Azeem Azhar argues the BBC should make (some?) of its content open source. He has taken a certain amount of flak for this from some quarters but I think the basic idea is a sound one. The BBC because of the license fee is able to produce stuff that the open market can’t afford to – particularly online, where at the moment there just doesn’t seem to be enough money to be made to make a business case for public goods like virtual communities.

Historically it hasn’t shared its content or tools but with the growth of open source as an ideology perhaps it is time to think again. We’ve all paid for the material and technology the BBC produces – why not make it more accessible by making it available freely – to both commercial and not-for-profit organizations? Even if another company makes money out of BBC material we haven’t lost anything.

The BBC isn’t that good at commercially exploiting its material anyway – and when it is, it gets accused of stifling the commercial competition – it can’t win whichever way it goes.

There is one risk, however – if commercial companies online can get acres of excellent content free where is the incentive to make content of their own? We already see this on news sites where a lot of the stories are just slightly re-edited AP and Reuters stories. Well, one hopes they will innovate to differentiate themselves from both the BBC and other commercial providers who now also have access to the same content…

I confess that this is potentially a huge subject area full of controversial implications but I hope that it gets taken up and examined seriously at a higher level. Even if it is not broadly applicable for political or institutional reasons, the open source mentality might still be usefully applied in narrow areas.post fuck free moviemovies free erotic length fullpreviews hentai free moviefree hustler moviesfuck movies free longfucking free movies midgetsfree movie adult clipsbackgrounds desktop free moviesexy free movienude free movie starssex after hysterectomy bleedingsex swinger adult videosalfa teensnaked amanda bynes sexvideo minute porn clip 15 freesystem analysis and aircraft trendingadventurous sexamber sexual Map

Howard Rheingold posts about Affero – a new open source reputation tracking scheme that lets people indicate that they like or dislike what you have posted or even pay you or your favourite charity money.

The thing about it that is interesting to me is that, “the system doesn’t come bundled with any particular forum or community platform, so any independent community host can integrate the services and individuals can share reputation across various communities.”

Of course this has its good and bad points as I discussed the other day at an e-mint meeting. It means your reputation is consistent which could keep known creeps from polluting new communities. On the other hand, it makes it harder to rehabilitate yourself if for some reason you make yourself very unpopular in one particular context. Some people are very un-helpful in one context (they’re a raving right-winger, say) but in another context (offering tech support) they may be really valuable participants. This calls for “multi-dimensional” whuffie.

We’re still at the early stages of handling online reputation but it is encouraging that these experiments are happening.

Needless to say I have registered so if you like this weblog, you can rate it by clicking here.

I was going back through my old “must blog this sometime” bookmarks and came across this hearwarming tale of how thanks in part to a virtual network of messageboards for Mac lovers a man helped police catch a fraudster. Of course it is also a little creepy in that it shows how easily someone’s private details (the criminal’s in this case) can be acquired…

On a similar theme, the BBC reports that both a big-time spammer and John Poindexter, the man in charge of the US Government’s Total Information Awareness program, have had their own privacy violated by vengeful netizens.

iWire notes in reviewing a study of instant messaging in the workplace that the main use of IM was ‘complex work discussions’. There are some methodological difficulties with the study (the software studied was new and about half of users worked at AT & T). But leaving that aside I can’t help thinking that if true this heavy use of IM for work is Not A Good Thing.

If work-related electronically-mediated conversation moves from email to IM, an important “record trail” may be lost. Email can be filed into folders by subject, keyword searched etc. IM in most systems simply disappears once it is typed unless one or the other party saves the transcript.

If businesses do implement IM, it may therefore be important to include some kind of automatic logging function as well as monitoring it for legal reasons if needed.

P.S. The Hubbub IM software that was tested in the study has some interesting new features using sound and giving more information on what other users are doing. Nice to see some new ideas!fast cash loan payday site advanceadvance simple payday personal loan cashquick cash advance credit loan paydayloan cash personal personal advancebusiness programs q affiliate loansagriculture real estate loanalabama loan debt consolidation mortgagesecond loan mortgage alabamagovernment loans debt consolidation alaskaonline personal alaska loan fastaccount card credit merchant texas bestfederal actors union com creditcard account account credit merchant californiaboards accreditationcertificate accredited online coursescourses accounting online accreditedinterest 15 cards no credit moford michigan long credit al 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

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.

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.”

Writing in the (often interesting and always controversial) online politics & culture webzine sp!ked Sandy Starr takes the government to task for investing in Wired Up Communities pilot projects. Why? Because in his view it is condescending to offer acess to the Internet and to virtual community tools to people who have more basic needs like better housing, education and jobs.

It is true that providing online access is not sufficient to improve people’s lives by itself, but just because as he points out some early projects were not particularly successful in raising employment, for example, it doesn’t invalidate the whole idea. These are only pilots – there is still much to learn. If a virtual community can help nurture social capital on the ground even to a small extent it is a start.

Sandy concludes:

“If the circumstances in which people live were genuinely improved, then they could get wired up on their own. And they could form online communities – if that’s what they wanted to do – without interference from a third party”

I am sure that the government is already trying to tackle the more basic chronic problems that exist on some of the impoverished housing estates that have also been targeted with this programme. Why not see if kick-starting online usage could help matters?

Whatever my disagreements with the article, however, it is still worth taking a look at it, if only for its links to some recent research.

Frank Boosman makes an excellent point about the need to find a way to set levels of privacy on one’s weblog (because it would be better to do that than to have to create several different weblogs each with mostly the same posts but different levels of security.

livejournal has this feature.

One might also extend this idea to “quality rings” where different levels of depth of your thinking were available to different readers, or eventually “payment rings” (like the Salon Premium model) where people could read your blog at one level for free or pay to be able to see the deeper level (or pay per post read at that level?)