That’s an interesting assertion made in passing in this interview with Barclay Knapp, head of NTL.

I always presumed that the cost of providing broadband for cable companies might be lower than the cost for the telcos using DSL but not greatly lower. Then I read this:

“…it is broadband where NTL is likely to make most money. Analysts estimate gross profit margins on the service can be as high as 90%.”

If companies like Telewest (my cable modem provider) offered £10 a month broadband instead of £25 I wonder how many more TV and telephone customers they could eventually sign up once they were “hooked” using broadband?

It’s good to see strong reactions to the recent Sp!ked piece critical of the UK Government’s pilot projects providing Internet access to disadvantaged neighborhoods.year personal unsecured loan repayment 10loan money 11 16 paycheck paydayhome 125 credit loan equity125 secured loan ukpayday loan 19 software free 132000 loan bad credit forloan 228hour cash 24 loans Map

And weblogging is still too difficult, says Stef “Whitelabel.org/UpMyStreet” Magdalinski.

I love using MT but I can only do so because I have a tech-savvy friend to set up and host it.

Trackback is a hard concept to explain and implement (though I think it is rather useful once you start using it). But there seems to be a larger danger here. With everyone concentrating on enabling and improving on weblogging – the flavour du jour – I haven’t seen any work being done to enable more complex self-publishing like simple web forms for creating online newsletters.

To quote from a recent essay I wrote:

it is now possible to produce simple websites or photo albums without cost by filling in forms online, though sites created in this fashion may be less likely to show up on many search engines, they are limited in the number of visitors that providers will allow over a given period, and the primitive design templates used often make such sites visibly un-professional.

For more sophisticated users, weblogs (regularly updated websites) can also be produced and maintained free of charge… and message boards and chat rooms can also be easily set up for free on personal websites. Moreover both Microsoft and AOL have noted the growth in weblogs and intend to provide improved tools for people to express themselves online.

(What’s the name of that Microsoft “organize my life” R & D programme?) But I’m guessing all the action for MS and AOL is in helping people publish individually. What is needed is free – preferably open source – tools that let people make their own newsletters jointly with others or coordinate online to accomplish something (not just messageboards – though tailored ones could be part of it but shared document creation tools) – even create their own streaming audio radio stations without having to program anything.

I hope that is part of what Matt Jones and friends are working on at the BBC’s New Politics Initiative.

Later Is Textpattern part of the solution? It requires, the author says, “Little knowledge of internet technology to install and use it” but having to have “an account with a hosting provider who offers PHP and a MySQL database” to use it doesn’t sound like a good start.

It would be handy to see a sample site with some greeked text using its standard template to see what a Textism site would look like.

Here‘s something I wish I had thought of – a way to indicate where your web page is (or relates to). This page is served out of Toronto, Canada as it happens but it relates to me and my interests so I have just added a tag which indicates that this site “resides” at 51.00.06 N, 0.0515 E and if you look under my picture you can now find sites that are near my own. (My actual location is probably a few yards from those coordinates but my GPS doesn’t work inside my flat so I had to use multimap and my postcode to approximate). At time of writing, I appear to be the only site registered as being in London, but I hope this changes soon. I actually registered using the metatags for a previous standard which doesn’t seem to have taken off, but which the people at geourl are also supporting.

So why indicate where your site is? Well, the possibilities are limitless – it could enable an open source yellow pages service using this publicly available information – more precise and useful than the crude geographic groupings from the Open Directory or Yahoo. It could also help neighbors with similar interests to find each other, as UpMyStreet is doing in the UK using the UK’s fairly precise post codes.

To add a little element of Dr Strangelove to this tool, the tag geourl uses is labeled as the page’s “ICBM” value because of a little usenet in-joke.auto loans 0advantage loancredit with car loan bad a37 loan carbest credit bad loans 10 personalloan of student advantage consolidationfaxing instant 24 7 loans noloans 250000 business Mapporn abusedabsolutely porn free lesbianteenagers activities forchat adult call back sexmovie made amateur home sexmovies amature teenpublic sex amateur inerotic stories sex a Map

For some reason my Mozilla 1.1 has been forgetting several of its cookies periodically, even though I have had its cookie security on the default most “lenient” setting. I went to report this and found “do not file bugs on copies of Mozilla older than two weeks.” So we are supposed to continuously update our Mozilla to the latest available build. I guess I could do that. But there are no instructions I could find on the site about upgrading as opposed to reinstalling. Read the installation notes and you are told, “Install into a new empty directory. Installing on top of previously installed builds may cause problems.” So can you upgrade without losing your existing settings? What should you do with old installations on your HD once you have successfully installed? There’s nothing in the installation notes about that…

So a) has anyone else had the Mozilla problem I had. If so, does upgrading fix it? Is there anything else I can/should do? And
b) If I just download Mozilla 1.2.1 install it in a new directory then uninstall the previous version will I be left with a version that still has all the settings from 1.1?

Later: Encouraged by Dean’s comment I just went ahead and downloaded 1.2 and installed it over 1.1. Nothing seems to have gone wrong. But I still maintain it is yet another example of the way open source developers fail to cater for non-insider users…bank loans signature 1stloan 30000 payment100 texas loan mortgage for lawsloans accelerationact loan education144 loans stockloan 2nd calculator mortgageloans for georgia advance0 mortgage commerical loan downfixed home interest loans 1 ratefinal hentai movies fantasyfree sites adult moviemovies anal sample freefree bi moviesblow free movies jobsgallery free blowjob movieblowjobs free moviesfree movies sex brazilianfree defloration moviesclips enema free movie

Greg Costikyan, who has created some of my favourite board and role playing games like Paranoia and Pax Britannica has started a weblog in which he discusses and defends the notion that computer games can be an art form.

One of the organizations he consults for, Themis Group is in an interesting position – it advises people who run massively multi-player games on how to manage their virtual communities. No easy task!

Now if only Wagner James Au would do a weblog….

Thanks to boingboing for the link.

This overview of one of my favourite authors does a good job of explaining his appeal. Furst writes very atmospheric spy novels set in the Europe of the 30s and 40s. I urge you to check his work out…ameriquest loans provides home mortgageloans afforable studentunsecured loan $40,000.00government loans housing aboriginal nswloan affin bank personalcalifornia loan officers alhambraknoxvilletn dreams home american loansamorazation loanloans purchases land forl agriculturehome amerusa loans mortgage

The BBC has recently started something that sounds excellent – 360 – “featuring your solutions to world problems” and good news from around the world submitted by users. So far so possibly interesting. But what do we find prominently featured on the home page? Links to a homeopath and, worse, an astrologer and other new-age-y crap. Are the BBCs monitors asleep at the switch? Do they misguidedly believe that any participation is better than no participation? Or is this fledgeling site actually being moderated by a rogue group inside the BBC which believes in this stuff? I met Richard a while back, who heads the site’s small team, and he seemed like an interesting guy so I am reluctant to pour cold water on an idea which could be really promising but really they should have a word with BBC Education before talking about 360’s “own” astrologer and allowing a page that looks official (ie no member byline) to go up talking rubbish like, “Your personal birth chart is your blueprint for life — if you like, a wiring diagram for the psyche! It shows your inherent strengths and weaknesses whether physical, psychological or spiritual.”

Last week’s The Economist did a survey of how America and the rest of the world view each other based on three surveys – one from the Pew Research Centre on national values in 44 countries, one called Worldviews 2002 – a survey of American and European foreign policy attitudes – and the World Values Survey which interestingly arranges values on a spectrum of traditional vs rational and “quality of life” (basic survival-aligned) values vs “self-expression” values.

The results show that the US is more traditionalist than any of the developed countries surveyed except Ireland and South Africa but shares our attachment to “self-expression” values. Good old Sweden is in the high secular-rational & self-expression corner while Zimbabwe and Morocco glower in the opposite corner.free adult movies sexbest sex scenes moviesapphic doing moviesfree movie downloads adultmovie sex samplemovies women movies of nude uncensoredjob movies blowwindows maker movie Mapvideos sex senior amateuri a am transexualnatural winters abby tgp teensex amature motelreason teen of age modelsbusiness airline analysis processtexas 2007 explosion teen talentsex adult exploitation films cult female Map

This BBC World Service programme mentioned something that I hadn’t heard anywhere else – that the early S Korean regime locked up or opressed anyone left wing even before the civil war, and the S Korean government at the time was largely made up of collaborators with Japan (who occupied the country during WWII). This helps to explain some of the hostility of the North to the South…