Some new manifestos….

A couple of manifestos which I've been reading recently…

From the gaping void blog

[The ChangeThis blurb:] “You've read the Cluetrain, now Hugh MacLeod brings you The Hughtrain. A manifesto on brands, blogs, and the now of advertising and marketing.”

P2P manifesto Via Howard Rheingold's Smartmobs.com

P2P is unstoppable
P2P is positive for companies
P2P is positive for the market
P2P is good for users

All the readers can create their own P2P Manifesto, free to edit this original P2P manifesto.

The idea is to then collect on the blog all the different P2P Manifesto's releases, to create a good knowledge base point about P2P issues.

Howard Rheingold's own Mobile and Open: A Manifesto

Only a cockeyed optimist would forecast an open, user-driven, entrepreneurial future for the mobile Internet. This should not prevent us from trying, however. Sometimes, envisioning the way things ought to be can inspire people to work at making it that way. That's what manifestos are for.

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Social software silos

Tim Idenifies the major problem with social software silos.

One thing that interests me in terms of is the fact that there are many sites offering social applications (different services rather than duplication) and it struck me that it would be really cool to have a sort of 'meta-social'software' service, that would aggregate all your social presence on the web into one place. That way you could take your blog, del.icio.us bookmarks, IM accounts, flickr photos, friendster profile, url and email (along with any other personal data) and make it accessible all in one place, meaning you only have to give out one userID to people, which would allow access to all these things.
Microsoft's solution is a great effort in that it tries to integrate all these services, but the fact that you have to buy in to using the same product for everything concerns me slightly; – it would be nice if integration was possible over multiple services. This should be possible with something like RSS, but to my knowledge has not yet been done. (Presulably a level of cooperation between teh providers of social web services would be needed, and since not all of these services are open source, this is probably fairly unlikely.)

Some thoughts on the issue myself, first I saw some information about LID – lightweight identity and I've been thinking about the whole issue myself. Recently I adopted the use of Keepass which is a open source light weight password manager. To have pretty much all my internet and computer passwords in an advanced 256bit encrypted, twofish algorithm database, makes you think twice about personal information. I mean for example I'm playing with Microsoft Wallop, using flickr for my public domain photos, relaying music taste to audioscobbler and busy weaving bookmarks and metadata for del.icio.us. But each one bar audioscrobbler I would say are pretty much deadend when it comes to getting personal information out. Not only that but what about all the other information which is generated from mass aggregation? Would be good to share that information with the people actually creating it wouldnt it? By the way I have not heard Doug Kay talk about Attention XML for ages now and digital identity was discussed by the gillmor gang a while ago. The reality of digital identity raises its head when thinking about social software, shame none of them will even take my foaf profile? Not to say that is the ultimate aim of digital identity and interopable social software.

Miles dropped me and Tim a email pointing towards the new Technorati Tags. And honestly I'm pretty impressed with the tag feature, I just wish there was a meta standard for blogging which would beat using the rel attribute in a link. The better default option of using the categories of blog entries is actually quite a good idea because it requires no extra effort from the blogger and its retro active, which gives technorati lots of data to analyse, if they have not done so already. Anyway to celebrate the technorati's step up in the aggregation market here's a couple of good examples.
Technorati bubble
Technorati ipaq tag | Bill Gates | Socialsoftware | Hacking | Xbox | Silicon | Flickr | xbmc. Now if only we could get this in xml?

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podcasting on mobile devices

[11:41:08] miles> Saw some interesting stuff recently on podcasting and 3G phones
[11:41:17] myself> oh yeah?
[11:42:41] myself> i saw there is a smartphone ipodder client now – http://www.ipodder.org/directory/4/ipodderSoftware. but directory is messed up so i cant see the url
[11:43:35] miles> What the “What is?” – um, yes. Forget whose blog it was. Suggesting that podcasting might make sense with a 3G phone. Imagine a service that would download your podcasts for you, allowing you to retrieve them conveniently with your phone or other digital gadgets – not using something like iPodder: the service provider handles all of that work. You get the content you want all in one place.
[11:44:03] miles> A sort of podcast aggregator
[11:44:05] myself> humm now thats interesting
[11:44:18] myself> found it by the way – http://www.equin.co.uk/ipoddersp/
[11:44:32] miles> It makes podcasts more viable, too, because the podcasters wouldn't get soaked for bandwidth
[11:44:53] myself> yeah and orange and the like will enjoy being in the loop
[11:44:53] miles> Cool!
[11:45:13] myself> i've not used pocketrss2 with 3g yet
[11:45:20] myself> but that would work too
[11:45:27] miles> Exactly – they can make money off it, and profile their customers' tastes too
[11:45:41] myself> ah now thats true
[11:47:59] miles> http://archive.scripting.com/2005/01/11#podcastingMayBeTheirKillerApp
[11:48:05] miles> That was it, I think
[11:50:17] miles> It's because the American low-end telephony approach isn't shiny enough – but this would work better for a 3G service than a low-end GPRS phone. Plus you could do more with a modern terminal
[11:51:45] myself> yes, this handset i'm using has streaming and very tightly intergrated mediaplayer

[11:52:24] miles> Spot on. If it had MP3/OGG streaming support it would be perfect /images/emoticons/happy.gif

So I go off and try and test downloading and streaming content on my phone. The results are not good. First finding a nice easy to type feed. http://www.di.fm will do. Ok great, page will not load on my phone correctly. Try http://www.shoutcast.com. Not much better, so i resort to typing in the direct url. Works but does not know what a *.pls or *.m3u file is Unsupported content type. Ok so I try going to the direct mp3 file. I get this error – HTTP Error: 413 Request too large. I think I'm going about it all the wrong way, maybe the media needs to be embeded into a page or be in a special format. So I go to the Orange world home page and check out the film clips in the 3g highlights section. As expected there is an option to download and to stream. With both, it swiches to the mediaplayer and asks to download or prepares the stream. Have to say the stream is good, only 5 secs wait before it started playing. Hummmm, so I need to look at what there using in that wap page to launch the mediaplayer. The link to stream is http://wap.orange.co.uk/downloads/index.wml?rm=buy&id=9937media_id=20013&version=gp80s&sid98bddc0e8231 and the download is http://wap.orange.co.uk/downloads/index.wml?rm=buy&id=9937media_id=20013&version=gp94&sid98bddc0e8231, but I think you need to be on there connection for it to work?

Anyway the other thing I wanted to point at was the link to ipodderSP I sent to miles about a podcasting client on the smartphone. I gave up my SPV to my wife so I just missed out, but wow ipodderSP looks like just the job. For now, i'm quite happy listening to podcasts on my ipaq than anything else but i'm happy to see even more podcast clients coming to the pocketpc.

more to come….

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More sanyo s750 fun?

I've been doing my research on the 3g forum just recently. Some things of interest.

From Frazzel

The video calling is good as it lets you play back a video to someone your talking to also while on hold you will see windmills and hear some chillout music. Very different!

Not yet checked this out because everyone I know on 3g is using 3 (the company). I think I may know one person on Vodafone Live 3g but no one on Orange 3g. Hey talking of which is it actually possible to do cross network video calls yet? Or do we have to go through the whole interop thing for the 4th time now?

About those Bluetooth problems I was having, well I got them still and Jonstatt sums up the problem. The bluetooth implementation is nowhere near as good as Sony Ericsson. You can only have one bluetooth profile selected at a time whereas the Sony will auto select the right one.. I tried the sync option as described here but decided to just export vcards out of outlook then copy them to the sd card. When in the s750, it will let you import them with no problems. It seems generally people are sending back there sanyo phones which I may do if I can not setup bluetooth dialup within the next week. There is some light however, some people have got it working with the ipaq, mac, a toshiba laptop and even a pc. I got a feeling the last two are pre service pack 2 pc's and I'm going to make a long call to orange about my 3g ipaq dialup connection!

Its 4am, and I've finally got the ipaq to dialup GPRS and 3G over Bluetooth with the Sanyo S750! Actually this is now the 6th time i've done it. Whats the settings I'm using? First thing I've pared the two using the headset method described here. Then I'm using *99# to dialup orange and no modem string of any kind. Now to be fair, I did once get the dialup to work with the string at+cgdcont=1,”IP”,”orangeinternet” but not consistently like the no string option. I'm now currently trying to work out why it didnt work before. Other things I noticed, I always have to dialup via the ipaq bluetooth manager otherwise it never works no matter what i do. The baud rate seems to work best on 57600 rather than 115200 and wait for dialtone slows the connection process down alot. I've also just been playing a little more and found +cgdcont=1,”IP”,”orangeinternet” works, but not as well as no extra modem commands. I really need to post this on the 3g forum soon.

I was trying to test the speed of the 3g connection and I can not find one tester which doesnt use javascript of java to complete the test. I really want to know what kind of speeds are possible using this 3g connection now. Which also reminds me to check to see if I get 50meg of 3G data too? By the way, if your interested in the quality of the 1.3 megapix camera check out these two great shots. Yep he's a lady killer…

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Future conference choices

Which one would you go to? and of course, how would you justify it?

Doors of perception 8 in New Delhi, India – 19-26 March 2005
O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, America – 14-17 March 2005
SVG Open 2005 in Enschede, Netherlands – 15-19 August 2005
The World Wide Web conference 2005 in Chiba, Japan – 10-14 May 2005
XTech 2005 (use to be XML Europe) in Amsterdam, Netherlands – 25-27 May 2005

Well if I can finally find time to write my SVG paper before the looming deadline of Feb 1st 2005, I would get a huge discount into SVG open 2005. (By the way, my new Sanyo S750 plays SVG). I was planning on a presentation on the Art and Design, Data Connection or Evangelism & Specs tracks. Even if I miss out on the paper call, I'm still going to create some kind of promotional animation showing off SVG at its best and hopefully projected on to the white walls of the university. Back to the subject, if worst comes to worst I'm going to pay for the conference because its so close, flights and sleeping arrangements will be cheap and its an excuse to go back to the netherlands again.

Update, thanks to Joel. I'm going to submit a paper to XTECH 2005 on behalf of BBC World Service about RSS. My main push will be about publishing RSS in 35 different languages and then how were publishing extra metadata to help build a better picture of the content. I'll also touch on how were able to service 3 different types of end points with the same content. Should make an interesting but challenging talk for those involved in the xml world. I wish BBC News lots of success with there paper, and honestly think if both papers are accepted this would be great for the BBC. You only have to look at the line up for Emerging technology to see how diverse and forward looking the BBC is.

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Bill Gates: Free Culture advocates = Commies

copyleft russian flag

From BoingBoing.net

In an interview on news.com, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates described free culture advocates as a “modern-day sort of communists.”

Q: “In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, 'We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights.' What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?

A: “No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

And this debate will always be there. I'd be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned–including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system–there's no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they've got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future.”

Ok this damm right offensive, where does he get off saying the free-culture movement is sort of like the communists movement. I cant wait to hear what others say about this part of the interview. I'm glad the Bill Gates is worried about free-culture, but this kind of misunderstanding leads to fear and stupid reactions to something quite normal. I mean come on now, you seriously think having a flexable IP system which allows the long tail to be productive is some what anti-captist? Get real! Jon Udell discussed the propsal of the long tail, opensource, creative commons and free-culture in the case of audio recently. And i'm sorry but none of the thoughts sounded communistic in anyway. (some more on the longtail here)

Anyway, I hope Lessig reminds all of us that were so above these silly comments. And that free-culture, creative commons, archive.org, open-source, free software, the creative archive are all part of what makes the internet great and Bill Gates needs to get on now or catch up later.

Update, more views about Gates outburst, while the list grows in blogdigger
Gates Calls Patent Reformists “Communists” from of all places xbmc blogger
Gates brands IPR opponents Communists a link from planet Mozilla
More Gates “Creative Commies” propaganda from boingboing
And what I've been waiting for, lessig replies to Bill Gates. As expected, he takes the moral highground and reminds Bill that he should once in a while engage in a conversation with his own employees. Ow, what a stinger in the tail.

Ok last few comments on the topic now. This weeks Gillmor gang also covers Bill Gates comment but Robert Scoble is in the Hot and uncomfitable seat. Its well worth the listening to, I am suprised that Doc Searls doesnt take it too seriously, i mean I dont and do. Anyway whats really interesing is Miles comments. He pointed out that Bill Gates is surrounded by Yes people who wouldnt dare say anything out of turn (I mean listen to Robert Scoble when Dan asks for his view). And its not even Bill Gates talking, its Microsoft's Shareholders view of the free culture advocates… And in that we are done for now.

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Sanyo S750 is now with me

Sanyo S750

At last, I made the switch to the Sanyo S750. Generally, I'm quite impressed with the operating system and the phone. Its the first phone I've seen which has a decent copy and paste function. Email was a easy as pie to setup, i was tempted with using gmail but decided to stick to hotpop for now. The screen is so slick and beautiful that I cant bear to take off the plastic cover. I still cant believe it has the same rez as my ipaq! The T9 seems very good and allows for multiple languages. I'm glad to say it records all its movies in 3gp format and you can save pictures in either jpg or 24bit png which is amazing! By the way the camera quaity is great and puts my spv to shame. Sanyo really thought about the phone and included simple things like unlimited video recording on to the SD card, ringtones in many formats and unified inboxes for all messages.

However its not all good. First thing I'm having a huge a problem transfering my contacts via bluetooth and infrared from my spv2 and ipaq. It will do one contact at a time which sucks when you got 250 contacts needed to be synced. I really dont want to do it via my laptop but it looks like may have to export vcards from outlook or use the software on the cd. I also tried to hack the settings for orange network sync into the phone so I could use the orange sync option. But it simply refuses to work.
Another thing which is related to bluetooth contacts problems. It seems the Bluetooth only accepts one request then hangs up and kicks you back to the home screen. What this means is, if you want to sync multiple contacts it will simply hangup after the first one sent. The bluetooth also seems to be only on for a certain period of time (maybe to reserve battery life, which is pretty damm good so far). What this means is I need to tell the S750 to get ready to dialup or recieve a item before the event. This sucks big time when using my ipaq. I'm very use to just dialing up with my phone still in my pocket. There has got to be a way around this problem!

Anyhow, other things I've found. Mobile SVG support works but I need to explorer it more. The browser is a openwave xhtml and wap 2.0 browser and its pretty good, but I would rather have Opera thank you! There seems to be no way to have more than one email account on the phone, and I never saw an option for imap just pop3. USB storage mode is useful, because it turns the phone into a USB keychain, but only if you buy the optional usb cable. Not seen this option on any other phone, oh plus the phone does accept sd cards higher than 256meg, I put my 512meg in without any problems. You just got to create folders like a digital camera.

Formats supported by the phone out of the box
Documents [/Sanyo/Media Album/Documents] – SVG (.svg, .svgz), vCard (.vcf), vCalendar (.vcs), vNote (.vnt), Text (.txt).
Melody & Ringtones [/Sanyo/Media Album/Melody & Ringtones] – AAC (.3gp, .mp4), MIDI (.mid, .midi), Voice (.amr), MP3 (.mp3).
Videos [/Sanyo/Media Album/Video List] – Mpeg4 (.3gp, .mp4), H.263 (.3gp, .mp4)
Pictures [/Sanyo/Media Album/Picture] – PNG (.png), GIF (.gif), Bitmap (.bmp), Wireless bitmap (.wbmp), JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg, .jpe)

Generally its a good phone but needs alot of hacking to make it a great phone. I'm just worry if its actually quite hackable and if people will.

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PocketRSS 2.0 is out

Following on from my podcasting with only pocketrss 2.0 entry. Happyjackroad have released version 2.0.1.6 which is the gold version for anyone to listen to. Users of 1.42 can upgrade for free, which is good stuff. Enjoy!

PocketRSS 2.0 screenshots

Features
ability to use Today Screen plugin within PocketBreeze – not much use to me, but very cool today screen plugin none the less
database storage for faster feed viewing/searching/history archiving – yeah beats flat xml files for speed.
simple Feed content management – Yep simple but also advanced and fully featured
namespace/xml mapping feature for advanced users – Seriously crazy feature, which few desktop readers even do
custom view modes (including dynamic, keyword-based views) – yep nicely natrual aggregated views
Feed Wizard to easily add/find new RSS Feeds – includes feedster search and pulls opml files off the web, which few desktop readers do still
support for “stylus-free” viewing /images/emoticons/laugh.gif-pad optimized) – Ideal for reading in a crowded london train
feed item control (read,unread,locked,delete,etc.) – yep very cool
ability to download full article links for offline viewing – bit hit and miss but useful none the less
ability to download audio content (aka podcasting) – No other client does this on the pocketpc yet, enough said!
support for WM2003 SE landscape mode (and VGA) – I dont have a WM2003 SE device so I cant test it
improved network connections – Yep its good
overall new look-n-feel – Didnt like it at first, but love it now.

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