BBPress is, quite simply, just another PHP based bulletin board (BB) system which to the layman means it is the software that runs forum websites. So in a market where BB software is two-a-penny (or cheaper, given the open source nature of most good software) what’s BBPress got that made me use it?

1. A Trusted Open Source
   It’s core development is being handled by the same loose group of folks that build WordPress, which has powered this website for the last few years.
2. Minimalist Design
   Every other BB that I looked at was full of bells, whitls, frills and flourishes that I didn’t need or want – and I certainly didn’t want the hassle of mainting or disabling such irrelevancies. BBPress eschews these in favour if a lean core, everything else (just like wordpress) can be done with plugins.
3. Extensible
   Yep, I said plugins.
4. Integrable
   I mentioned WordPress already, well, it can integrate nicely with it’s user database, so if you’ve got wordpress ID’s and roles that you already manage, they can be seamlessly used by bbpress, keeping admin to a minimum.
5. No Spam
   BBPress can be protected by Akismet, the same service that already protects this site, which has now been blissfully spam free for over a year.
6. Released
   I started using it before it’s release because I knew I had a fairly safe walled garden in which to get friendly with it. Now that version 0.72 “Bix” to give it it’s full name has been released, others with more public websites may want to have a play.

If you’re wondering what it feels and looks like, you can have a go on this site. Eventually I plan to move most discussion over to the BB side of things and leave comments open for trackbacks and pingbacks only.

Metadata Search

Google aren’t exactly clear what constitutes a ‘blog, but based on the current search results it appears to be any content that is supported by an RSS feed (or any metadata for that matter).

Whilst there is bound to be some beard stroking about what should and shouldn’t be included in the search results from this particular portal, it’s obvious that as the web continues to mature, metadata will become more common.

Google’s Blog Search is, fundamentally, a metadata search that has the benefit of being integrated with the rest of the Google empire.

With this in mind and because the underlying operators have a general applicability we must really consider the capabilities of this service in relation to the main Google search, for that is where they will end up.

New Advanced Operators

The most obvious additions to the interface therefore are three new “advanced operators” which enable specific aspects of the search to be focused on. These are:

• inBlogTitle:<keyword>
• inPostTitle:<keyword>
• inPostAuthor:<name>

So for example, to find all posts that I’ve written with “slashdot” in the title, one might use this search. Or conversely, to find blogs that mention my name, other than my own blog the negative operator works too.

Date Sensitive Search

A potentially useful addition is the ability to restrict the search to a specific range of dates – however this is only possible in the advanced interface and selecting the date range uses a pretty poor and slow selection of pull-down boxes: something which a little time and imagination will solve I hope. No advanced operators are available for setting the date range either.

The current Google advanced search only uses the generalised date criteria of “Anytime, past 3 months, past 6 months, past year”. Being able to tie document searches to a specific period is useful, and may even go some way to providing part of an eternal Domesday Book, as discussed here.

Saved Searches

The killer feature of Blog Search is the fact that search results can be output using RSS and Atom formats (in addition to the familiar web page).

This makes it possible to add google searches to any software that is capable of reading RSS. For example, using Firefox, RSS search results appear as bookmarks.

It is this feature in particular that puts Blog Search in a position to compete with existing blog discovery services such as Technorati and Blogdigger.

Summary

Blog Search is a very good indicator of future improvements to Google’s main search service, and provides some useful functions today.

Overall this (once again) reflects the standard Google operating practice of getting the barest functionality to work, scaling it, and releasing it early. Google has effectively put a big enough stake in the ground that we will surely witness the erosion of any emotional ties that users might have with existing blog discovery services.

The Opening Gambit

The article which is featured today on CNET News.com opens thus:

MONTEREY, Calif.–The advent of Firefox and other alternatives to Internet Explorer means cybercops have to learn new tricks for their investigations.

Given their heritage, describing an “advent” of Firefox or Opera is wholly misleading to readers who do not know the history of the world wide web. It makes them sound like a newcomers rather than the nth generation of browsers that have both been in constant development for over 10 years. The “new tricks” that have to be learned are nothing of the sort.

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera et al, are all examples of web browsing software, and the article’s introduction implies that Internet Explorer is a standard to which these others should conform – it is not. It uses standards (often incorrectly or half-heartedly) to provide access to the World Wide Web, just like it’s “alternatives”

Essentially (for those non technical readers) the whole article’s basis can be summed up with the following analogy: Bananas and other fruits are alternatives to Oranges, and furthermore some people are actually eating these new-fangled Bananas! What are we going to do? Everyone knows Oranges can have their pips removed using a juice extractor, but Bananas don’t have pips. Whatever you do next, don’t panic!

Describing the Problem

The reason that this is a problem for “forensic investigators” is described as follows:

Internet Explorer hides nothing from police and other investigators who examine PCs to discover which sites the user has visited. They know the location of the IE browser cache, cookie files and history, and they know how to read those files. Also, popular forensics tools can help out.

This is flawed logic. If the investigators don’t know where something is, then that does not mean it is hidden. The process of finding this information is called “forensic investigation”, not “McForensic Harvesting”.

I also note that if “popular” forensics tools can’t handle all browsers, they’re not going to be popular for very long (apart from among criminals).

Catchy Monkey

The article then goes on to identify an intricacy of IE that may be used to prove that a URL was manually entered rather than just being a link that was clicked on by the user.

This really could be used to convict someone, but it’s more likely to happen at the pivotal moment in a Hollywood blockbuster movie,where all appears lost: as the the clock ticks down the young misunderstood toothy geek who has previously appeared socially mal-adjusted removes her* glasses, shakes down her hair, somehow transforms into a beauty on the edge of adulthood, who appears on the stand as an expert witness and foils the crime syndicate.

The film closes with a ticker-tape parade.

What the article fails to point out is that IE is more full of security holes than a prison made of edam that’s fallen victim to a surprisingly large and hungry family of mice. This insecurity makes it particularly easy for evidence collected from an IE user’s machine to be brought into doubt because it is remarkably easy to show that it could quite easily have been tampered with by a third party.

So that’s plus-one point for forensic simplicity, but minus-infinity for the admissibility of evidence.

Re-title

The article was titled “Alternative browsers pose challenge for cybersleuths”, I could come up with any number of alternative titles, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

It was whilst working on an exceptionally complex piece of distributed code today, that I realised that such clues may indeed be all around us; yet without inertia, they appear random.

Clue 1: Dining Philosophers

One of the most famous examples of distributed computing logic can be found in the Dining Philosophers problem, which illustrates the need for cooperation if the issues of starvation and deadlock are to be avoided.

There are obvious parallels between the core concept and the real world, and so compelling are these parallels that it is easy to overlook that the philosophers are eating spaghetti.

Clue 2: The Spaghettified Non-conceivability Ceiling

In massively distributed computing, there are myriad global interrelationships between the complex tendrils of code & data and their mutations through time and space.

These start to feel like a spaghetti of information that cannot be held in a single brain, and the phenomenon is known as the Spaghettified Non-conceivability Ceiling (SNcC) . It is reached when a system becomes so complex that it can no longer be completely understood (and therefore developed) by a single human.

Clue 3: Physical Non-conceivability

For the last few years, scientists worldwide have been working towards Grid computing, and ultimately a Grid-of-Grids which combines all machines into a grand unified system: A system so complex that no single human can behold more than the smallest part of it.

A pure physical manifestation of the Spaghettified Non-conceivability Ceiling (SNcC).

Clue 4: da Vinci and The Second Coming?

It is common in religion to describe how a deity is at one with it’s creation, omni-present and omniscient; and, bringing this article around full circle, it was da Vinci‘s friend (and fellow Italian) Michelangelo who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where man and deity touch in the “Creation of Adam” fresco; where a small spark can be seen connecting them. Man connecting to deity through an electrified channel.

Putting the pieces together it dawned on me that the Flying Spaghetti Monster may be preparing to take physical form on Earth, manifested as The Grid of all mankind’s knowledge and computation. Present in every home, in evey office, everywhere; seeing and knowing everything, directing us, controlling us.

Are scientists building a deity?

Now that you are aware of these clues, others may reveal themselves to you; so be alert to His mysterious noodly machinations, and be sure to share any divine insight that may be bestowed upon you.

Install & Confiure

The download and install is typically trivial. This is becoming a trademark of google applications. No bloat, just function. The basic application is 900K so over broadband it’s there in seconds.

During the install I’m informed that Google Talk can notify me about new mail, and offered the chance to uninstall GMail Notifier, I do so.

Buddies, Contacts, Friends

I login, using my gmail account name, and initially my buddy list is empty so the “Add Friend” option looks like a good starting point. It crashes, and appears to restart itself automatically. Surprisingly this is the first time that any Google application (beta’s included) has crashed on me.

I try again, and this time it works. Ok, so I can add people that have gmail accounts. Who else? Nobody. There’s no integration with other IM protocols (yet).

Helloooooo?

The problem of there being no integration with existing clients is that I have nobody to talk to, so now I have to wait whilst my friends get online to use the puppy in anger.

Time passes. Happily two contacts turn up rather quickly enticed by their technical curiosity.

The chat interface is nice. What’s particularly good is the way that the windows for these two friends happily clicked together and shared the screen space, each minimising itself as I talked to the other. Innovative features such as this are going to be important in the battle for hearts and minds. I fire up a VOIP chat with one of them, but he has no microphone, so it doesn’t last long, but at least the voice connection works, and is as simple to use as starting a normal text chat.

The Competition

It seems that Google can no longer release products without being in competition:

• By entering the free VOIP market they’re in direct competition with Skype, which has a lot of good will flowing it’s way because of it’s support for Linux.
• They’re also in cometition with each of the main IM providers, because they’re providing a new IM network.
• Eventually they’ll also be in competition with the likes of Trillian and Gaim, because their single client will provide access to all the other IM networks.

A Foot in The Door

From an IM perspective Google have done what they did yesterday with the Google Desktop Search Sidebar: they’ve created an application with an API that has a lot of potential. It uses Jabber/XMPP so there is potential that it can work with any existing protocol, but right now it’s just a shell.

In summary then:

• It doesn’t innovate: in either the IM or the VOIP world,
• It has fewer features than other clients or networks that do similar things.

but

• It has millions of ready made users with gmail accounts.
• It has a surprisingly respectful user interface that is a joy to use.
• It has potential to be extended from day one (unlike AIM or YIM where the owners have fought to keep the protocols closed and proprietary.

Speculation was rife that the BBC had inserted false information into Wikipedia regarding a multi-media “entertainment mystery” surrounding the death of an imaginary pop star.

The concept of viral marketing is not new, but recently, marketing companies have been becoming more inventive in their use of the internet, leaving seeds of information in various trusted and untrusted sites in the hope that they will germinate into word-of-mouth frenzy. Wikipedia has been used several times by marketeers, and the slow burning trickle of readers can provide a valuable revenue stream, or a useful place to leave clues.

In contrast, the tide of opinion that comes with being featured on slashdot can be difficult to cope with. Failing to respond to the millions of scrutinizing eyeballs that are suddenly turned your way can result in significant brand damage and the BBC have moved quickly to deny any involvement. When the story broke, I contacted the BBC;

Could the bbc please comment regarding the apparent misuse of wikipedia to further the Jamie Kane project.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/13/bbc_punks_wikipedia_.html

As a license payer I feel obligated to ensure that this question is asked.

Rob Cooper who is the senior producer of Jamie Kane was kind enough to set the record straight when he emailed me just now:

Thanks for your feedback. There has been some confusion over this issue. Just to confirm, the BBC would never use Wikipedia as a marketing tool. The first posting was simply a case of a fan of the game getting into the spirit of alternative reality a little too much. The follow up posting was made by a fan of the game who happens to work in the BBC and was made without the knowledge of anyone in the Jamie Kane Team or BBC Marketing.

The viral marketing of Jamie Kane was certainly something the BBC desired. In a Guardian interview from June 2005, Sophie Walpole, head of interactive drama and entertainment, was quite explicit in “hoping it will go viral.”

In this case, it appears that active viral marketing wasn’t intended, but through the global reach of sites such as Slashdot and BoingBoing, it has occurred anyway, and the project has indeed received massive publiclity. The value of this publicity will take time to understand since the project’s target audience of females aged 14-18 doesn’t fit well with the demographic makeup of Slashdot readers, who tend to be male, and over 18.

AB begins by introducing his preference for simplicity, and what he calls the virtues of dumbness, he suggests that because complex things break, and simple things work, simple things are better, and highlights that his employer, Google, has the dumbest query language in the world, but because it’s simple, it works.

Anybody that’s studied the underlying scientific concepts of Information Retrieval will know that the Google search interface example is a gross simplification of what’s happening under the surface. AB has blurred the distinction between the usability of the interface and the underlying capabilities of the system for the sake of fitting his talk within the time available.

Based on the simplicity premise, the concept of a low-tech query language for web data is introduced: a language so simple that average programmers and content developers can understand and work with it; a language that doesn’t query data tables, but which queries data that’s on the web.

“To do this needs an open format for data. It has to be one grammar or the engine will have a hard time. It has to be sloppy or Average Joe won’t be able to use it.”

The most suitable target use for this query language appears to be the data aggregator; i.e. it’s not a detailed data model, it’s a a query protocol that can encapsulate diverse result sets, so it’s potentially very useful for agent-based computing, but unlikely to be “the new data model for the web” that the slashdot article portends.

Importantly, although querying web pages is what’s being discussed, the issue of the semantic web is sidestepped:

“this is not the semantic web. I don’t understand top down ontologies. The semantic problem is still yours [so] you have to figure out what [the result data] means.”

So, AB is suggesting a simple query language, not a description of how the queries should be fulfilled on the server end (which will require semantically enhanced databases in many cases) or how the results can be interpreted, which will need semantic inference, which again needs semantic markup, so RDF seems a key supporting technology.

In the questi0ns at the end, AB confirms that RDF (and by proxy the semantic web) is not what he’s talking about, suggesting that it has empirically failed his simplicity test, because people get confused about arcs, nodes, verbs and rdf grammar.

Of course, this isn’t empirical testing at all, it’s conjecture based on his admitted confusion (and a confusion I can empathise strongly with on occasion, having grappled with RDF constantly for the last few years), but just as most of us speak languages without understanding the intricacies of their grammer, so it will also be true that most of us will be able to use RDF and other semantic tools once their libraries and concepts mature.

In summary, the slashdot article hails a seminal lecture and labels the sementic web a failure. In fact, AB gave an interesting presentation about a solution to a rather specific but common problem, that appears to make the importance of the semantic web more obvious to Average Joe.

The surprising insight that I got from this experience was that, financially, Slashdot have to work harder than probably any other site to generate revenue, because their audience is the most tech. savvy and adaptive of any website, and therefore the most capable of blocking adverts.

Based on the a comparison between the stats of an average day, and yesterday, I did a few sums, and discovered (from this small empirical sub-sample) that 37% of slashdot readers use advert blocking software. The sums tell me that an average story-page on this site serves 2 adverts, but yesterday, that average had dropped to 1.25.

Advert blocking software was developed as a remedy for annoying, flashing, vibrating and misleading adverts that make web pages difficult to read, or that mislead people into clicking on them. The downside is that responsible and relevant adverts are affected too.

The costs of being the busiest technical news forum on the web can’t be small, and Slashdot have to meet these costs whilst dealing with 37% less potential for generating revenue. The long term solution may be more adverts, attempting to increase the return from those who don’t block all ads, or it may a further shift towards the subscription model.

Either way, yesterday’s increased visitor numbers here have highlighted to me that generic advert blocking software is not the panacea it appears to be. Adverts are often necessary to cover operating costs, so a blanket ban affects the good sites as well as the bad.

It would not surprise me if anti-blocking measures are developed before too long. I can forsee something, perhaps in javascript, that descrambles a page based on a key that must be retrieved from the advert, or from the advert server.

Obviously such measures would themselves result in countermeasures, so the only real solution is the responsible use of ad blocking software. Currently however, software such as AdBlock and Remove It Permanantly are not designed with this responsibility in mind.

A short term solution may be the inclusion of a “Show Ad’s” toolbar button, similar to the “Show Images” button seen in many email applications, but long term, blocking software needs to be more aware of the kind of advert that’s being displayed and make more intelligent decisions of what to remove.

Electronic paper has been on the cards for a long time, but one of the major obstacles was the requirement for a power supply, Fujitsu’s solution only requires power to change the image, so for static content, the power problem is circumvented. It’s also highly durable, and can be flexed and poked without degrading.

The obvious route to market for this particular system is therefore the advertising billboard, where the early development cost of electronic paper can be offset by the cost-saving from not printing and distributing adverts to every bus shelter and hoarding. There is potentially enough market here to warrant tooling and skilling a factory that can then improve and streamline the process enough that it’s cost will plummet and the rest of us can have dynamic wallpaper in our homes.

I wonder which room people would decorate first?