The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia is announcing a new version at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle today, and the big news is that the whole thing is being rewritten from the ground up. M2, as it's being called, will include all of the features of the current Ma.gnolia, but it's going to be entirely Open Source. A first look at M2 should be available by September.

So, why Open Source, and what does it mean to Ma.gnolia users? Well, you'll be able to download Ma.gnolia and run your own version of it, and that version will be able to interoperate with Ma.gnolia.com and other web services. Standards like OpenID and OAuth will be supported, allowing for maximum portability of your data -- which, in the case of Ma.gnolia, mostly means your bookmarks and tags --- between sites. If you're already thinking of creative uses for an Open Source Ma.gnolia, good! They're looking to make user feedback a big part of building M2, so keep an eye on their blog if you've got input.

Ma.gnolia to go Open Source

About six months ago, I was invited by the North American Serials Interest Group NASIG to keynote their annual conference. After admitting that I didn t know what serials were think periodicals, journals and other similar things , I realized that this was a perfect opportunity to address a unique group, so I jumped at the opportunity. Serials librarians, and publishers of serialized works, have been at the forefront of understanding the relationship between physical objects, digital objects and how the two relate to each other. The music industry, as we know, tried to fight the conversion to digital of the physical objects with which they had traditionally made their money . As soon as Internet search engines appeared, and I suspect as soon as Google started indexing PDFs, the serials world realized that digitization of their content made it simultaneously more visible since now the most obscure journal could now be found and cited and possibly less valuable since it could not be copied easily . Moreover, libraries quickly realized that online access changed their understanding of what it means to the products of their subscriptions. Most people no longer look at the physical journal in the library, which the library clearly owns outright, but look at articles through online services. The questions then become: how is that paid for? What is owned? What happens to the owned content when publication goes out of business?

These are profound questions at the core of nearly all modern digital products, and instead of hiding from the problem, the serials world has quietly and methodically tried to articulate the questions and negotiate answers. Publishers, libraries and information brokers all participate in the NASIG conferences and discussions, and they've collectively come up with a range of fascinating solutions ranging from license models to technologies that preserve access to owned resources when the original provider disappears. In short, they've spent years trying to answer questions that are only starting to occur to folks in other disciplines.

My presentation, called Information Shadows: How ubiquitous computing serializes everyday things (1.2MB PDF) is my attempt at showing how ubiquitous computing technology is, in essence, turning whole classes of everyday objects into serials, or services, by creating pervasive digital access to the objects' metainformation, their information shadows. In the process, I talk about blenders, timeshares, Cuddle Chimps, City Carshare, and Exactitudes. I think it's a fun talk, and I'm really happy to have had the opportunity to articulate these ideas in this forum.

How ubiquitous computing serializes everyday things

They are accused of stealing more than 40m credit and debit card numbers before selling the information.

They allegedly hacked into shop and bank computer systems using a technique known as "wardriving" and installed software to access the data.

Prosecutors said the alleged fraud was an "international conspiracy".

'Increasing vulnerability'

Three of those charged are US citizens. The others come from Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus and China.

The 11 suspects are alleged to have illegally obtained card numbers, account information and password details by driving around neighbourhoods and hacking into wireless equipment.

They are said to have then concealed the information in computer servers both in the US and Europe.

US cracks 'biggest ID fraud case'

Crashing right after launch is, apparently, a startup rite of passage. If, however, you ve touted your new search engine as a Google killer, you might want to make sure crashes can t happen. Google never goes down, and quite simply, can t be killed with overloaded servers.

After Powerset s sudden sale to Microsoft, the blogosphere needed a new contender. A former Google search architect and her Stanford professor husband, along with other former Googlers operating under the protective wing of the anti-noncompete laws of California a law, ironically, Google likes to leverage when it can , thought for sure they could provide that new challenger.

And then all went blank at Cuil cool , which was touted to have thrice the index of Google, scanning 121 billion web pages. Servers today couldn t keep up with demand, illustrating what Powerset foresaw as their biggest hurdle: scalability. Microsoft provided that, along with enough cash to see it through. Even if you could get a query to return something today, though, reviews of the results have been mixed.

The results are supposed to be an alternative to Google s ranking system, which is often criticized for being more of a popularity contest among a myriad other criticisms in the search results. Hence all the Wikipedia and YouTube returns.

Cuil is said to operate differently from Google s distributed server, load-balancing concept—which incidently handles about a trillion URLs several times daily and manages to stay online—and has its servers divided according to category. If one searches for a sports-related query, for example, there are designated sports servers to handle that. One issue, as we re seeing today: If a spike in sports queries knocks the sports servers offline, other non-specialized servers specializing in, say, cooking, will handle the results instead.

In that event, you get either no results or bad ones, which is likely the cause of all the subsequent, to put it lightly, disappointment following initial launch hype. I thought an ego-search would be sufficiently simple for it—there couldn t be that many sources to pull from. After a few minutes, Cuil did bring back several instances where my articles have appeared on TechMeme, and once from the New York Times Blogrunner. A few images accompany the results, none of which are of me, one of which appears to be a female.

There s an interesting Explore by Category section currently more than a few minutes later unclickable to see where they lead, categorizing me, interestingly, under Critics of Scientology, Investigative Journalists, American Bloggers, Scottish Premiere League Players, Villages in Illinois, and Black and White Films.

Cuil Crashes And Burns At Launch

Forrester Research has unleashed a bit of ire from Microsoft Nasdaq: MSFT Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. Latest News about Microsoft with an analyst report suggesting large corporations might do well to sit out the Vista era of Windows.

Analyst Thomas Mendel s July 23 report on enterprise Rackspace now offers green hosting solutions at the same cost without sacrificing performance. Make the eco-friendly choice. trends contained a brief mention of Vista, comparing it to New Coke -- Coca-Cola s NYSE: KO Latest News about Coca-Cola disastrous reformulation of its NAMEsake product in 1985. Public outcry forced the company to backtrack and reintroduce the old drink.

Here s a tip, Mendel wrote. Consider following the lead of Microsoft s most important partner Intel and re-evaluating the case for Vista.

Only 8.8 percent of enterprise computers were running Vista as of June, up from 6.2 percent in January, according to the report. XP was the most prevalent OS, running on 87.1 percent of the 50,000 desktops included in the survey.

If it aint broke dont fix it, or atleast dont replace it with just more issues....

MS Blasts Forrester's Sensational Anti-Vista Report

About a week ago, Phil T. & I finished and released our first video! Its called Citizen Engineer. We finally fixed a lingering audio codec problem and so I invite you to watch it.

Citizen Engineer is an online video series about OPEN source hardware,
electronics, art and hacking by Limor Ladyada Fried of Adafruit
Industries & Phillip pt Torrone of MAKE magazine. The first video
debuts at “The Last HOPE” conference in New York City.

Volume 01 - Phones: SIM card & payphone hacking
Learn how a SIM card works the small card inside GSM cell phones
make a SIM card reader, view deleted messages, phone book entries and
clone/crack a SIM card.

Modify a “retired” payphone so it can be used as a home telephone and
for VoIP Skype . Then learn how to modify the hacked payphone so it
accepts quarters - and lastly, use a Redbox to make “free phone” calls
from the modified coin-accepting payphone.

Basically its me messing around with electronics. I liked making these videos because I got to play around more than I normally do. Not having to design a ‘payphone kit’ means more time spent learning all about payphones. I’m already planning the next video :

Good video! Check it out...

Citizen Engineer Vol. 1 : Phones... SIM card & payphone hacking

Apparently alarmed about the ongoing decline in their page views and associated ad revenue, the folks at Tom’s Hardware posted an inflammatory article about The SSD Power Consumption Hoax several days ago. It got picked up just about everywhere in the technosphere; one of the latecomers was good old Robin Harris, who immediately used its faulty conclusions to repeat his and his clients’ related message in Notebooks SSDs are dead.

So lets see, when did "the folks at Tom’s Hardware" become experts at everything?

Read on....

Modern Jackass: SSD Power Consumption (SSD is Dead???)

If you had to choose, would you rather Twitter get its act together on uptime issues, or mediate all the disputes that arise between members of the community at large?

Based on the buzz in the blogosphere the last several days, I’m getting some severely mixed signals. On the one hand, you have folks saying that all their new venture capital should be devoted purely to making themselves stable. On the other hand, you have this whole cadre of folks that have cropped up in the last several hours behind the banner of Ariel Waldman essentially saying that Twitter should focus on community building and legalese.

In case you’ve missed the tempest in the teacup, the latest uproar over Twitter has surprisingly very little to do with uptime, and everything to do with the use of a number of four-letter words in connection to a blogger. Ariel Waldman, who’s resume includes workplaces like Suicide Girls, Engadget, Pownce and AdRants, has had something of a problem with a fellow Twitterer engaging in abusive behavior over Twitter:

“In June 2007, I unfortunately found myself on the receiving end of multiple accounts of harassment from a user on Twitter. When the user started using my full name in their harassing tweets, I reported the harassment as a form of cyberbullying to Twitter’s community manager.

Ariel Waldman’s War on Twitter...

If you had to choose, would you rather Twitter get its act together on uptime issues, or mediate all the disputes that arise between members of the community at large?

Based on the buzz in the blogosphere the last several days, I’m getting some severely mixed signals. On the one hand, you have folks saying that all their new venture capital should be devoted purely to making themselves stable. On the other hand, you have this whole cadre of folks that have cropped up in the last several hours behind the banner of Ariel Waldman essentially saying that Twitter should focus on community building and legalese.

In case you’ve missed the tempest in the teacup, the latest uproar over Twitter has surprisingly very little to do with uptime, and everything to do with the use of a number of four-letter words in connection to a blogger. Ariel Waldman, who’s resume includes workplaces like Suicide Girls, Engadget, Pownce and AdRants, has had something of a problem with a fellow Twitterer engaging in abusive behavior over Twitter:

“In June 2007, I unfortunately found myself on the receiving end of multiple accounts of harassment from a user on Twitter. When the user started using my full name in their harassing tweets, I reported the harassment as a form of cyberbullying to Twitter’s community manager.

Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog

Dash, which makes the very cool Dash Express GPS gizmo for cars review , has opened up an API so developers can build new apps for the unit. On announcement, according to a company press release, several apps will be available: a homes-for-sale app from Coldwell Banker, a calendar app that can read appointments from Outlook, Google and automatically route you to them, a weather app from WeatherBug, a speed trap app from Trapster, and Mediaguide, which can display the songs that just played on local radio stations.

I want the Trapster app. Not only is this the most useful of the apps, I believe, it s also the one that leverages the Dash s two-way capability the best: You can add to the Trapster database when you drive through a speed trap yourself. There may even be a button that says, Yo, I am getting pulled over right now. I haven t tried the service yet; I don t know.

Even cooler would be: Let me connect my Valentine One to the Dash device to update the database automatically.

The Dash API program faces two small problems, though: First, there s the chicken-and-egg issue for a non-market-leading platform. Dash is hardly the best-selling GPS product, even if it is the coolest. Developer interest will wane unless consumers start to get behind this product.

Second: Safety. I don t know how Dash is going to ensure that developers don t build distracting or confusing apps that get their users into trouble when they re driving. Building for the 60-m.p.h. user interface is not something many developers have experience with. Hopefully this will be addressed is Dash s presentation at the Where 2.0 conference Wednesday morning.

Current Dash Express users can go to the MyDash site for apps.

Does TomTom or any other NAV. system have an open API?

Dash Navigator gets open API?