Interesting article from Simon Barnes this week in The Times in the run up to the Ryder cup. The gist is to ask how the USA might have been different socially if the national sports were ones that the rest of the world played and hence intenational matches on foreign soil were as important in the USA as they are in say Brazil or India.

"The reason Americans have never got international sport is because they never play any. Or hardly any. The sporting focus of the nation has always been internal, self- enclosed, all-repelling. The high points are the Super Bowl, the National Basketball Association finals and the World Series, an event so exotic it sometimes includes Canada. They don't have Test matches. They don't have World Cup qualifying matches well, they do, but nobody notices. They don't have the Six Nations rugby championship. They don't get beaten by New Zealand or Norway or Ireland. They don't get whitewashed or blackwashed, they don't get bamboozled by India or out-tigered by Pakistan.

Try watching the Olympic Games in the US. Or rather, don't, not if you want to watch the Olympics as we understand them, a sporting event involving around 200 nations. In the US there are two nations: America and America's opponents."

And you wonder if the country's entire conception of itself would be different if it hadn't invented its own games: if Americans had carried on playing cricket, if they had adopted proper football as a national pastime, if they beat and got beaten by teams from other nations on a regular basis, if the notion of international sport, of regular dealings with people who talked different and played different and lived different, were part of national life, if sport were a celebration of diversity; above all, if sport were a revelation of national weaknesses as well as of national strengths.

You can't help but wonder that if this were the case, not only would American sporting life be vastly different, but American social and political life as well. [from: JB Ecademy]

Let's not get into it's versus its or using apostrophe s on proper nouns when you mean plural rather than the possessive.

Today's irritation is the use of loose when what you mean is lose.

Is it just me noticing it or is this on the ascendance? Are we witnessing the birth of a new spelling (a neologism even)? Or are the authors simply not championship spelling bee material?

Here's an example. His primary assertion is that Rathergates will force unbundling because one bad item leads media consumers [to] loose trust in the whole.. Are media consumers unleashing trust in the whole? Are they setting trust free to chase the dogs of war? I can excuse the missing "to" as the sort of mistake we all make when typing too fast and hitting submit without re-reading the text. But the mis-spelling of lose appears to be deliberate. [from: JB Ecademy]

For all those weboptimiser people. It looks like Google Ads is incredibly fast at working out what's on the page. Are pages containing Google Ads indexed faster than normal? I don't think they're scanning the page in real time but it feels like there's a short link between a page request containing a Google Ad and that page getting into the index so that next time the Ad is better targeted.

The other question is whether putting Google Ads on a page tends to increase that page's page rank. [from: JB Ecademy]

See Marc's Voice: Sell Side advertising (OpenListings?)

I went to a dinner last night with a bunch of interesting people at which Marc Canter presented this idea. I'm both fascinated and bothered by it.

The gist is this.

On one side there's a bunch of sites (like Ecademy and CraigsList) that have listings of stuff people want to sell. There's also a bunch of people who have personal sites and blogs who have stuff to sell who currently use places like Ebay.

On the other side is a very large number of small and large sites that would like to advertise stuff that people had to sell and earn some money from it.

What if there was a standard like RSS for publishing your adverts for stuff. And sample code in lots of platforms to display that stuff. We could disintermediate Google and Adsense.

Except (comma but), there has to be some aggregator in the middle who manages the charging and payment, tracks who gets what and who clicks on what and serves up the right ads to the right people. But what if there was open source code and a standard protocol and API so that anyone could run an AdServer. But then we hit the problem of critical mass. The publishers want to work with AdServers with lots of the right sort of inventory. The displaying websites want to work with AdServers that have lots of the right sort of Ads. And we're back where we started with the Ad industry pre-Google.

In fact, if you look at this, it actually looks like a reaction to a couple of missing pieces and flaws in Google's program.

First, Google has a real problem at the moment that it's too good. If you're in business and describe your products well, Google will accurately target your domain and serve up loads of ads for your competitors. They have to find a way of dealing with this.

Second, listings sites don't really have a mechanism for automatically creating Google Ads from their listings. And if they did, they probably couldn't afford it (or maybe they could). But this is where Marc's idea might work. The listings sites could act as Google's resellers. The trick would be for Google to provide a simple API and to keep the cost low. I figure Ecademy, for instance could charge for listings at a rate that included the payment to Google with the USP that every listing got widespread exposure on Google's huge roster of display sites. As a by product benefit to Ecademy, every click through would be take you to Ecademy where the listing is actually hosted and of course, we would make it hard to respond to the listing without signing up to us first.

So as usual the question becomes, "What should Google Do". Adding an API to AdSense to allow automatic posting of "adverts for stuff" with a standard data description format could revolutionise the supply side of advertising just as AdSense has revolutionised the display side. Will they do it?

At which point, I start thinking about independent AdServers again and in particular BlogAds. And the old Blogger TextAds program. If an AdServer site can aggregate enough inventory, handle tracking and payment, do the sort of automatic serving that Google and Overture do and innovate with the API, they could not exactly compete with Google but make a good living from the space between individuals, listing sites and web inventory owners along side them. And in the process take big bites out of the "boot sale/local newspaper classifieds" market currently served by Ebay.

Anyone got some VC? (or spare programming time in the evenings?) [from: JB Ecademy]

SSRN-War, Peace, or Stalemate: Wargames, Wardialing, Wardriving, and the Emerging Market for Hacker Ethics by Patrick Ryan

A quite detailed and legal minded paper. Note that it's written from a US perspective and so doesn't allow for UK and EU laws.

"This article will argue that the act of wardriving itself is quite innocuous, legal, and can even be quite beneficial to society. It will also highlight the need for wardrivers - and for anyone accessing open networks - to help establish and adhere to strict ethical guidelines." [from: JB Ecademy]

We should not have allowed 19 murders to change our world - Robert Fisk: 11 September 2004

Three years ago, it was all about Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’ida; then, at about the time of the Enron scandal ­ and I have a New York professor to thank for spotting the switching point ­ it was Saddam and weapons of mass destruction and 45 minutes and human rights abuses in Iraq and, well, the rest is history. And now, at last, the Americans admit that vast areas of Iraq are outside government control. We are going to have to "liberate" them, all over again. ...

... George Bush and Tony Blair are doing their best to make sure the murderers DO change our world. And that is why we are in Iraq.

As seen on Bloggerheads who has this to say.

Today, you should spare a thought for the victims. All of them. By my reckoning, there's about 90,000 dead (and a few million besides 'merely' suffering) because of the way this unique mix of tragedy and spectacle has been ruthlessly exploited by the Bush administration in the pursuit of power and profit.

I weep for the world.

A few people have asked for a way of getting messages from Private Clubs in the RSS feed for My Clubs. So now you can.

Add &pword=YourEcademyPassword to the end of the URL for the RSS. If the uid and pword match, you get to see the messages from all the clubs that uid belongs to including the private ones.

The same trick can be used to export all your profile data, including sensitive contact info, via FOAF. But there's probably only 3 people in the world who might want to do that at the moment. More on that story later... [from: JB Ecademy]

Last night in the Marriott Marble Arch I stupidly got stung by STSN for their WiFi. Here's the catalogue of shame.

Marriott have outsourced their WiFi access to STSN. There's nobody in the hotel who understands it and the only detail is a single photocopied sheet behind the reception desk althought there was a 5 foot sign in the bar advertising it.

When I first tried to connect I got endless captive portal errors that always ended with a 404 page not found error.

So I eventually found a support telephone number on one of the signs. This turned out to be a premium rate number to a call centre in the USA. After running round the usual useless menus and stock responses followed by call waiting music, I finally got to an operator, explained the problem and then was cut off. That support call cost me £8.00.

A few minutes later I went back to the WiFi and got through to the credit card entry screen which I think was IE6 only. This got me online with a popup window that had the logoff button on it. There was no indication that I had to logoff to kill the session, only that if I didn't I wouldn't get an email confirmation of the cost.

With the bar full, the wifi was seriously flaky despite apparently having good signal. Somewhere in there and what with suspending the laptop to wander up to the meeting, back to the bar and rebooting the laptop once, the popup window was lost. I got into conversation with a couple of people so it was 25 minutes later that I found out I was still on line.

I thought I'd better make sure I was logged out so I went to the STSN site and despite lots of FAQs about configuring WiFi on XP, there was nothing about killing the session. By chance I managed to find the popup window URL in the browser history. Sure enough I was still logged on so I did a final email collect and logged off. Imagine my surprise when I saw the bill.

£27.25 for 88 minutes online!

This surely plumbs new depths for ripping off customers. Given the prices in the bar as well, clearly London Marriotts are designed to fleece expense account travellers unmercifully. But frankly given the hoops I had to jump through, I wonder what I would have been charged if I hadn't found the logout button. I've got no reason to believe that I wouldn't still be racking up credit card charges.

Ironically while sitting in the bar I could just get signal from a free, unprotected WiFi AP somewhere across the street but not good enough to use.

One further thought. I've had problems before with commercial WiFi that has a signup page. It's often IE6 only and not browser neutral. It often involves a popup page when we all now block popups. If you lose the popup page there's frequently no obvious way to get it back. If you don't log off, it often takes a considerable time to time out and log you off automatically during which you're still paying. It's often stupidly hard to find a support number, get through to support, find how to logoff and there's only very rarely anyone on site who can help.

And they expect to make a long term business from this?
[from: JB Ecademy]

I've just come across a niche business idea that needs to exist. Currently premium rate telephone numbers are arranged with each national PTT. This means that it's impossible to have a single number that can be called internationally and it's extremely expensive to set up numbers in each country that your users might want to call from. What is needed is for an organisation (Like Skype or Vonage, say or the cheap rate calling card companies) that already have infrastructure in each country to provide a system where they resell international premium rate numbers to service providers. Then an international company like Ecademy could go to a single place to arrange a premium rate number that worked everywhere.

The alternative is for the national PTTs and TelCos to work out cross charging but I don't hold out any hope of this happening, given how slow they've been with cross border SMS and MMS. [from: JB Ecademy]

I think I've finally got the comments threading working correctly in "Threaded-Max" view. It only took 2 years.

For those who don't know, above the comments on a blog is a comments display control box. The options work like this.

Display:
- List-Min: Just show titles in date order
- List-Max: Show full text (according to threshold values) in date order
- Thead-Min: Titles only in threaded order
- Thread-Max: Show full text (according to threshold values) in threaded order

Order:
For the List displays only
- Date-Old: oldest first
- Date-New: Newest first
- Rate-High: Highest rated comments first
- Rate-Low: Lowest rated comments first

Filter:
Each comment has a -1 to +5 rating in a drop down box. Comments start with 1 point. Set the drop down values and click on Moderate comments button at the bottom to show your approval or disgust at the individual comments. The end result is that the comments get a current score and an average value.

The Filter setting decides the value at which comments get collapsed into a title only and obviously only applies if you have a display setting of List-Max or Threaded-Max. So if you set it to +1 any comment with a current score of less than +1 will be collapsed.

The default view is now Threaded-Max, Date-Old, +1

I'd encourage you all to rate comments particularly on blogs that attract long threads. If we all do this, then the worst comments will tend to fade into the background. [from: JB Ecademy]

Project Censored 2005 - Top 25 Censored Stories

What's interesting about these stories is that they're generally not censored by governments but via self censorship by the media. Why?

Take a look at this quote.

Tentacles of Rage: The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history LEWIS H LAPHAM / Harpers Magazine v.309, n.1852, September 2004 1sep04 : * The rightward movement of the country's social and political center of gravity isn't a matter of opinion or conjecture. Whether compiled by Ralph Nader or by journalists of a conservative persuasion (most recently John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in a book entitled The Right Nation) the numbers tell the same unambiguous story%u2014one in five Americans willing to accept identity as a liberal, one in three preferring the term "conservative"; the American public content with lower levels of government spending and higher levels of economic inequality than those pertaining in any of the Western European democracies; the United States unique among the world's developed nations in its unwillingness to provide its citizens with a decent education or fully funded health care; 40 million Americans paid less than $10 an hour, 66 percent of the population earning less than $45,000 a year; 2 million people in prison, the majority of them black and Latino; the country's largest and most profitable corporations relieved of the obligation to pay an income tax; no politician permitted to stand for public office without first professing an ardent faith in God.

Two nations divided by a common language? I don't think we even begin to understand the gulf between us. For all it's faults I sometimes think that Europe is actually on the cutting edge of political and social thought. We've successfully separated church and state to the point where church is something that people do privately at home if they choose. We've got a pretty good balance in our mixed economies between left wing social support and right wing capitalism. We've given up our empires and have effectively demilitarised. And we've got a legal system that works upwards from legal aid and citizens advice through national supreme courts to a supra-national court of human rights. These are all things that the USA would do well to study rather than dismissing them as the bleeding heart liberal foolishness of "Old Europe" (as in poor old Europe). It's also things we should defend vigorously from the arrogance of such politicians as Blair, Blunkett and Howard as they attempt to dismantle them in the name of "Law and Order", "Security" and the "War on common nouns".

No 2 ID is a campaign against the introduction of ID cards in the UK.

Joi Ito's Web: David Weinberger, a small person :
Mitch: he literally just said "either you are with us or with the terrorists"
Mitch: and followed by comparing Bush to Churchill
Mitch: Rudy is sure he's Churchillian

Does comparing Bush to Churchill and calling him Churchillian count as a Godwin moment?

Shouldn't they be comparing Bush with Roosevelt, in the sense of Franklin D allowing Pearl Harbour to happen in order to get the USA into WWII? Or is that a conspiracy theory too far?

Skype Adds Mac OS X Support :: Voxilla :: A user's guide to the VoIP revolution

So now all the recent Mac users can play as well. Skype now have a client for Windows, PocketPC, Linux and now Mac.

The announcement was on 29th August but I can't see the download on their website yet. I guess it'll go up today or tomorrow. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Happy Poster Project Cheer up!

Now that the IPO has been a success and they have the money and income, what should Google do next? Here's a few ideas.

Release a Google branded and customised version of Mozilla Firefox. Contribute to Mozilla development.

Finish and release all those Beta programs. News, Groups II, and so on.

Add more APIs. It's 2-3 years now since the Google SOAP API was launched. Relax the 1000 calls r day restriction.

Add XML versions of the output from search, news search, image search and so on. Email alerts are just so 1995.

Do something useful with structured data. There's at least 15 million XML, RDF, RSS, Atom, FOAF files out there. Displaying and providing abstracts of the raw data is not enough.

Buy Technorati and Flikr. And then re-build them for scale from the ground up

Kill Orkut and do it again properly in a way that's not evil and allows members to export their data.

Route Blogger and Blogspot updates through the main search engine for instant indexing of blogs. Provide an API so that other blog systems can play too.

Expand the reach of Google News. 4000 news sources is not enough. Find ways of lessening the influence of AP and Reuters that means that a single badly written AP report turns into 100 newspaper reports and hence gains validity.

Find ways of eliminating the search spam so that searching for a product name doesn't mean wading through 3 pages of sales outlets.

Find ways of eliminating referrer spam and hence defusing the growth in comment and trackback spam on blogs.

Link all the signin and login systems for all Google products. I should be able to use one ID+Password for Groups, Gmail, Blogger, Adsense and anything else Google runs.

Turn the resulting Google login system into an MS Passport competitor with an open API.

Next? [from: JB Ecademy]

I can't believe this. We're getting a rash of 419 scammers on Ecademy. They sign up, navigate through all the email confirmation hurdles, set up a profile with a picture even. And then start spamming the members with 419 messages via the internal message system.

How the hell do I protect against this, apart from just banning them as they arrive and start abusing the system?

Marc's Voice: New Friendster features? : 2) Being able to route new contacts through Friendster. I love being able to say "Send me a Friendster message" to people I meet through the blogosphere or conferences, instead of having to give out my real email address or IM nick or phone number on the public Internet. And did you know you can now block Friendster messages from undesirable acquaintances?

I'm convinced there is a real need here. I've been calling it "Arms Length Communication" We need a way of contacting people we don't know very well or at all that is non-threatening, deniable and doesn't expose us to huge quantities of spam. There are those among us who don't care and post our contact details everywhere we can and just struggle through the mountains of cold calls and spam. But most people, while they are open to communication from strangers or new acquaintances, are scared of letting out their contact details. I've lost count of the number of business people who say "call me" but don't put any contact info in their email signatures.

Black and White Photography: London Tube Map. Wonderful overlays of actual London Tube maps onto satellite photos. [from: JB Ecademy]