Blogs can do everything Facebook or Twitter can do, though they lack the centralization. You have to manually go out and visit them to see what’s new, or use RSS, which isn’t exactly intuitive to less technical users. Blogs are, in their barest form, a reverse-chronological listing of postings. Those posts can be of any length, and contain any type of information. Plain text, images, audio, video, etc.. Some platforms, like WordPress and Tumblr, even offer features to differentiate between types of posts. Photo galleries? You can even do that if you set it up right. Profiles? That’s what About pages are for.

The only thing that’s missing is a standardized federation API that broadcasts information about a blog, linking them together so you can have user-friendly news feeds like Facebook or Twitter. The API would include basic profile information, such as your name and the URL of your chosen avatar, the URL of the blog, and anything else that a social networking would need to query.

Using that information, a user could skim through their friends’ latest updates from a convenient dashboard. It would pull in information from the federation API and aggregate public posts.

WordPress.com is already doing something along these lines, only it’s internal to their hosted service. You can “follow” a WordPress.com blog, and its posts end up in a news feed of sorts. Imagine if it became a part of the open source WordPress project as well, and any WordPress blog could be followed in the same way. And if it was later opened up and inter-operated with other platforms as well. You could even follow non-personal sites such as Smashing Magazine, much like you would a “fan page” on Facebook.

Just add remote replies, so you can comment on a post without traipsing over to the other user’s site, and you’ve got a social network. You could even have mobile apps. WordPress and Blogger have had XML-RPC APIs for a long time, and the WordPress team even made an iPhone app for on-the-go posting an comment moderation. Add the aggregation into the mix, and you basically have Twitter or Tumblr, but more open.

Given the extensibility of the more popular blogging platforms, WordPress especially, it wouldn’t be out of the question to handle it as a downloadable plugin. The idea would probably gain more traction if the Automattic team was on board, though, and integrated it with WordPress.com.

Forget Google Plus or Diaspora, the future is going to be even more open.

The only reason necessary is suspicion of a “cybersecurity threat,” which is so loosely defined as to include the use of anonymization tools like Tor and VPNs, or using GPG to encrypt your emails. Perhaps even BitTorrent. Basically, anything that somebody could deem “suspicious” is enough justification for a business to monitor your internet usage and report their findings back to the Department of Homeland Security.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a frequently asked questions page about CISPA, for more in-depth information, as well as a form to contact your senators. Since the bill passed the House, it’s up to the Senate to strike it down. President Obama issued a statement of his intent to veto a bill that would “sacrifice the privacy of our citizens in the name of security,” but senatorial opposition is still needed.

CISPA stands for The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, a cybersecurity bill written by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) (H.R. 3523). The bill purports to allow companies and the federal government to share information to prevent or defend from cyberattacks. However, the bill expressly authorizes monitoring of our private communications, and is written so broadly that it allows companies to hand over large swaths of personal information to the government with no judicial oversight—effectively creating a “cybersecurity” loophole in all existing privacy laws.  Because the bill is so hotly debated now, unofficial proposed amendments are also being circulated and the actual bill language is in flux.

“Cyber” bills of any kind are pointless, even when they’re not harmful. There is no crime that can be committed using a computer that is not already sufficiently covered by existing legislature. There are no laws specifically for “ski-mask-robbery” or “battery-with-an-encyclopedia,” and neither should there be “computer-thievery” or “internet-fraud.” You don’t need “cyberbullying” laws, for example, when you already have laws against harassment, assault and battery, slander/libel, et cetera.

Of course, the real “first blogger” is hard to pin down. While it may have been Winer, Justin Hall’s Links From the Underground, which launched in 1994, is also a contender.

Meanwhile, TidBITS.com is over 21 years old. It wasn’t exactly a blog when it was started in 1990 as an “online newsletter and Web site” about the Macintosh, but it has slowly adopted that format. It’s one of the oldest still-updated websites on the internet.

As for domain names, the first one to be registered with a .com TLD was Symbolics.com, followed shortly by the other 99 oldest domains registered from 1985-1987.

The first website on the first web server ever would, of course, be info.cern.ch. The original page that was hosted there has been replaced over the years, but it’s still something of a historical landmark. Incidentally, the trend of hosting websites on a www subdomain was accidental, and caused by the CERN site.

And here’s the fun part: Bell Canada owns most of the “last-mile” copper connections in Canada, so competing ISPs that use the same lines will also be metered by Bell.

To put this in perspective, let’s take a look at just how much data 25GB is…

• Netflix streaming uses about 1GB per hour. So you could watch 25 hours (10-12 movies) in a month, assuming you did nothing else.
• A 45-minute TV show or video podcast downloaded via iTunes is about 200MB in size. So, about 125 in a month.
• A 1-3 minute video from YouTube is around 5-10MB in size, depending on the quality.
• A one-hour (standard definition) stream from Hulu is about 350MB. You could cram about 70 hours of Hulu streaming into one month, again, assuming you only did that.
• Online gaming, whether a console game or an MMORPG on your PC, uses very little data. In order to get around network latency issues (to keep the game from lagging badly) games send frequent, but very small, data packets. You probably wouldn’t use more than 50-70MB per hour of gaming, though it could vary greatly depending on the game. Also, voice chat would increase the number significantly.
• Streaming Last.fm music will use 30MB per hour using a low-quality 64kbps stream, and 60MB at 128kbps. You would eat through 25GB in 375 hours.
• iTunes AAC music downloads generally range from 70MB-200MB per album. That’s about 128 albums per month.

One can’t help but wonder if Bell Canada wishes to prevent Netflix—which just recently became available outside of the United States—from being widely adopted in Canada, so more people will continue to use their cable television service.

Further Reading

• 200GB to 25GB: Canada gets first, bitter dose of metered Internet
• Tech News Today 169: Sandybridge Over Troubled Water
• What does 5GB (Gigabytes) Get Me?
• Stop The Meter Petition

EDIT: Apparently petitions work in Canada. UBB is being rescinded or overturned by popular demand.

I think mobile applications are as much apart of the field of webmastery as web pages are. Just as a web application can serve-up an HTML frontend or an RSS feed or a JSON result set, it can also have a mobile interface in “app form.” Modern websites generally separate the content from the business logic and the presentation layer, allowing for interface-agnostic systems like Twitter. I can use most of the functions of Twitter through the main website or through HootSuite or through one of the many iPhone apps.

True, mobile apps are not hypertext, but they’re yet another facet of the internet. Let’s face it, normal web pages don’t work terribly well on pocket-sized devices. The iPhone made it tolerable to browse the web on a mobile device, but it’s still not an optimal experience. Apps are the preferred interface, whether we all like it or not.

What do you think: is mobile app development as closely linked to web development as I consider it?

Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

TechCrunch is currently pursuing means of litigation against Fusion Garage, but the project is, for all intents and purposes, dead. The intellectual property behind the device is owned jointly between the companies, and TechCrunch owns the trademark “CrunchPad” outright.

The ISPs, phone companies and cellphone carriers have been very vocal in their opposition, and have went so far as to encourage their employees to astroturf. As a result, there has been a lot of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (or FUD) spread about the issue. Some fear that the FCC wishes to impose a version of the old Fairness Doctrine on the internet, which couldn’t be further from the truth. (The regulations would prevent something like that, since they require that any and all lawful content be accessible without discrimination.)

Essentially, these are regulations to prevent regulation or ISP tampering. They’re to make sure that the ISPs stay as what they should be: indiscriminate carriers of unopened and untampered packages.

You can read more thorough explanations of what’s going on at Wired at PC Word:

• Net Neutrality FAQ: What’s in it for You
• FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules, Now the Fight Begins

Not long after the FCC made their decision, Senator John McCain (Republican, Arizona) introduced a bill to Congress known as the Internet Freedom Act. It’s purpose is to “keep the FCC from enacting rules prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Internet content and applications.” Not only that, but it will essentially prevent the FCC from regulating anything related to the internet or cellphones. This coming from someone who has admitted to not knowing how to operate a computer.

This is an important issue, to everyone. The internet is a global thing, and allowing companies to tamper with the traffic passing through it is bad for everyone, no matter what country they’re from. It must remain neutral.

I would say that you shouldn’t believe the telcos or those who support their agenda, but I prefer not to try to make peoples’ opinions up for them. So I’ll say this: Use your head. Research the issue, find out what both sides have to say. Then make up your mind for your self. Are you for openness, or for giving the telcos free reign?

“While a smartphone user downloads a fraction (typically 1/25th) of the data consumed by a laptop user, the signaling load produced by the smartphone user is much higher and in fact one third of the laptop user on average,” wrote Airvana. “In other words, while it takes 25 smart phones to equal the data throughput from one laptop, it only takes three smart phones to equal the signaling network impact of one laptop (25/3 ≈ 8x).”

The basic idea is that a cellphone does a lot of polling, making various checks and requests as long as the device is on, and most people leave their phone on pretty much all day.

Providers of cellular internet service traditionally have charged steep rates in order to have service for your laptop, and then cap your transfer at an almost unusable level. For instance, the $60/month “DataConnect” plan from AT&T “includes 5 GB of data,” meaning you will pay rather pricey overage rates if you download more than 5GB of data in a month. Unless all you do is check your email, and maybe do some light web surfing, you’re going to blow through that limit pretty quick. (And if you don’t do much more than that, it’s pretty hard to justify paying $60/month for mobile internet service for your laptop.) You’d better make sure your operating system or applications don’t run any software updates, otherwise you’re probably screwed.

Sure, data transfer doesn’t necessarily have too much to do with network congestion primarily caused by gazillions of short pings from smartphones polling for data, but that’s no excuse for such outlandish pricing schemes. If my 1Mb-per-second DSL line costs $45/month, and doesn’t have a transfer limit other than 1Mb x 60 x 60 x 24 x 30, or the amount you can grab in a month at the 1Mb/sec speed cap, why should something that does far less cost $60? For that $60 you get slower speeds, a tiny download cap, and the famous network congestion and spotty coverage that everyone’s always complaining about.

Why should you have to pay extra for so much less? As far as I’m aware, all of the wireless carriers that offer similar services charge similarly exorbitant rates. To date, I have yet to see one of them provide a satisfactory answer as to why they charge so much for practically nothing. (And then talk about throttling smartphone users who dare to use the service they paid for…) All we get are allusions to the suppositious “unique constraints” of wireless networks, and talk of how network neutrality regulations would not only be impractical, but would cripple the networks.

The CrunchPad is to be an internet tablet running a version of Linux and a Webkit-based browser, controlled by a 12-inch multi-touch display. The device is sort of a “giant iPod Touch” that boots directly into a web browser. In this age of internet connectivity and “cloud” web services, you don’t need to carry an entire computer around with you everywhere.

The CrunchPad is planned to have Wi-Fi and 3G wireless support, and was originally intended to be $200 or less when it was announced last summer (though plans for pricing may have changed). The device will be about 18mm thick, and it will have a USB port for connecting peripherals such as a physical keyboard.

Personally, I don’t think I’d have much use for this, as I have a smallish laptop and an iPod Touch, which together take care of most of my computing needs. The iPod serves the same purpose as the CrunchPad to me, but it plays music and is pocket-sized.

I can totally see this taking off, and putting down some of the netbook craze. It may have to go up against a competing product from Apple, though, if the rumors have any truth to them.

It’s the community, and their willingness to help people out without anything in return. Sure, the web has it’s fair share of trolls and greedy corporate people, but overall you can just approach someone, say a blogger, ask a question, and get a straight answer.

Having trouble getting a PHP script or CSS effect to work? Visit a coding-oriented web forum and ask for advice. One of the many people there will most likely know what’s wrong and spot that typo on line twelve that you missed despite going over the code dozens of times.

Wondering what the easiest way to make a blog mobile accessible is? Just ask a blogger who has experience in that area. If you were to email me (there’s an easy form on my contact page), I’d write back in a day or two with a few recomendations, or refer you to an existing post of mine (or some other bloggers’) with the relevant information.

Is your computer’s hard disk failing? There are plenty of people online who can advise you on how to rescue your data before it’s too late.

Where else are people so willing to help and advise others?