yadis: yet another distributed identity system
From the LiveJournal guy, Brad Fitzpatrick [from: del.icio.us]

O'Reilly Radar > Google has del.icio.us tags and RSS feed autodiscovery

W00t! Is this real? Or has Rael got some Firefox add on that he didn't realize?

According to Rael, some google searches have added an XML icon if the target web page has an RSS/Atom feed. And an info button if it has del.icio.us links.

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
More Shirky, taggy tasteiness [from: del.icio.us]

Doc has been writing about the perils of IQ tests. The Doc Searls Weblog : Saturday, May 14, 2005

I'm reminded of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. To paraphrase.

"I'm a Beta. Betas are the best. Those Alphas are so stuck up. They think they can do anything with their precious intelligence. I don't want to be a leader like them. I'm better being second. And Betas are so much better than those stupid Gammas. And as for the Deltas. Well somebody has to do all those terrible jobs like picking up the trash. And I'm glad it's not me. Yes. Betas are the best."

And I'm also reminded of one of Gurdjieff's teaching stories. As a kid he was out with his father and uncle in the fields listening to them talk.
Father: What is God doing now?
Uncle: He's making ladders.
Father: What are the ladders for?
Uncle: For the nations of the world to go up and down on.

It seem to me that IQ tests, streaming in schools and national propaganda are all aimed at the same thing and for very much the same reasons. They are simplistic techniques for telling us what to think. And they get used because it's a great deal easier than teaching us how to think.

Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tool Collection
small pieces loosely joined [from: del.icio.us]

DNA Hack
ooh err [from: del.icio.us]

MPAA targets TV BitTorrent tracker sites

There's a certain insanity here. Take content that is transmitted free to air, remove the ads, rip it to Divx, post it on Bittorrent. Fairly obssessive people then spend considerable time downloading it so they can watch shows they've missed. The MPAA then goes after the tracker sites.

Meanwhile the BBC is hard at work trying to find ways to give away it's content in ever more useful ways.

Now somewhere around that 2nd stage (remove the ads) the TV industry's business model fell apart. Which makes the final action by the MPAA inevitable. And ultimately it's the obsessive end user who suffers.

So you business model is screwed. How is that my problem?

My experience of this is an obssession with Alias. In the UK, it's on a minority channel at an awkward time. In order not to miss an episode, I've been collecting rips of season 4 via BitTorrent from BT@Effnet. It's really pretty hard to see how doing this is impacting the copyright owner's ability to make money from the series.

More on this. Mark Pesce (the well known digital Magickian) has a great article about the business models affected here.

Outfoxed | Personalize your internet.
Something very interesting going on here [from: del.icio.us]

Please read. How Not To Blog - REAL ID is not an identification card. It's a national surveillance infrastructure

The background is that the US government has just sneaked an ID Card bill through on the back of a very large budget allocation for Homeland security. It calls for all the same things that have been mooted for the UK ID card. A centralised database, machine readable ID cards, embedded biometric information.

Don't let them try the same thing in the UK. The much reduced Labour majority will make it considerably more difficult, but it's still worth supporting people like No2ID. [from: JB Ecademy]

Many-to-Many: Google Acquires Dodgeball : Google Acquires Dodgeball

There should be a good fit between Dodgeball and Google maps.

The problem I have with Dodgeball is the need to report where you are and the process for doing it. This is another application case for the phone knowing where it is either by GPS or cell ID and a small app on the phone reporting up to the central server. This App could either poll periodically or on demand under user control. Then we have the fact that it's still US only (I think). And that to really take advantage of it we need flat rate data transfer instead of per Mb charges.

So all the usual issues with walled gardens, awkward networks, lack of application development tools on the phone side, lack of standards and missing LBS support on the phone side.

So what's next? Google starts an MVNO?

Let's say you have an image that is actively updated but keeps the same filename. How do you force browsers and proxy caches to refresh at the browser end? I "touch" the file so that it's last modifed date is now and often it has a different size and hence etag. Apache correctly honours this and returns 200 OK or 304 no modified it asked. but it seems that a lot of browsers and caches don't ask.

You may have noticed we've got Skype indicators on Ecademy today. If you're in my contact list, then your indicator will be live while I'm online.

The way this works is that I have a desktop tray program running that watches my copy of Skype. Whenever it sees a presence change, it makes a webservice call to the Ecademy web server. You can see the web service here. The server side then creates a pair of images in /skype/ called your_skype_name.gif and your_skype_name_g.gif These are the images that appear on your profile and against your name in lists. The web service checks to see if the Skype_profile_name is a person that is an Ecademy member. So this is not a general service but only for Ecademy members.

The problem here is that when your skype contacts list gets very big (eg >500) presence updates get slower and slower. So I can't really run a single Ecademy Skype Presence server and have everyone connect to it. People who've tried to do this (Like Jyve) discovered that updates were taking 15 minutes to several hours to propagate.

So what I'm looking for is:-
- A few more people prepared to run the desktop app. The benefit to you is that your presence on Ecademy will change immediately. The side effect is that all the Ecademy members in your contact list will also be activated.
- A programmer prepared to take on the code for the desktop app. It's currently written in Delphi but could easily be reverse engineered into C#, C++ or others. It's fairly clean but it doesn't yet cope well with putting the machine into sleep mode or closing down and restarting.

BTW. My Skype contact name is julian.bond
BTW2. It's important that the skype name in your profile is the same as your actual Skype name. And it is case sensitive and typically all lower case. [from: JB Ecademy]

O'Reilly Radar > ETech 2005: Where Did They All Come From? :

Europe and UK do seem to be under-represented in the data. There were times during the conference when it seemed like the Brits had taken over. Maybe it's just they were all giggling a lot, or that they were more active on IRC, or had taken over the bar. And what about the "Virtual SuW" Does a person from Wales attending via iChat count?

More seriously, the contact detail for attendees and especially presenters seemed surprisingly thin. For instance, I'm sure there were a lot more people with a Skype address than mentioned this. Perhaps next year the data entry form should have a FOAF import filter. And to make geocoding easier, make Zip/Postcode a required field. There are some good Zip/Postcode to Lat/Long databases freely available.

And lastly, it always seems like conferences are overly protective of all this data. I'd really like to see the contact list online in the run up to the conference and afterwards. It shouldn't be too hard to have an online registration form that has a privacy switch and where access to the data is only available if you've registered.

Formal Friday
Suicide fever is a keeper. Suicide is painless mashed with Pacman game sounds [from: del.icio.us]

The Huffington Post | The Blog : The new iPod my girlfriend gave me is a trap.

Is Hilary gay? I think we should be told!

But really, doh, the humanity of it all. Here's the ex-head of the RIAA railing against DRM and lock in. Well surprise surprise, the iPod does actually support non-DRM Mp3 files just like every other music player in the world. You don't actually *have* to get your music from iTMS. So don't.

Just Say No To DRM

The right place for data in your feed - 0xDECAFBAD Blog talks about Microformats in syndication. It's a subject that is close to Marc Canter's heart as well as he evangelises microcontent.

There's something that bothers me though about both Decafbad's article and the main article on Technorati. Neither of them really address the issue of getting implementations ot happen of each new format. This is something that really hit me last year when being involved in FOAF. It's all very well coming up with a neat new metadata standard but without implementations at both ends (publisher *and* subscriber) it's just academic wanking. What tends to happen here is that the standard comes first, then we get some reference example data. But we never get the application that consumes it. Even when the data is all in RDF (it's all triples, man) and the data is readable into your vast triple store, you still need the understanding of what the data means to do anything useful with it and present it in UI to some human. The net result is that the vast majority of these microformats (and even some of the big names like FOAF) remain "Write-Only Data".

So here's some advice for potential standard architects. To get your standard implemented, you need
1) A written non-ambiguous doc in the style of an RFC with lots of examples
2) Example Apps and proofs of concept for both the publisher and the subscriber that answers a real need
3) Toolkit libraries in all the major languages and environments. perl *and* php. Java *and* C#
4) A community of evangelists who go out and spread the word and put effort into persuading likely publishers and subscribers to support your new standard.

Of all these, 2) is the most important. and regarding 3) I don't care how clever your Ruby, Java or Python toolkit is, the world uses perl and php. If you can't support those you're never going to get widespread adoption. And ignoring C# because MS is evil is a bad idea. It's hard to get those MS-heads involved but they are finally waking up to the existence of the non-MS world. And there's an awful lot of them and an awful lot of potential customers using MS Win XP.

Skype Journal: I'm All Ears : There's been research on music listening, I'm willing to pay a premium for a headset (prefer wireless) that is guaranteed easier on my ears. Just like I know a top end stereo, I need a topend, robust and light-weight easy-to-listen-to headset. It can't be tiring... thus must be just like a top quality stereo. Where's the brand and the model?

I still haven't found a good solution to this. My requirements are worse because I listen to a lot of music. I want to switch seamlessly from using a high quality stereo headset to talking on Skype. So I think what I want now is a pair of those great Sennheiser phones with a boom mic and a really small inline mic mute button.

I've wondered about the effect of mono-stereo on phone calls. We're all used to listening to phone messages through one ear only. When you hear a phone through both ears and the voice is in the middle of your head, it seems to dominate your thinking to a greater extent. I'm wondering if Skype should provide an option to play back in mono through only one channel?

The other alternative is to have a headset Mic but play back through speakers (assuming you work in an environment where a speakerphone would be ok). The catch is that I still can't find a boom mic that is really good at ignoring ambient noise and the potential feedback from the speakers. If you reverse this and use a desktop Mic with headphones, then the desktop Mic picks up all the typing and mouse clicking noise, not to mention the PC fan.

I've tried a pair of Plantronics ear buds with inline mic but the sound quality is cheap and the mic is effectively omni. Right now I've got a plantronics boom mic duct taped to some high end Sony ear buds but that's less than perfect. That may be the way to go though. High end stereo headphones with a duct taped high end boom mic.

ps. Skype auto-pauses Winamp. It doesn't always auto-restart it. And why not iTunes/WMP as well?

See http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/digital_camera.html and http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/what_is_where_2.html

O'Reilly is running the Where 2.0 conference for people hacking geo-spatial applications. Google Maps has given a big boost to this. The second link is to a report that Ricoh now sell a digital camera with built in GPS which drops the lat-long coordinates into the metadata of the JPG images. With Phone Cameras now the market leader for digital cameras and with Phones (somewhat limited) knowledge of their location, there's a huge opportunity here for all sorts of hacks and interesting applications. As ever, it's the walled gardens that are holding it up. The phone networks don't want to let you get at the location info without paying. And they're still making it hard to get the pictures off your phone without paying. Even Garmin make it hard to extract the GPS info from their GPS devices.

When will these people begin to understand that having simple, open APIs encourages third party developers which then expand the market. Lock in is always a short term game that is inherently limited. Openness is a long term game that always results in much much bigger rewards.

One thing puzzles me in all this. Why are GPS devices so expensive? Presumably they've been around for long enough now that there's a single chip solution. There are USB-GPS antennas now for <£70 which means that the factory cost of the raw bits must be down at £10. At that price, couldn't they just be bolted into high end phones? Or is the network subsidy process such a problem that wholesale costs of even a high end phone are critical?

Scripting News: 5/6/2005

Dave has cancelled his subscription for Audible because the DRM is tied to both the iPod and PC he was using and both have now gone. This raises an issue I was aware of but I hadn't really considered properly. Let's say you use iTunes to buy and download lots of music for your iPod. All goes swimmingly for a year or so until your iPod dies, or is lost, or the dog ate it. Around that time Creative (or Archos or iRiver) introduce a new machine that is a must have alternative that blows the iPod out of the water. Just one catch, it doesn't play iTunes encrypted AAC. What are you going to do?

Music is for life, not just for christmas. I've still got LPs, and even occasionally listen to them, that I bought more than 30 years ago. Can you be sure that whatever DRM scheme you buy into will still work in 30 years? The plain old CD and the MP3 might well still be around. But I can pretty much guarantee that iTMS encrypted AAC won't be.

Just Say No To DRM.