What's the best platform for building a public personal profile page?

It should collect all my posts and all my comments from all the networks and forums I'm on. It should show my status on the stats systems like Peerindex, Klout, Backtype, EmpireAvenue.

It should have basic personal detail and links to my profiles all over the web (the YASN-Roll).
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It should show my location and presence from things like Latitude, Foursquare, Skype and so on.

And finally it should have some basic skinning and customisation so I can make it my own.

This is all aimed at being a page that represents me on the web for other people to find, read and add comments to.

Now clearly, Ecademy is an option as we've already got a lot of this, but what about elsewhere? Friendfeed? About.me? Flavours.me? Google Profile? And what about the walled gardens like Facebook that don't allow their content to be exported. Even building a custom site using wordpress or such like with loads of plugins is a major undertaking and can't do a lot of this. Things like Friendfeed are pretty good at aggregating the content but haven't caught up with new services like Peerindex. And location is still a complete mess with precious little export of information.

I've asked this question on Quora, Buzz, Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook. We'll see if it gets any answers anywhere. Feel free to answer there as well! [from: JB Ecademy]

I got taken in by a religious troll asking "Do you think it's possible that the Earth could only be 6,000 years old?" on Buzz. But I did spend a little while writing some rejoinders that I rather like. It was this comment that kicked off my comment storm.

Jay Lauser - It is very possible. There is no consensus among scientists about it because the answer is not experimental science at all, but a historical belief. The Bible clearly states that it is about 6000 years old, and since God is the only person who has been here as a witness the whole time and can tell us, it is foolhardy to doubt it. The science we do see today also leads us to that conclusion.

Julian Bond - @Jay Lauser assuming your answer isn't sarcasm, you appear to believe that the scientific method doesn't work. So no SUV, computer, TV or antibiotics for you then. In fact since your beliefs apparently preclude computers among other things, I must be dreaming when I see your comment in Buzz.

My imaginary friend was lonely so she thought she'd create something. The problem was that she was everywhere, everywhen and everyhow. So first she cleared a space in herself so there was a space where she wasn't. Then she dropped a tiny piece of herself into the space complete with a whole set of physical rules. It took several attempts to get the rules just right so that the system would evolve in an interesting way. 13.75 billion years later she was delighted when the first conscious beings started conversing with her. Some of those people were so amazed by the way the Universe looked exactly as if the voices in their heads telling them this were true, that they wrote it all down and called it the strong and weak anthropic principles. Not only did the Universe have exactly the right properties for them to appear and have these imaginary conversations, but somehow the conversations made the universe have exactly the right properties. The very fact that they existed now, created the Big Bang then. I've checked all this out on numerous occasions, and my imaginary friend thinks your imaginary friend is a retard. Unfortunately he also seems to be extremely good at indoctrinating children so I've decided to call him Pedogod.

Julian Bond - The Old Testament "Ancient of days" with his hairy beard really didn't have time in 6 days to do all the creating so he just did the broad brush stokes. Everything went fine for a couple of thousand years with just a big crystal blue screen with pinholes in it to represent the sky. But Man started testing his creation and that forced him to start filling in all the details. And it wasn't just fossils in the rock and a few moving stars. Before long Man created tools like telescopes and microscopes and now the race was on. All the way from quarks to quasars he was just managing to stay ahead of the game so that there was stuff to be discovered just before it actually was discovered. You want to know why the physicists haven't found the Higgs Boson yet? It's because God hasn't got round to that bit yet. He's too busy filling in the details of the first 10^-23 seconds of the big bang.

Julian Bond - I'm easily amused. And one of the things that amuses me is people who believe the literal truth of the Old Testament and it's god but don't apparently want to believe the literal truth of the New Testament and it's god. In the second, crazy dude wanders off into the desert and then comes back with his starvation induced revelation and tells people "You've got it all wrong. It's all a parable guys, stop trying to take it literally. Look, here's another one. It is like a grain of mustard seed..."

I particularly liked "Pedogod" ;)

Chocolate Cocktails - Cuatro Diablo
I've been working on the Bond chocolate cocktail. This one is named Cuatro Diablo because it involves the 4 Mexican devils. Tequila, Chocolate, Coffee and Chili. Ingredients:-
- Boston Cocktail shaker
- 2 Expresso cups
- 40ml Expresso
- 30ml (2 tablespoons) Quality hot chocolate powder/nibs with Chili. William Curley or Paul Young [1]. You could probably use Green and Blacks with some Tabasco. It's easier if your hot chocolate powder is already chili enhanced.
- 10ml Sugar syrup or Gomme
- A dash of Vanilla essence (optional)
- A medium quality white tequila. El Jimador is a good bet. Jose Cuervo or Souza is not good enough, but there's no point in going for a premium tequila.

You can probably make double the quantity in the one Boston shaker but that's it.

1) Put the cocktail glass and shaker in the freezer
2) Put an expresso cup of expresso in the freezer
3) In an expresso cup make a paste of the chocolate with just enough boiling water to melt it. Add the 10ml Gomme. Add just enough water so you end up with a little more than 40ml of liquid. If you want add a few drops of vanilla essence to the mix. Put this cup in the freezer as well.
4) Wait as long as you can stand it for the hot liquids to cool.
5)1/2 to 2/3 fill the shaker with ice rocks. Don't bother with crushed ice as the cocktail will end up too watery.
6) Add 40ml tequila, 40ml expresso, 40ml chocolate mix.
7) Shake and pour into your chilled cocktail glass. If you give it a good shake, you'll end up with a thin foam top
8) Optionally dust with a little cocoa powder.
9) Enjoy!

What you're aiming for is enough sweetness and chocolateness to take the edge off the tequila, and enough aggression from the tequila and chili to make this an adult drink. It's great as an after dinner drink. The coffee and caffeine should wake everyone up and get them talking! Most of the chocolate and expresso martinis end up a bit sickly especially if you start using things like Tia Maria or Kahlua. I've seen recipes for things like Gin-Noilly Prat as the base spirit but I don't really think these work with chocolate. Vodka adds the alcohol but doesn't add anything to the taste. The recipe above of equal quantities of Tequila-Expresso-Chocolate works for me, but do experiment.

I'm still looking for a good recipe for a straight Expresso Martini. I'll let you know.

[1]Paul A Young is currently out of stock of their wonderful Aztec-Chili hot chocolate mix as their supplier has gone bust and he's searching for a machine to make the right size of granule. I dare say there's a way of making up the chocolate mix from chocolate bars and chilis (like say Valrhona) but this is going to make the whole exercise even more of a mission as you'll have to melt the chocolate in a bain marie.

Originally posted on Buzz

After SXSW, we're lead to believe that location is the next big thing. I feel like I've been waiting for somebody to do for "I'm here" what Twitter did for "My thoughts" for at least 4 years. I can't really understand why its taking so long. And why it's definitely not here yet.

Right now I'm seeing a whole series of errors being made over and over again by players in this area. Here's a short list of facepalm comments. Is it really any surprise that location hasn't taken off yet?

- Desktop browsers that don't support geolocation using the HTML5 API.
- Almost no laptops with GPS or 3G built in.
- Apps that have a mobile UI but no equivalent desktop UI.
- Apps that only work on the iPhone and not other phones that have location support.
- Launching as USA Only.
- Launching using the city paradigm and then only for a small number of cities.
- Apps that default location to off.
- Apps that pay only the most cursory attention to privacy.
- Apps where you can only pick from a fixed list of nearby locations and not add your own or adjust your position.
- Apps that only allow you to check in where you are right here, right now.
- And most of all, Apps that take too many clicks, mouse movements or whatever to check in.
- Not everyone wants to play a game. Some people just want to tell their friends and business colleagues where they are.
- Apps that have an API but no UI. Or a write API but no read API.
- Apps that have location support but have no RSS-Atom feed that contains the location data.
- A lack of integration between systems via (say) RSS/atom.

So look at the current state of play.

Firefox and Chrome support HTML5 Geolocation. Great. IE only does it with Google Gears and that's on its way out. Safari on both Windows and Mac has no support. Now laptops are portable too and plenty of people use laptops on the road. That's what they're designed for. But with half the market excluded it's understandable if annoying that way too many applications have a phone UI but no web UI. Which leads to people using the phone web site in their desktop browser if they want to play and clicking through the "unsupported OS warnings. However, geolocation by Wifi and Firefox/Chrome works pretty damn well. So why make it so hard to check in using the web UI? Buzz, Foursquare, Gowalla all fail here.

As phones now have GPS and 3G by default, pretty soon, I hope that laptops will also come with GPS and 3G. Not so long ago, laptops didn't have cameras or wifi built in but now they're both built into even the cheapest laptops.

So you gave up on trying to support a desktop browser and made the bulk of the function phone only. Then you compounded the mistake by making the system iPhone only. The iPhone is not the only smart phone on the market and it won't be in the future either.

As a Brit, apps that are launched as USA only are intensely irritating. And only slightly less irritating than Apps that only work in a small set of cities. Why? Location is inherently global. Why would anyone build a system that deliberately limited their market?

Privacy at the moment is binary, your location is either public or not at all. That's not great, but it's pretty hard to get this right and leads to unfortunate but hard to predict problems. I may try and make my home invisible to location systems but will my guests? This then leads on to the issue of how you ask if the user wants to show their location and how often. And the easy answer is to have one checkbox buried in settings that is defaulted off. Sadly that's the answer that will guarantee failure. Well done, Twitter! But equally, I don't want to have to click through "This app wants to get your location" every single time I use an App who's whole job is to get location. Well done, Apple!

When I finally get to check-in, I don't necessarily want to checkin right here, right now. As an obsessive, I may be catching up with things that I did earlier in the day. So let me say "I was there, then" as well as "I'm here, now", oh, and "I will be there, then" as well. And what exactly is where. The system may not know about the coffee shop next to Starbucks but several systems really want you to say you're in that Starbucks and won't let you add or adjust your actual position. For years, Loki only worked off broadband IP address and had a bad database of Wifi Access points but they didn't provide any way for the public to crowd source more accurate information. Checkin and position adjustment needs to be very, very low hassle or people won't do it, no matter how much you dress it up in a game.

Games are fun. But I actually just want to let my business associates know where I am and to be able to find out where they are. I don't want to be mayor of anywhere or collect points. Can we please have an adult system for location as well as the teenage one?

APIs. Remember how Twitter grew so fast because the APIs were simple and a big 3rd party developer ecosystem grew up round it? Remember how they had RSS feeds from day one? Well we have to have the same around location. There's a trivially easy tag to add to RSS/Atom in georss: and generating RSS/Atom really isn't rocket science. So why does Foursquare have private RSS only; Gowalla have no RSS; Buzz have no georss in their feeds; Buzz not read Twitter's georss to set the location of Buzz entries; Google Reader not show location of items containing georss (I think). When an App does actually have an API for setting location why do most systems that use that API not use the location features?

There's special place in fail hell here for Twitter. They introduced the location API very nearly a year ago. They defaulted off a hidden checkbox. There's no UI for location. It's only now that the UI is introduced and it's USA Only. It's only this year that the most common 3rd party twitter readers support it and then only one of them has it available in their desktop version. So doesn't Adobe Air have any location support?

The location Emperor badly needs a sharp set of clothes. It's way past time the industry got round to building him some.

ps. This was posted in the mobile version of Buzz on a windows laptop. And all because there's no location support in the desktop version of Buzz. doh!

Some years ago I wrote a brief blog about my attempts to find a rolling tobacco, broadly similar to Camel cigarrettes. Well the search continues. It's been going on for 30 years so I don't expect it to compleet any time soon, but I do feel I'm getting closer.

The USA web sites for roll your own afficionados speak very highly of Peter Stokkebye's Turkish Export. So I went on a quest to try and find a UK or European supplier. I drew a blank from the specialist UK online tobacconists. Even though some of them do carry other Stokkebye products, this was a typical response.

I have asked the UK distributor of Peter Stokkebye to consider adding this to their stock list before but they say it isn't viable. It is on the website www.tobaccoonline.co.uk but their minimum order is 4x300g plus shipping

Now 4*300g is a substantial amount of rolling tobacco. And I'd really like to try more like 30g before committing.

I have found some USA sites who will ship to the UK, but inevitably, a Denmark made product shipped to the USA and then shipped back to Europe is pretty expensive. A $25 pouch ends up being more like $100 after shipping and tax.

I feel sure that somewhere in Europe there's a specialist supplier who can help. But Google is not my friend here. As a UK-English speaker it's extraordinarily hard to do searches for retailers based in Europe. You constantly get pushed back to either spam shopping search sites or American sites.

Stokkebye is part of the Villiger Group from Switzerland. However, the Stokkebye-Villiger website seems to be based in the USA and is not answering my queries.

In response to this HellForLeather article.

I'll try not to have a moan about US-Centric thinking, but I can't help but think that electric motorcycles don't make a whole lot of sense there, while they make huge amounts of sense elsewhere. And I think at least part of this is the almost complete disapearance of the bottom end of the PTW (powered two wheel) market. Can you imagine people buying a C50-C90 cub or an Elite-125 scooter. Now go back to 1984 and Terminator. It seemed completely natural that Sarah Connor should go down to the neighbourhood store to buy some milk on a Honda Elite. That's exactly the usage pattern that makes complete sense for an electric version of the same thing. But as that store gets further and further away and is visited less often, it just becomes a damn sight easier to wheel out the SUV.

So how did PTWs stop being at least partly a utility and become exclusively a life style gadget? Maybe that's one big change that Electric could bring in turning one aspect of PTW use back into straight utility.

Now translate all this into urban and suburban living in Europe, South America, China, India with the electricity coming from wind and solar generators on the roof. The Electric PTW is now a big step up from bicycle or pedestrian leg power rather than a huge step down from a sports bike or a hog. Which perhaps explains why a search for electric bicycle on Alibaba returns 10,000 entries.

i64X.com - nLite Windows XP Install on Asus Eee PC
[from: del.icio.us]

TuneGlue° | Relationship Explorer
Another cool music mapping tool [from: del.icio.us]

Music via Google
Another nail in the coffin [from: del.icio.us]

Tonight (Friday 20 Mar) at about 5:30pm GMT we will be taking search down for 10 minutes or so. The rest of the site will be unaffected.

Overnight our upstream Internet link is undergoing maintenance between 3am and 5am GMT Sat 21 Mar. This should not affect Ecademy but there may be short periods of outage during this time. [from: JB Ecademy]

We're going to try to stream the London event tonight. The URL is here
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ecademy-tv

Video streaming by Ustream

[from: JB Ecademy]

We had an outage for about an hour this afternoon. This was caused by a small software problem on a critical server.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Apologies for the outage on the web site this morning. We had both web servers fail at about 10:50 and back up at about 11:25.

We're currently working on trying to diagnose exactly what happened and to prevent it happening again. [from: JB Ecademy]

The site maintenance over the last weekend went smoothly and I hope you're enjoying the much increased speed of the Ecademy website. We have two problems as a result.

Some people have been receiving email from the site that is dated December 2007. It seems we had a large queue of email that had been held. When that was copied across, the new email server finally delivered it. If you receive email notifications, particularly about subscription problems, that you weren't expecting then check the date. If the Sent date is very old, then simply discard it.

The main Contacts Search seems to have got out of step and some searches are not returning the data they should. This is currently being dealt with and should improve over the next day or so.

Julian Bond
CTO Ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]

We've now got Yahoo OpenID fully working to log into Ecademy.

1. Go to My Settings, Manage OpenIDs

2. Type in "yahoo.com" into the "Add a new OpenID" field and hit "Sign In"

3. After a moment and perhaps an intermediate screen, you'll be presented with a Yahoo screen asking if you want to log in to Ecademy.com. Click on the "Let Me In" button.

4. You're returned to Ecademy and your Yahoo OpenID is associated with your Ecademy account.

Now when you need to log in to Ecademy, the process is very similar.

1. Go to the login screen at Ecademy. Scroll down to the "Login with OpenID"

2. Type in Yahoo.com and click Sign in.

3. You're redirected to Yahoo asking if it's ok. Click "Let Me In"

4. You're back on the Ecademy home page and logged in. [from: JB Ecademy]

A second virus email has appeared with text about Ecademy, Subject: "ECADEMY will close work in April 2008". It appears to be from info@ecademy.com . Again it has a Yahoo Message-ID although it hasn't been anywhere near Yahoo's servers. The email has an attachment Ecademy_Instructions5164.zip which contains document.exe which may be a Trojan or Virus.

One copy we've seen was sent from a Korean home broadband PC using Outlook Express. This makes it look as though it's being sent by a botnet of infected PCs round the world.

Needless to say this is not from Ecademy, and is in no way connected with Ecademy servers, systems or people.

Ecademy never sends emails with attachments.

Ignore it. Don't open it. Delete it.

Julian Bond
Chief Technology Officer
Ecademy

---

ps. Here's the text of the email

Hello!
Dear postmaster@ecademy.com members, clients and guests of our portal,
Over the last few years our portal has helped you to organize your business, find new partners and increase sales.
However, all good things end. Many of you know that we have experienced legal problems over the last year. Our competitors from other social
networks are trying to take over our client base.
Our website has been hacked and our database was stolen. After that we were taken to court because of identity theft.
Unfortunately, legal expenses and unfavorable court verdict with following closure of our bank accounts will lead to closure of our website. All
paying members will receive refund starting from March 14th.
Please check attached file for legal information in regards to your account.

Best regards,
The Ecademy Team

Ecademy - The Social Network for Business People

Company Registration:7382702 VAT:718 0377 36
[from: JB Ecademy]

Over the last couple of days and again this evening we've had some problems with our database server.

It looks as though a request for an RSS feed was being made very frequently and this particular request was launching a database query that was inefficient and slow. The combination was overloading the database and leading to the site being extremely slow or unavailable.

This particular problem has now been dealt with and should not arise again.

Please accept our apologies for the outage.

Julian Bond
Chief Technology Officer
Ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]

There's a virus email doing the rounds that appears to be a message from Ecademy support. It's a Virus or Trojan. At least one copy that we've seen appears to have come from an ADSL broadband line in Chile. The headers are forged and made to look as though it's from a fake Yahoo email address with a fake Yahoo message ID.

Needless to say this is not from Ecademy, and is in no way connected with Ecademy servers, systems or people.

At first glance the message could be taken to be designed to be a malicious attack on Ecademy but I'm inclined to think that it's actually just an example of clever social engineering. It wouldn't surprise me if there are or will be very similar emails apparently about other social networks just as there are already about all the banks.

Ignore it. Don't open it. Delete it.

Julian Bond
Chief Technology Officer
Ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]

Some of you may have noticed that the Skype icons on Ecademy have changed and a lot of them now show a gray question mark. We made a change to the way Skype presence was displayed and these icons are now served direct by Skype's servers. This means that display of whether you're online should be more or less instant rather than delayed by an hour or not at all.

If you want your presence and status to be displayed, then you need to enable it in Skype. Within the Skype program the switch can be found in Tools, Options, Privacy, Privacy settings, and then check the box "Allow my status to be shown on the web". If you can't see the checkbox, click on "Advanced". The default is off, so if your Skype icon shows the gray question mark. you need to change it. [from: JB Ecademy]