Polka Tables, originally uploaded by markrocky.

From our photography excursion (with Harvest Digital) on the South Bank using “Lomolitos” (mini Lomos), on Wednesday evening…

1) Open source paves the way for the odd utopian dream:

Sir Thomas More’s description of Utopia as a place where “nobody owns anything, but everyone is rich” is not a bad way to describe the open source movement in which people around the world collaborate with each other to produce services that anyone can use - or improve on - for nothing.

2) Open source is recession proof:

One of the interesting things about the collaborative movement is that it is probably recession-proof, though you won’t see it in economic statistics because it mostly does not involve cash transactions.

3) Open source is robust and well-trusted by large successful organisations:

Big corporations, such as IBM, Google and Amazon, are devourers of open source software because they find it cheap, efficient, low-maintenance and reliable. But UK government departments, including health and the foreign office, have proved risk-averse with hardly any open source in their infrastructure.

4) Open source is socialism (well, social collaboration at least):

…open source combines the cooperative spirit that was at the heart of the Labour party in the past with the entrepreneurial skills needed today.

And with nothing more to add to that summary, I’m off to join the revolution (well, okay, I’m off down the pub to carry on ranting to anyone who’s too polite to stop me).

Whatever you say about Twitter, I was enjoying the ability it gave me to receive updates via SMS. In fact, it was this feature that won me over to using it and helped demonstrate what it was all about to mates. I figured that the initial free SMS alerts that appeared in my Twitter account would run out one day and then I’d have to pay for more credits - easy business model. I’d happily have paid too. So why pull it? Maybe its all part of some ploy by Twitter to gather a crowd reaction - so that when they announce payment plans for SMS alerts, they already have the crowds’ support. Yeah - okay, that may be a tad cynical but I do hope they listen to their UK users (and, in fact, anyone who used the UK based SMS alerts). The reaction is already gathering pace - with comments and tweets a plenty - and now a Facebook group. SMS is huge here and it seems to be a glaringly obvious way to actually turn Twitter into a revenue making business, in the UK at the very least.

iR2P is an initiative that aims to connect, support and motivate individuals to further the public understanding and political support for implementation of the United Nation’s “Responsibility To Protect” (R2P) doctrine, and to promote the importance of individual responsibility in this context.

The essential principle being that an individual can make a difference - no matter how small - to any issue. The issue that we draw your attention to is genocide and crimes against humanity. The United Nations and its member states undertook a ‘responsibility to protect’ the victims of these crimes yet Darfur continues, the Burmese government continue to block aid workers, and Mugabe remains in power and able to cause suffering at will. We fear that similar atrocities will continue into the future. We also fear that the international community will not live up to its obligations.

If you share our concern, but also our optimism that governments are accountable, that we can make a difference, that individual actions matter, then join our movement, sign our pledge, unite: www.ir2p.org/pledge

We will alert you to developments in the international arena, advise you on actions that you can take, and encourage you to get involved in a range of activities. We also want to hear from you with ideas, suggestions and critiques. We are building up our own capabilities at the moment but are excited by your interest and the possibility of what we can achieve together.

And with this promise of an enhanced search presence will come the marketing need for publishers to create content that capitalises on this. Just as SEO emerged as an industry all of its own, I expect Semantic Web Optimisation to emerge as an industry all of its own in the very near future.

[Before submitting this post, I quickly searched on the topic (yes - I appreciate the irony of having used Google!) and came across this article - essentially saying the same thing as me above. But please can we not fall into the trap of applying version numbers after “Web” for every evolution in web technology that occurs!]

Scary or exciting?

Vote Ken, originally uploaded by markrocky.

I thought there was something strange about these stencils I saw this morning.

Rumour has it they are part of a campaign against Banksy’s backing of Ken. Subtle. Most people will simply think Ken has gone all street and down with the kids.

[Edit: cycled past this morning and they’ve now been boarded over]

• Dynamic webserving
• Persistent storage
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

Python is the only language supported at the moment but they say more languages will be supported in the future. With the weight of Google behind it, this service looks set to provide an excellent all-in-one route to rapid web-app development. So long as you are happy using Python and all of Google’s Web services.

• Gmail CustomTime - never miss a deadline again
• TrustBanners - incredible mind-altering online advertising.
• Google buys Facebook - a bit close to the truth?
• Microsoft finally acquires Yahoo! - even closer?
• Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin launch Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars

Yet another critical web app has a brief spell offline…

Again - while annoying - I do find a slight comfort in the fact that even the big boys have bad days.

37signals System Status, originally uploaded by markrocky.

One reason why you shouldn’t rely on all this fancy web 2.0 stuff for your business…

Although I do get a certain reassurance from seeing that even people like 37signals can have bad days (sorry 37signals)!