Portent

I do wonder why Google bothered capturing WiFi data when it recorded Streetview. Wigle has over 24 million networks most in the US and UK/Europe.

In my area there’s at least 100 recorded though interestingly they all seem to be along main roads and not side streets so my network isn’t included. There’s some interesting stats on the site as well and it shows that encryption has doubled from 30% to over 60% in the last eight years.

You can browse maps or sign up (it’s free) and search. Or in my case just switch WiFi on my iPhone as I’m working about!

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I think you can say that this website is unique. Us Brits (a technicality there which I'll come back to) are singlehandedly blamed for most of the world's woes. Therefore this website, owned by the unknown Carrie Carnegie is either a very good windup or as we Brits would say "Stark Raving Bonkers!". She would like us to cough up (ahem) £31,000,000,000,000. Now as there are roughly 60,000,000 of us in the UK, that is by my reckoning half a million each. Will you take used £5 notes Carrie?

British is a strange term anyway. Never mind modern day politics where the Union of Great Britain is 300+ years old and showing signs of creaking if not falling apart, for most of the period that this website cites, it was the English not the British invading etc. Also we haven't had one continuous monarchy- it was made up of various different families and at one time, no monarchy but a Lord Protector – Oliver Cromwell.

Apologising for the past is a somewhat pointless gesture that is more about gesture politics than anything really solid. (Except say for compensating people who are still alive for misdeeds done to them but that is different). But good windup all the same. Now which nation should Carrie pick on next?

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Peer to Peer (P2P) technology is what drives the internet. There are many who say that downloading is evil and theft and in some cases it is true, but not only does it have many legitimate uses (e.g. Linux Distributions- distros are often provided in this way) because by its very nature, it takes a significant load off servers, but the Jury is out as to whether it deprives producers of money (from not selling their content) or helps them sell more because it makes it easier for people to try it out.

It’s said that between 1/3rd and 2/3rds of all internet traffic is P2P, specifically BitTorrent. Some people find it a bit hard to use and to provide download information you have to create a torrent seed. There has been a bit of a campaign by organisations like the MPAA against sites which host seeds. They won’t I imagine like Tribler!

Tribler is a software package fom Harvard University’s school of Engineering and Applied Sciences that simplifies using Bittorrent and lets you find other Tribler users without having a central server. The name Tribler (according to Wikipedia) stems from the word Tribe, refering to the usage of social networks in this P2P client.

Tribler’s purpose is a step in bringing internet TV closer to being an everyday occurrence, not only making it easier to find content but also quicker to download.  There are versions for Windows, Linux and Mac.

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I was impressed with this- not least because if you enter my name in David Bolton, my website comes first!.

No, it’s a visual search engine, not visual as in searching for images but it displays the pages so you can easily flick through them by using the slider bar at the bottom and they pan from side to side. Very Impressive.

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i’m not sure how long this will last as it lets you search Google without returning other Google site results. Ie nothing back fron knol (the Google answer to Wikipedia), Blogger or Youtube.

It looks like Google and has Google in bold. it’s hard not to imagine Google’s lawyers sharpening their pens over this: copyright or maybe trademark infringement? Perhaps they should consider it in the spirit it is intended- that results from some Google site pollute search results. Hmm Look! A pig flying past…

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Along with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and a few others there is now Chrome; an open source web browser project that aims to reinvent a leaner, meaner browser that is more robust and faster than other browsers. It’s a quick download and has worked flawlessly on all websites I’ve tried so far.

It’s multi-tabbed and all tabs run as separate processes so if one crashes, it only kills that tab not the browser. Memory management is also better; Firefox as much as I loved it has a bit of a problem in that area. What Firefox still have over Chrome is the add-ins, though with a plug-in architecture, it’s only a matter of time before we see lots of add-ins. I’m very impressed with Chrome.

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This is an excellent (free with optional subscription) file synchronisation service. After signing up, you download a setup exe (one for each of Windows, Linux and Mac) and create a folder or use the default one. The free subscription gives you 2GB of storage.

You can then allow others to access your shared folder by inviting them (by email). I installed the free Dropbox App on my Mac, PC and iPhone and took a photo of the Mac screen from the iPhone (which to be fair was on Wifi) and the photo appeared within a couple of seconds in the shared folder accessible from the Mac and PC. It’s very slick and worked flawlessly. I set up a shared folder with an artist friend and moving the graphics between us was very fast. Moving files between computers has never been easier. Recommended.

Link (Link contains Referrer code – if you sign up with it, we both get a little extra storage free).

It’s not unknown for people to put their name into Google and to search on it; nothing like vanity and a touch of narcism. This isn’t the first site to do it, googlism has been around for donkeys years.

This though, originally was an art project and has become a website. It generates a sort of digital DNA of your profile on the web, but unlike real DNA of course can alter. It’s quite colourful and could I’m sure be expanded further. I’d love to see category links so I can find out what the illegal links are!

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This post is for wannabe website creators. Creating static html websites is pretty old hat. You could do that in the 90s with people like AngelFire etc.

Now though it’s all about dynamic websites, where the stuff your browser receives (html, css and JavaScript) is generated on the fly. There’s no FTP needed, this does everything in the browser. From a technical perspective this uses JavaScript on the server side which is somewhat unusual; normally JavaScript code runs in the browser, classic examples being Google Maps, Gmail etc.

So if you’re wanting to dip a toe or completely immerse, give it a try. A British firm as well.

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Imgfave is a free service (registration required) that lets you save a copy of any image you find on the web so you can get it later. Technicall it’s an image bookmarking service.

To make it easy to use they provide a bookmarklet, a small piece of JavaScript that you save on a toolbar. On a page with an image just click the bookmarklet and drag the image and it will be saved. Quite a neat idea although it possibly breaks copyright…

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This is my mini city- not much to look at, but the more visitors it gets the higher the population becomes and then I can add industry, set up proper transport infrastructure, security, business and the environment. I’m not sure if they have to be unique visitors but would guess so or else repeat visits would clock up the numbers.

For once the link goes to my city called Portent999 rather than the site itself but you can set up your own free city and invite visitors. It’s a neat idea so long as people visit so come on everybody- turn my humble patch into a sprawling (but green!) metropolis…

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Not so long ago, several key cables were accidentally cut and India/Asia lost a lot of connectivity. This picture lets you see why. Ok, so i like this kind of stuff; infrastructure etc! Doesn’t make me a bad guy!

Click the link (or the picture above) and it will take you to the Guardians website and the full size image.

Link to picture on Guardian website

One of the big sites of 2007, Joost (pronounced “Juiced”) uses peer to peer technology (like Napster, BitTorrent etc) to stream video content just like a TV station to your PC. Not the kind of thing you can run at work!

This isn’t just another take on Youtube but with licensed content from the likes of Viacom (including MTV Networks, BET Networks and Paramount Pictures) and others there are currently 15,000 shows on there.

I find it slightly awesome and a little depressing that just as there are so many websites in existence that I will never ever see more than a tiny fraction of them. Likewise there are so many TV shows on Joost and videos on Youtube. No person will ever be able to say they’ve seen everything!

Joost lets you mix and match content so as to create your own channel and you can even blog (it includes support for main blog software) while watching content. Ummm, maybe…

It’s a clever idea using P2P to share content. Course that means your internet connection may get used a bit so just hope your ISP’s unlimited traffic limit is really that! Plus it’s another legitimate use of P2P so calls to ban that technology have less chance of ever succeeding.
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Newsmap is a news headline aggregator written in Flash. It’s pretty slick and shows headlines according to how popular the story is- judged by how many sources carry it. You can display them in a square look ( as shown) or an almost bookshelf type look.

Particularly clever is the way you can filter by major countries. If you click on a section, it shows you how many sites have this story and you can click through to one- though I’m not sure how it chooses.

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In the past Internet Explorer was very non standard and was very easy to subvert so that trojans etc could be downloaded and your PC filled with nasties. This poster promotes Firefox by showing a screen of IE full of toolbars and LavaSoft's Ad Aware having found 152,000 nasties!

To be fair to Microsoft they have improved it but IE is still not as standards compliant as it could be.  

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