Free is the right way to do WiFi

Lately I see more articles that WiFi Internet Access should be a free service. The Billing and Customer Care systems make WiFi to expensive. So you should just add it to your existing services (food, coffee, whatever) and see it as a marketing cost.

This brings me to the question whether we should still call it a service. Something to think about: what are the boundaries of a service? [via BoingBoing]

Ultima Services

Jullian Dibbell sells items that he amassed playing Ultima Online through eBay. In his weblog he explained how much money he has earned by this (in US dollars and Britannian gold pieces).

This is an interesting example of services (but which I will not add to my directory).

[via BoingBoing]

Keyword Search Advertising Service troubles

eBay sent a letter to Google demanding ownership of all keywords containing the name eBay. This on grounds of trademark ownership of the name eBay.

For me this seems to be a bit farfetched. As the article describes this would disallow the selling of any eBay add-on products or services. But this is a very grey area and clear limits should be known. Trademarked keyword ownership should be limited to only the services and products offered by the keyword owner. Thus if somebody sells eBay management software, then eBay has no power over related keywords and these keywords do contain the word eBay.

[via CNet].

RSS for Trouble Tickets

The dutch ISP uses RSS to publish its public trouble tickets. Nice if you want to follow the operations of your ISP. You can use your favorite RSS aggregator.

It is nice to have a standard for publishing and using trouble tickets. I guess however that RSS is not enough. You also want to follow the status of a ticket (threads?), semantics (what kind of ticket), priority (how bad is the trouble) and you might even want a specific RSS reader, where you can sort and analyze the tickets. But it is a very good first step. Who is working on an XML-standard for trouble tickets? We might even envisage a service provider that reads and presents trouble tickets.

[by way of Adam Curry]