messages where Zawodny posted the detail but Yahoo have deleted it. Where do the movers and shakers in these areas hang out now? Have we all retreated into our own little blog worlds with comments and trackback turned off because email, email mailing lists and usenet are terminally broken and the spammers have won?

OK, just this once go pay a visit to the Conservatives' home page. See that poll in the bottom right corner? Go on, vote for 'blogging' and let's see what happens.

[via Nick Barlow] and UkPoliBlog.

Rigorous Intuition: The Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11 : I could go on. And on and on. But I trust you get the point. Which is simply this: there are no secrets, an American government would never accept civilian casualties for geostrategic gain, and conspiracies are for the weak-minded and gullible.

Really. It's all so far fetched it couldn't possibly be true.

Any of it.

At all.

Because that way lies madness.

But I keep wondering why we never hear anything about the third building at the World Trade Center that collapsed 7 hours later

In my increasing trawl through the UK political websites. I tried to look at the site for the Sedgefield Labour Party, the constituency for our beloved leader, Tony Blair. Imagine my surprise when I was confronted by a completely blank page! What can this mean?

MP hits back over spoof weblog

Proxy Blogs for MPs hits pay dirt. Compare the proxy here with David Lepper's official site here. Even a blind bat could not mistake one for the other.

I particularly liked these comments from David and others.
Mr Lepper said: "It's highly objectionable that someone is posting information on the internet claiming it has been written by me. "I'm particularly concerned because there is an email address given which purports to be my own. "I would hate anyone to think the responses from this address came from me."
The MP believes he was contacted by the author of the web site who complained his real web site has not been updated. Dr Nick Palmer, secretary of the all-party Parliamentary internet group, said: "Blackmailing MPs into creating blogs is not the best way. If they want the MP to blog, they should get in touch and ask. "David Lepper is a serious and dedicated MP and does not deserve to be ripped off in this way."

I wonder which bit of Almost David Lepper, MP. I'm NOT David Lepper, the MP for Brighton Pavilion. Brighton Pavilion has to be one of the most wired places on the planet. I believe in democracy and I believe in the media networking revolution. I believe MPs should blog. If David Lepper, MP, did blog, it might look something like this. they find hard to understand?

I guess David prefers to keep his head down and out of the blog spotlight. Welcome to the Internet, David!

Incidently I discovered all this from a news aggregator of UK Political blogs that I recently launched.

[Edited to add] Compare this with Alan Milburn The proxy author went in to an MP Surgery and has convinced Alan to allocate one of his constituency workers to start posting items to the blog. [from: JB Ecademy]

Oh Lazyweb, give me a Firefox - BitTorrent extension built into the download manager so it becomes completely transparent to download things like the Windows XP Service Pack 2 more efficiently and I can act like a source whenever Firefox is running.

Late last year and this year has seen a huge increase in the use of the internet by the USA political parties and action groups. From the Dean campaign to the (somewhat fake) weblogs from the Presidential Election candidates, to Kerry's donation drive, to bloggers at the Democratic Convention, to local activist websites, it feels like they've finally embraced the Internet as a means to do politics.

By contrast, the UK's political use of the net is primitive and stuck in a time warp from 5-8 years ago. There are some bright spots in sites like They Work For You but that's about it. Quite a lot of MPs have websites. But they are generally static, driven by Frontpage and rarely updated. The main sites are formulaic with no community, no route to talk back, no attempt to engage. Amazingly the Conservatives have an RSS feed of news but they are alone. There's surprisingly few weblogs that focus on UK Politics.

Generally the Internet side of UK politics looks about as apathetic and uninterested as the offline side.

So what I'm looking for is people who can help change this. Specifically,

- An email writing campaign at anyone involved to encourage them to build interactive community sites and to get the current sites to generate RSS from the existing news pages. This includes the major media. The BBC, Independant, Scotsman have RSS feeds. That's all. The Telegraph and Guardian have some feeds but nothing specifically on Politics.

- People who can build and host community sites for local political chapters and activist groups.

- People prepared to lobby their MP or councillors to start a blog. And if they won't, to start a blog on their behalf.

- People who can try and get themselves accredited to the upcoming party Conferences as "Blogging Journalists" and then provide an alternate view to the traditional big media TV clip of "Auld Lang Syne".

- New and interesting hacks that leverage the existing sites in the style of FaxYourMP or Public Whip.

I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas. The aim is to try and drag UK politics into the 21st century.

If enough (any!) people come forwards, we can at least start a club here on Ecademy and then whatever else it takes.

As a start I threw together a site over the weekend that provides an aggregated view of all the news and Blog sites I could find in UK Politics. This was inspired by a US site that did the same thing for the Democratic party convention. [from: JB Ecademy]

Late last night I flicked the switch on a public aggregator of UK Political Feeds.

http://www.voidstar.com/ukpoliblog/

If people find it useful, I'll give it it's own domain. It could do with a graphics makeover as well.

In response to "Can we blog the Labour Conference" and with a tip of the hat to http://www.conventionbloggers.com/

As for Media RSS in this area, I've found the Scotsman and The Independent.

While searching for feeds, some things I discovered.

- Quite a lot of UK politicians have websites. Almost without exception they are Frontpage driven from a packaged template. Consequently, they rarely get updated and have no RSS.

- There's a surprisingly large number of blogger/blogspot driven blogs that have no feed and where people have jumped through frames to put them on real domains.

- There's a movement that's gathering momentum to create proxy blogs for prominent politicians. If they won't run one, we'll run one for them.

- A LibDem group has started a Meetup. So someone's watching the USA. But generally, UK Political use of the internet seems to be primitive.