Update to my review of the Motorola V600 (as a side-bar that review is now on the first page of results.)

According to Motorola there is no problem with the V600. As flimsy as my evidence was (2 phones in 2 stores) they don't offer any reasoning or evidence to backup their claim.

I've also come across a forum for Motorola users called Mototone. As I write this the site is being relaunched so lots of the links aren't live yet, but the forums are working and I have posted a question about V600 call quality there. The single respondent, so far, says:

think the reception on the v600 is one of hte best of all the new phones on the market

I have resolved to go try a few more stores and see. My advice is slightly modified (to what it should have been in the first place):

• Don't buy a Motorola V600 if you intend to use it for calls unless you try it first and are satisfied with the voice quality.

02/26/04: Making Waves. Robert X Cringely's column of the week on PBS Online. [I, Cringely @ PBS.org]

Right or wrong I always enjoy Bob's thoughts and I definitely agree with him this time. After dot.com e-commerce has come a long, pregnant, pause. I think nanotech was supposed to step into the breach, but it's proved to be a complex animal. I remember reading articles, over a year ago, about investors sueing VC funds to get their uninvested capital back. It seems like Big VC's have lost the meaning of Venture.

In the, admittedly unlikely, event that any VC's read this, here is a helpful guide. Print it out and stick it next to your Ester Dyson wall planner. A venture is:

1. An undertaking that is dangerous, daring, or of uncertain outcome.
2. A business enterprise involving some risk in expectation of gain.
3. Something, such as money or cargo, at hazard in a risky enterprise.

Open Source Java. Rod Smith: Here is the offer: IBM would like to work with Sun on an independent project to open source Java. [Sam Ruby]

This seems like, if it was taken, it would be a significant step.

One event standard - please!.

Here's Matt Mower's thoughts on adding ESF events to the When category of the k-collector.

I'm gonna rely upon Matt and Paolo to grok all this stuff. I just hope they're making sure:

• that all these events standards can work together
• that they've gone back and checked out the earlier standardization efforts that happened in the blogosphere (I seem to remember an rdf schema from Danny Ayers)
• that they're talking to Andrew Baio of UpComing.org.

Schedule and Calendar aggregation is key to the overall digital lifestyle aggregation scenario.

[Marc's Voice]

I think we're likely to support ESF straight away because:

• it's there
• it's simple
• it's RSS2.0

Based upon Marc's suggest I have taken a look at UpComing.org however it doesn't seem to support event metadata in it's feeds yet. Clearly we're interested in what such services will do in this area.

Event Sharing, publishing, syndicating, etc. When we introduced the "when" part in the w4 concept, almost one year ago, what we had in mind was a space where events would be topics which could be aggregated in calendars and allowed users to navigate information using a timeline.
...
Using the same approach we are using with topics, new events will be automatically distributed among members of a cloud allowing users to pick an event if it already exist instead of creating it.

There will also be relations between events and other topics on the server, which we believe will create a sigificant added value to the process (allowing, for example, to quickly move to all information related to an event to all information related to one of the participants).

[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

The When classification was always a key part of the overall vision of K-Collector. Being able to navigate sensibly based upon time & date is a very powerful concept.

One of the last things I did within liveTopics before moving on to K-Collector was to implement time as an XFML facet. This created a hierarchy of topics representing dates. For example there was a topic "2003". This in turn contained 12 sub-topics "Jan 2003" through "Dec 2003". Each of these topics contained a further division by date. Posts were linked to these topics based upon publication date. The upshot was that you could browse based on an increasingly specific date filter.

We will be looking to implement When topics in K-Collector in conjunction with ESF events. The idea will be to link the event (perhaps defined as a What topic), with a particular point in time (a When topic), a place (Where) and possibly people attending (Who). Hence an event will form a glue which binds together a number of different topics in a context.

Example:

What

blogtalk 2.0

Where

Vienna

Who

Thomas Burg

When

5-Jul-2004

There are still issues to work out like: What about events which span multiple days? Do we represent time on the calendar? What about recurring events? And so on. But I think even a simple model which dodges many of these questions would be amply useful at this point.

Introducing the enhancedAggregator.

I've recently spent some time investigating Radio's aggregator code, looking for an easy way to support additional RSS modules in general, and ENT 1.0 topics in particular.

The enhancedAggregator tool is the -provisional- result of this investigation. It comes with full ENT 1.0 topics support for Radio's aggregator, and skeletons for aggregating Atom 0.3 feeds and ESF 1.0 events for RSS 2.0.

I'd like the enhancedAggregator to become a community driven project, allowing Frontier/Radio developers to easily test aggregation of new syndication formats and extensions, without mobilizing Userland scarse resources.

So I've added some intal/uninstal/update/prefs ancillary functions to the tool, and provided guidelines for updating the current drivers and adding new ones, with pointers to the available online documentation.

I hope Matt will copy the ENT module driver and paste it into the k-collector client for Radio, and Paolo's eVector crew will build upon the ESF module driver skeleton, copying the result to their new tool when it's stable enough.

[s l a m]

Marc's doing sterling work.

In response to "Terminology: The management in KM", Richard McManus agrees and suggests Information Flow (a term he has been musing about) as an alternative.

Whilst I do like the way information flow sounds I don't think it replaces knowledge management because it describes the goal and not the activity.

Hence:

• information flow is to X, as
• managed knowledge would be to knowledge management

The question remains: What is X?

Perhaps the problem with the American economy is that it is a house divided against itself.  We think of ourselves as an innovation driven country, fully in support of Pareto's entrepreneurs.  In fact, we are largely supporting Pareto's renters (rentiers) in:  IP law, health care, taxes, spectrum allocation, and more.  The problem is that we are an open economy in a globally competitive system.  By protecting renters at the expense of entrepreneurs we make it almost impossible to compete.

[John Robb's Weblog]

I don't understand John's post but I've been interested to read a little about Pareto and will probably read more.

I've been pondering the term Knowledge Management a little. In particular the use of the word manage.

A dictionary search for 'manage' brings up, among others, the following meanings:

• to direct or control the use of
• to exert control over
• to make submissive to ones authority, discipline, or persuation
• to direct the affairs or interests of
• to make subservient by artful conduct
• to bring around cunningly to ones plans
• to exercise in graceful or artful action

• to direct
• govern
• control
• wield
• order
• contrive
• concert
• conduct
• transact

To me this terminology sounds all wrong. It is the language of control, of dominance. It is the lanuage of the scarcity mentality which says "I Win, You Lose" or "You Win, I Lose". That's not how I want to think/talk about knowledge.

Unlike, say, Plutonium, knowledge is only as scarce as we make it. As I impart my knowledge to you I don't lose it, instead we both have it. And maybe more, between us we may synthesize something that I could not have created alone. Giving my knowledge to you has, at the very least, increased the total amount of knowledge, not reduced it. (Fortunately Plutonium doesn't work this way!)

So I think the terminology doesn't fit. In the context of a healthy organization knowledge isn't something that we should want to manage. Rather I'd say it's something we want to plant and watch grow.

What is required, I think, is to recast the principles of knowledge management in a language which emphasizes abundance without unduly frightening those people who may tend toward a scarcity mentality. I'm still thinking about how that goes...

A few days ago I wrote a bookmarklet for toggling checkboxes on the page. It's intended to make it a bit easier to use the Radio News Aggregator page. This often has hundreds of checkboxes which you may need to toggle on and off. After a while it gets to be a pain. The bookmarklet went through the page toggling every checkbox. Unfortunately I found it didn't really do what I needed as, quite often, I want to keep about half the posts in the page for later.

I just wrote a variation which can be used alongside it. What this bookmarklet does is to selectively toggle checkboxes on the page. Like the previous one it looks at each checkbox in turn. When it finds a checkbox which is checked it begins to toggle each subsequent checkbox until it reaches another one that is already on.

What this means is that you can toggle on the first and last checkboxes of a group (or several groups) that you want selected. Then use this bookmarklet to check every checkbox in between. Easy! It can then be combined with the toggle-all bookmarklet to invert the selection.

New topic map tools. Peter Van Dijck has pointed out a few new topic map tools and approaches: tinyTIM: a very small easy to use (50kb jarsize) in memory Topic Map engine. It implements the TMAPI interfaces, so one can work with TopicMaps via... [Column Two]

Two interesting tidbits.

Darn, why did it take me so long to figure this out?

I'm converting a whole bunch of tables in a Word document into text for processing into another format. This means placing the cursor then going through the sequence Table|Convert|Table to Text|Paragraph Mark|Ok. Over, and, over again. Boring.

So I started looking for how to record a macro to do this for me. In the process it asks me which key to bind to, so I start hunting for a free combo (not easy in Word) and, as I am doing this, I come across Ctrl+Y Edit Redo, Repeat. Repeat?

Of course this does exactly what you would think and is making this job a breeze. I wish i'd found out about this years ago, I bet it's been in Word since forever...

Blogger's Poker Party.

Speaking of Texas Hold'em, it might be interesting to hold a Blogger's Poker Party as a variation on blogger's dinner.  Anyone has a ideal pad for such an event in the Bay Area?  Mine is too small.

[Don Park's Daily Habit]

Wrong side of the Atlantic again <sigh/>.

Breakthrough Skype Conferencing Solution. The promised Skype conferencing capability is nearing launch. The preview version is available for additional testing today. To confirm I just connect a conference with Bay Area (2), France and India. Great call quality. I then connected another with China... [Unbound Spiral]

Exciting news! I wonder when we'll be able to start integrating this functionality into our applications.

Why Projects are Hard.

This sidebar to Frank Patrick's series on Promises and Prescriptions attempts to show why it is we find projects hard. I found it hard to understand the sidebar! (Just kidding Frank.)

Projects are hard due to the interaction of uncertainty and variability. Our efforts to minimize uncertainty, for instance by deciding early, serve to limit the actions available to performers as the future unfolds. At the same time, we introduce variability by being unreliable with our project commitments. "Hard" is an understatement.

For those of you subscribing to Reforming Project Management via Bloglet, you can add a subscription to Frank's Focussed Performance Business Blog and have our postings delivered together automagically in the same email message. (You'll find Frank's subscription box at the top of the right-hand column.) Try it out for awhile.
[Reforming Project Management]

I think that this is one of the first areas in which business weblogs will make a big impact. Widespread use of weblogs offer a low-cost boost in information visibility & processing which has a two key knock-on effects for project work:

• earlier identification of risks
• better tracking of those risks

In turn this ability to manage risk better holds out the possibility of a more flexible approach to project work. One such idea borrowed (most recently) from eXtreme Programming is the architectural spike.

In XP an architectural spike is a short, controlled, foray into unknown territory. When confronted with a difficult problem several of these spikes may be made to evaluate different approaches before selecting the best option.

Used as part of a lightweight, high-visibility, methodology this is an improved way of working. Because you can trust that your risks are containable you can safely defer decisions until they need to be made increasing options & flexibility for the project team.

A while back I wrote a modification to the Radio news aggregator page which added a button for toggling all the checkboxes on or off. This was pretty handy but trashed by a Userland update. I could never muster the willpower to figure out how I did it again, and watch it disappear again at some unspecified point in the future so i've done without.

Today I slapped myself for being a fool and wrote a JavaScript bookmarket which does the same thing. It just toggles every checkbox it finds on the page.

I've learned some more tricks for writing Bookmarklets, since last time, so this one should work the same on IE and Mozilla (although I won't be testing it on IE).

New Bush records, same old questions. Why did the "outstanding young pilot" stop flying? Why don’t the records document his time in Alabama? And what about the missing physical? The 400-page document dump has no answers. [Salon.com]

Until you make it possible for an ordinary person, without oil money or dynstasty backgrounds, to run for president you are never going to have an honest man in the Whitehouse. It's too much of a magnet for the power hungry or the friends of the power hungry. I hold out little hope for Kerry, Edwards, or Dean. They aren't Bush but what are they exactly?

What an interesting race it would be to have a dozen, non party, ordinary, smart, Joe's running. People who don't realise their entire life has been leading to this momement until they're actually there and doing it.

Right now I think America would be better off with a lottery. Just pick someone at random every 4 years. You couldn't do any worse than you are now.

My capsule review is: Don't buy a Motorola V600 if you actually want to use it for making phone calls. In all other respects it's great.

I've been waiting for the Motorola V600 to come out for quite a while. It's the phone I want to buy. I was delighted, yesterday, to finally hold one in my hands and play with it. Truly a thing of beauty and a great feature set. I was ready to hand over £50 that I don't have for the pleasure of owning one. Only one hurdle remained...

Reading about the phone on the web the reviews were all positive about how good it felt to own one etc... except for one review which complained about voice quality.

So I put my SIM in the phone and made a call. Indeed the quality was poor, tinny with a lot of distortion even at half volume. The speakerphone didn't sound great either but in a shop with music it's hard to tell. Additionally the person I was calling said the clarity at their end wasn't brilliant but again the music might be a factor there.

I was in town today so I thought I would try again. I went to a different store and tested. Again the sound quality was very poor. I got the shop assistant to try it and he agreed, noting that other customers had returned the phone with similar complaints. He certainly didn't seem surprised when I declined to purchase.

So there you go. Great screen, camera, bluetooth, GPRS, cool lights on the front, but useless as a phone. Pity.

I'm reading Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm and something just struck me.

Moore describes buyers in the following categories:

• innovators
• visionaries
• pragmatists
• conservatives
• skeptics

Moore defines some of the characteristics of visionaries and pragmatists in relation to markets. It's a sweeping generalization but he notes how visionaries often have very strong horizontal links between them whilst pragmatists tend to be much more focused on vertical relationships with those around them.

What struck me was how this mirrors with a take up of blogging. Blogging has been very much about the horizontal. We are throwing out ideas and commentary and, quite often, making broad horizontal links to our comrades in spirit. My supposition is that this prospect likely does not appeal to the pragmatists out there who are more focused on the people around them, their "verticals."

I think what we may be seeing, with the emergence of k-logging, is a move to a more blended and holistic form of blogging where the verticals relationships take their rightful significance.

Found on perspective the Soviet Music site. Fabulous.

Watching a programme about the Falklands War. Task force commander, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse put his job this way:

This war is not going to be like the last. My job is to adapt faster than the opposition.

In case any other Radio users would like to do what I've just done I've uploaded the script necessary. Import this into Radio and run it. It will create two files in your gems folder called posting-history.csv, and, summary-posting-history.csv, respectively. These can be imported into Excel, sorted and used however you fancy.

I just took a look at my All Posts page for this blog and was a little taken aback at just how much content I have amassed since I started. 1,300 posts doesn't sound very much until you start reading the titles. I got interested in my posting habits and got some data out of Radio to make these graphs:

There is quite a lot of daily fluctuation. I guess that's only to be expected.

Somewhat less on a monthly basis although you can see that the trend is downwards as I have gotten busier with work.

About a year ago I heard Dave Snowden speak. Something he came up with then which I have reflected upon a number of times since was that he thought Best Practice systems were a waste of time. It was much better, he said, to build Worst Practice databases. Now I don't know Dave well enough to guage whether he was being flippant but I've pondered it and I definitely see something. Here is my attempt to understand what I think:

Best practice systems are an attempt to capture what works and replicate it. That's a noble aim. Worst practice systems, on the other hand, are a way of capturing what didn't work. How different are they? At a glance one appears to be the inverse of the other, but as I thought about it I began to see them in a subtly different light:

• Best practice is about transferring skills.
• Worst practice is about informing judgements.

Having said that best practice can be valuable there are some problems to overcome in acquiring it. For a start, best practice may be very hard to agree on. Which parts of an activity contributed to it being best? And, having identified this, it then has to be rendered into terms meaningful to others. When you consider that practice often has a high emphasis on doing/skill it is clear that tranferring best practice is either on, or over the border, of transfering of tacit knowledge.

Best practice is expensive!

For a practice to be transferable all these challenges must be met otherwise no benefit will be accrued. By constrast (and I'm making a bit of a leap here) worst practice is probably easier to identify and codify. We're so much more used to honing in on problems. Also we can useful work with clues and vagueness in a way that best practice doesn't suggest.

Unfortunately there is an even bigger problem. Best practice tells you what worked in the past. It doesn't tell you anything about what will work in the future. Accepting best practice is accepting a predictive model which assumes that today will be very like yesterday. In the face of discontinuous change best practice may, in fact, be a trap for the unwary.

This seems to me to go to the heart of what Snowden's work has been about to this point. The idea that we (as people and organizations) exist in different domains of order and unorder and that what is an appropriate response in one domain may not serve in another. Understanding what domain you are in and knowing how to act appropriately is key. Hence in times of change and uncertaintly best practice is not your friend.

So where does best practice fit in..?

I think that best practice will remain a valuable management tool for use in "peace time." I also think there will always be a role for understanding those practices which are based upon sound principles. Otherwise get building that worst practices database today!

Last tweak of AOP performance. With a last session of performance tweaking, and with help from the CGLIB people, our framework can now perform 17 million AOP method calls per second. CGLIB was updated to not create any Object[] array for zero-argument method calls, and along with caching of Invocation objects (per thread, in a threadlocal) calls can now be made without creating ANY objects as a side-effect. There is also no synchronization in the method invocation code, so there's no performance degradation when multiple threads are working simultaneously. Very nice.

This means that it is possible to implement dynamic AOP in a rather performant way. I was worried that all of that framework stuff would make it crawl, but 17 million calls per second is actually quite decent, at least for a large portion of applications. [Random thoughts]

After a really long hiatus I have been picking up on Aspects again. I came across some stuff written by Rickard which really tweaked my curiousity. I last looked at AOD about 3-4 years ago when AspectJ was pretty new, now it's part of the Eclipse project and aspects seem to have become a credible solution to some real OOD problems. That's cool, they always appealed to me. I like the look of Dynaop myself.

I just caught the end of an episode of Captain Scarlett. Colonel White is reading Scarlett the riot act about something gagging him and putting him in a broom cupboard or some such. He sums up with:

"I hearby sentence you to death. However since you're indestructible there'd be little point putting you in front of a firing squad. Dismissed."

Does anyone have a recommendation for where I can get a copy of Murray Rothbards: Man, Economy, and State in London? Ordering it from Amazon.com at $35.00+shipping isn't attractive.

Source control, change tracking, and regular builds. Michael Ivey writes that if you don't yet use source control, change tracking, and regular builds in your process, you should implement them today. [java.net java.net Daily Update]

Sound advice.

Documentation & knowledge. A oft repeated question / assertion in KM is the link between explicit documentation and knowledge. The point I'm trying to make, is documentation alone does not = knowledge. To retain knowledge against attrition you have to have a community... [Knowledge-at-work]

I have formed the view that it is intrinsic to knowledge that it be actionable. By this I do not mean that it necessarily provokes action, but that it enables it. From this viewpoint the question is documentation knowledge? doesn't matter very much. Any particular document may, or may not, be knowledge; to different people, and at different times. Everything depends upon the context.

Lurking - Ton on Lurking and Weak Ties and their value in networks. Ton has a superb article on the value of lurkers and their weak ties and their power to help networks... [Robert Paterson's Weblog]

Interesting notes about lurkers and their significance. Inside companies I think there are, typically, less forums to lurk in. Developing a weblogging culture will help to promote the lurking within. Ton has also prompted me to wonder about whether there should be tools for lurkers. If we see lurking as a useful complement to participation, what can we do to facilitate it?

Ted Nelsons transclusion publishing concept.

Just musing out loud...

The HTTP protocol specifies headers which clients can supply in a request to control what a server can return to them. One in particular is the accept header. Which looks something like:

accept:text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1

• <rights apply="*" scope="http://matt.blogs.it/*" grant="read" copyright="Copyright 2004 Matt Mower"/>
• <rights apply="text/xml,application/xml" scope="http://matt.blogs.it/*" grant="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nd-nc/1.0/"/>
• <rights apply="image/gif,image/jpeg" scope="http://matt.blogs.it/images/*" grant="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/"/>

I'm not sure whether this is something that should be embedded in an RSS feed or referenced from another location (since it is potentially applicable to the blog as well). Other questions are:

1. Should it be extended to handle specific identifiable resources?
2. To whom are these rights granted?
3. Do we have the right set of rights to be granted? (cf my use of read above.)
4. Is the creative commons URL per scheme approach the right one?
5. Can we come up with a similar scheme for copyright & public domain?

It occurs to me that it might be possible to link a scheme like this to FOAF and use a service like PeopleAggregator to create the publishing/sharing relationships. This moves much closer to Ted Nelsons Transclusion publishing concept.

I have received a couple of comments to my earlier piece about licensing & RSS. Among others Phil Ringnalda pointed me at the Creative Commons RSS Module authored by Dave Winer in Dec 2002.

The CC module is pretty much the same solution as I was proposing in that it seems to be a start in the right direction. However neither it, nor my own suggestion, answer all the questions in a way I can appreciate (e.g. as Phil points out, what is covered by the license: text only? images? etc...), so i'm going to keep chipping at this.

A commentor, Lorenzo, has suggested that

Copyright is a "state" and licensing is an "action" made possible by the state.

It seems to me that a Copyright statement reserves all rights relating to making copies (& derivative works) to the author who can then make exceptions on a case-by-case basis. As in the case where an author grants their publisher the right to make copies for sale.

Hence an RSS feed with a copyright notice shouldn't be read (copied) unless you consider the act of offering feed to be an implicit agreement by the author to do so. Of course from a software perspective implicit rights can be problematic, especially when they are not immutable or well understood. For an RSS feed with a copyright statement what rights are actually on offer? People commonly republish content from posts they have aggregated either whole or in part. How do they know they have the right to do so?

Then you have some interesting anomalies when software gets in the way. For example, my weblog has a Creative Commons license, yet my feed is Copyright. I guess Radio is automatically adding the copyright notice, I don't know how to make it stop. What am I telling you?

Alternatively, and I guess this may be common, Phil Ringnalda's blog doesn't have any kind of license at all, neither does his feed. Can I assume Phil intends all his material to be public domain? If i'm not clear that this is the intension how can my software be?

Creative Commons offer a range of licenses which offer the right to copy, or make derivative works, with certain restrictions such as share alike and non commercial use only. Primarily Public Domain takes this a step further in granting unlimited rights with exceptions being, if you'll excuse the pun, the exception.

Maybe it's my developer "tunnel vision" at work but this looks very similar to the common model of permissions adopted in software everywhere:

• include * except A, B, C,...
• exclude * except R, S, T,...

For most personal news aggregators I guess none of this matters much. If someone publishes a feed, and you're just reading it, then whats the harm? Unless of course you weren't supposed to have the URL to the feed. But that's a different issue.

However for aggregators like K-Collector and users who are reposting content it's a different matter. For example K-Collector doesn't mess with the content of posts, but it does republish them in a new context. If K-Collector has a better Google page rank than the author then we even begin to suck traffic away from them based upon their own material!

(To be clear I am only talking about the public K-Collector portal W4. This is an untypical use of K-Collector which is designed for use within organisations. But the point still stands. And what about Feedster?)

As ambitious, semi-automated, software like K-Collector become more common then a reasonable, dependable, system of rights is going to be required. To my way of thinking the Creative Commons RSS Module, whilst a start in the right direction, addresses a necessary, but not sufficient, subset of the goals. What do we do to take it further?

Just a couple of follow-on thoughts...

1. If a feed is copyright, does that mean an aggregator should not collect it? Is this reproducing the work? (How is it different, for example, from downloading pirated software?)
2. What does it say when an author asserts copyright of material, but publishes it in an RSS feed? The Creative Commons licenses grant rights to the recipient. Copyright (AFAIK) does not.
3. Does it matter what type of aggregator it is? For example K-Collector aggregates in a different way (and for a different purpose) to, for example, Radio Userland or NetNewsWire.
4. If it aggregates a feed, should it prevent you from re-posting aggregated content? In Radio this is very easy, I can click a button on a post in the aggregator to use it as the basis for a post to my own weblog. If an item is copyright should it stop me doing that?

I think this draws us awfully close to the kinds of things Ted Nelson was thinking about when he outlined his vision for transclusion based publishing. I can almost envisage a system where, when I press the post button on a copyright item, my aggregator goes off to check with the original authors system for permission to publish. You could imagine using the data from a social network to decide who can republish your content with your permission.

I have been encouraged to think about how copyright content works with RSS. For example I publish my weblog under a Creative Commons license however you couldn't tell that from my RSS feed. Does that mean that my feed is not under a CC license? I don't, but I guess that it's confusing at best. What should an application reading my feed and not my blog do? What rules should it apply?

I didn't find any solutions to this question searching Google just now so I've started thinking of one myself. Obviously if anyone knows of solution already in use I'd be grateful to hear about it.

My first attempt at a solution is to propose a simple new RSS 2.0 extension for Licensing. This extension would add just one new element <license> which can be applied at both <channel> and <item> level.

Using such a mechanism a license can be applied to the feed and overriden for specific items if required (although this would require more control in the editing environment). For example one might apply a Primarily Public Domain license to their feed, but override this on a specific item for which they wished to retain the copyright.

The next question is what the content of such an element should be. Creative commons licenses have a useful URL which it would be helpful to include. Other (or future) types of license may also have a similar arrangement. Copyright notices on the other hand do not generally have an addressable resource. Therefore I propose the use of an optional src attribute which can point at any addressable resource related to the license.

Since copyright is (as far as I understand it) a binary concept I propose another attribute, copyright which has a default value of true. To remove the copyright the attribute should be specified with a value of false.

The content of the element then can be an arbitrary string. A copyright notice in the case of a copyright work, or some other useful descriptive string.

Some examples:

• <license>Copyright (c) 2004 Matt Mower</license>
• <license copyright="false" src="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0">Creative Commons - By Attribution, Non-Commerical, No Derivative works</license>

Any takers?

Hmmm.... for some reason, lately, my PC has been messing with my keyboard layout. One moment Shift+2 gives me a " and the next I am getting a @. It's quite odd and I cannot fathom why it is happening. Anyone have any ideas?

basecamp.com.

Basecamp launches. definitely worth taking a look at this project management app [anil dash's daily links]

Jason Fried (Mr. 37Signals - the creators of basecamp.com) sent me a link to it today. It looks coolio.

[Marc's Voice]

This one looks interesting...

Projection. I'm preparing my talk for EclipseCon and I notice yesterday's talk was by Michael Tiemann from Red Hat. I personally love the book he was citing (see my books page). While I recognise the need to make allowances for the audience he was speaking to, the report in eWeek (which I've verified with some delegates) suggests he went beyond the bounds of decency as he expounded his hatred of the Java environment and encouraged the Eclipse faithful to bring down Java from the inside.

Reading Tiemann's comments I wonder what:

"In my travels I have found the Java community to be marginalized by the Java apartheid —meaning if you are programming in Java you have to shun all other communities."

I lost my copy.  I love the Internet:  Hagakure (PDF). [John Robb's Weblog]

I've been meaning to read this ever since seeing the excellent Ghost Dog. Thanks John.