non-free WiFI is too expensive

An interesting quote via boingboing, that Marriott is going to introduce free wireless. The point is that all payment schemes are too complex in their operation. It is must cheaper to just give WiFi access away for free.

Live Journal

Live Journal is yet another weblog-publish and hosting service. The blog-service seems complete with comments, personal profile, moods, templates and calendar. The service has a directory which allows you to locate common interests. They are interested in creating communities, i.e. blogs with a common interest. I find this a bit out of their service realm.

Smart Mobs

The new book by Howard Rheingold discusses Smart Mobs. I guess I have to buy it, as it is the basis for whole range of new services.

Update: I bought it, is a great book.

FOAF privacy

An interesting discussion is developing on the publication of your networks of contacts (or friends) [Ben Hammersley: FOAF stuff]. You can not really publish your network: your friend might not allow it. It is part of his privacy domain, so publication must be granted by both participants in the relation. And their must also be a way to hide your contact details from email address harvesters.

Personal related content is owned by the person in question and he/she determines who will get access, which can also be revoked at any time. For relationship knowledge two persons are involved. The question is whether anything of a relationship can be published. Ben Hammersley only want to publish the mailbox-hashes. They seem to argue that this is a good hook into a person, which only that person can grab and open. The hash is thus an anonymous unique identifier.

Moblogging example

In the Online Journalism Review an interesting example is given of how a truck driver filmed a motor accident with his mobile phone and got in this way on TV.

In this way everybody can become a journalist with a mobile phone. The mobile phone leads to interesting uses, which were not quite foreseen.

Game Ranger

GameRanger is an internet multiplayer matching service. It has some 80.000 members and support some 90 games. This service requires a separate client, which only runs on a Macintosh.

Groove.net

I just came across Groove.net, a provider of ‘desktop collaboration software’. It allows teams to work together over the Internet. The product seems to consist of a workspace (on your desktop) and several servers.

More interesting is for me the hosted possibility, where you use their relay and management server. For the moment Groove is nothing more than an Application Service Provider for their own products. It might become a more interesting online service if it will host workspaces for small teams of co-workers.

Spimmers

It seems that the three cellular in Japan share blacklists of spimmers (BoingBoing). The word is new to me. It is supposed to designate Unsolicited Commercial Instant Messages (or are those SMS’s?). The author of the article questions the legality of such a blacklist, but isn’t the same thing happening with email. It would however be better if it were handed over to a separate not-for-profit company with public guiding rules.

Sprint to launch public WiFi network in USA

WiFi seems to get the interest of larger companies. They have however some catching up to do.

SparkPod

SparkPod is yet another weblog-hosting service. It is supposed to be Mac-specific. It seems to be based on Mac-software. It looks like a decent service. I like the interface better than that from Blogger. It is more geared towards a homepage, than a blog with the possibilities to add your bio and links.

Buymusic.com

Buymusic.com is a new shop for buying and downloading music online. The service is only available on Windows (so I can not test it).

Signature Authentication Web Service

Simon Willison is thinking of a Signature Authentication Web Service. The idea was to be able to sign your comments to a weblog. Thus the originator and the comments can be trusted. I guess this service can be also used elsewhere. A lot of work had already be done, also with W3C. Isn’t there anything that can be borrowed?

FOAF

FOAF is a standard mark-up language in order to create a description of yourself. As it is standardised it is readable by computers and can be used for searching people. FOAF-a-Matic is a service that allows you to create such a FOAF-file. The interesting thing is that in a FOAF-file you can also mention your friends and their FOAF-file. This will allow services to create a network of friends of friends, etc.

However FOAF seems to be yet another way to create a profile of your self. It would be much better to add a FOAF-structure to for instance a vCard like standard. However it is an important step towards a semantic web.

Google Alert

A new service from Google: Google Alert. The service allows you to run a search query every day day automatically. The results get delivered into your email box and may be viewed on the web. The search will only be performed on the new pages in the Google database. This is a very useful service. Northern Light used to have such a public service, before they started asking money for it.

Blog Change Bot

On Dave Winer’s blog I found the Blog Change Bot. It is a quote ”Blog Change Bot is a blog monitoring service which updates you via AOL Instant Messanger when a blog you are interested is updated. It is available with the screen name blogchangebot on AOL IM.” unquote. I am not sure who would like to use this. You are really craving for news if you need this.