Help, looking for an XML widget for wordpress

It seems the big boys, i.e. google, facebook, who it now seems own friend feed and twitter are all changing their services and APIs. Friendfeed has stopped parsing twitter because of the API changes, it also seems to have stopped polling my delicious feed. My home grown mingle is still polling my bookmarks, blogs and pictures, but it’s lost my google reader news posts and you tube favourites some time ago; google turned them off as they sought to make Google+ a secret garden. My booklist site, living social, packed in a while ago. All in all, my efforts to collect my contributions on the internet into a single place are falling apart. …

A bad week for RSS

RSSI reckon it’s been a bad week for the open web. Google have announced they’re shit canning not just Google Reader but also CalDAV and Twitter ran one of their API Version 1.0 blackouts. Both offer alternatives; I am unsure that they are as open as their predecessors. Twitter certainly are withdrawing support for RSS, and Google have over the last 18 months been rebuilding their technology as a secret garden. …

Sea Lawyering

A couple of years ago, Simon Phipps, introduced me to the idea that any system contains its own counter system, which he describes as a game. In an article I am writing, I summarise this as,

any rule set, inspires its own games

Simon explores this in his Webmink Articles,  The Sentinel Principle and more effectively in The Open by Rule Benchmark.

He also explores the feasibility of realistically building “fair use” interpreters in an article on his Computer World blog, Fair Use Robots? Science Fiction!

In this last article he talks about “Quantifying Discretion”. The difficulty in building systems to undertake this work is based on the fact that at the edge of consideration, its exceptionally difficult, and that it may be that these decisions are not best amenable to a Wisdom of Crowds or the application of machine intelligence. They are best taken by trained and experienced and independent individuals, or Judges as we might call them, although we have usually chosen to ensure that a jury of peers is involved in our courts.

  …

Can Free Software save the public money?

Bern City Council have adopted an Open Source software procurement policy.

This reported by long time Open Source campaigner, Simon Phipps in his Computer World blog. It seems, as in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, that this decision had a champion, in this case, a Councillor called Matthias Stürmer. Phipps story details the bureaucratic politics around the trigger decision which was the Microsoft licence renewal agreements. The size of the agreement required Council approval and the Council had been moving towards preferring Open Source IT. The Council review requirement led Microsoft to reduce the cost to a value below the review threshold and the renewal was approved without the Council approval. The Council was, it seems, unamused and took action to ensure that the policy preferences of the elected council were to be obeyed in future. Phipps reports, …

And now it’s Google’s turn, this time it’s privacy

Simon Davies, who writes a Blog called the Privacy Surgeon has today commented on the EU Commission’s latest intervention against Google. His article, Europe to Google: respect our laws or face the consequences details the actions taken by the EU’s regulators, led by France which has amongst the strongest data protection and privacy laws in the EU. His article’s title sums up his views as to what is happening.

I have been meaning to write up my views that Google may have jumped the shark, but it’ll have to wait ’till another day, meanwhile, here’s another piece of evidence. …

Citizens not Suspects

I attended the Open Rights Group’s London meetup on Monday night; Rachel Robinson, Liberty’s Policy Officer was speaking at the Angel, a pub near Old St, probably the inspiration for the London monopoly board space. She spoke about planned legistation in the UK known variously as the Communications Capabilities Development Programme or the Communications Data Bill. Interesting how the British Government develop such annodyne names for their oppressive measures, the Digital Economy Act vs the US “Stop Online Piracy Act” or the “Commerce before Leisure on the Internet Act”, I made the last one up, or I think I did. …

Mobile Future, can Yahoo! really show the way?

Business Insider reports that Yahoo CEO Marisa Meyer is considering giving iphones to all Yahoo! Employees. It seems she agrees with those in the company who feel that their IT department’s commitment to Blackberry is holding them back and that their engineers would benefit from using devices that they aim to deliver services to; not Blackberrys. This was known at Sun Microsystems as “Eating our own dog food” The article finished with what I assume to be a Business Insider editorial comment,

“Yahoo should be innovating for the future, and BlackBerrys are not part of the future. They are part of the quickly fading past.”

The article also states that Meyer is not so wedded to Apple, and might consider Android. The unspoken question is whether Yahoo! is part of the quickly fading past.

On another note, I use all three devices, although the Apple device is an ipod touch and since like everyone I am unhappy with what I have, and am already looking forward to replacing both the phones. …