Any visitor to the site could select which version they wanted to receive.

Until last week, that is, when the BBC decided to start forcing it’s visitors to take the version intended for the territory from which they are visiting.

As an ex-pat living in San Francisco, California that means I am now forced to take the international front page despite being very interested in British news (I’m a British citizen, tax payer, voter and still have interests in the UK).

Those of you who know my background will also know that I spent six years working at the BBC, predominantly on the BBC News Website – in a technical and product development capacity. I’m therefore doubly interested in this change, as I still feel very proud of the work that I contributed to at what is (in my opinion) the most upstanding source of news around.

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, New Mexico (?)

The changes have angered a lot of people, as you can well imagine. Check out the comments on the BBC Editors blog post – which Steve Herrmann (Editor, BBC News Website) tries to address on another post.

The heart of the matter is that the BBC News Website is serving three distinct user stories:

• I am a UK user wanting to view British and International news
• I am an International user wanting to view world news
• I am an International user wanting to view British and International news

Sadly, the changes made no longer allow for the last use case – which is a pretty vocal set of people.

Technical challenges that have caused this change

The BBC says it’s doing this for a number of reasons. Serving video has become complicated – pages designed for a UK audience don’t play the video intended to accompany the page when viewed internationally as the BBC rarely has rights to show such video. The BBC is also now serving display and text-link ads to international users – it needs to maximize the efficiency of those ads and design pages layouts that accommodate them while at the same time running a domestic version of the site that contains no advertising whatsoever. The BBC also points out that a section listing UK News is included on the international front page – although I would counter that it is included ‘below the fold’ and doesn’t reflect the same editorial list as the Domestic Front Page.

While I understand and sympathize with the issues raised by the BBC I believe both are solvable very easily and am disappointed that this course of action has been taken.

5uP3r W1z4rd H4XoR

The great news is that due to the way the BBC News Website is built, you can still access the “UK Front Page” via a special hacked-up URL, which I have bundled into a convenient bit.ly url:

http://bit.ly/ukbbcnews

I would suggest adding that to your bookmarks or updating your default start page with this url.

UPDATE: Following on from demand, I’ve also created http://bit.ly/intbbcnews as a dedicated url to the international front page.

Below I have pasted an email I sent to Steve Herrmann, along with Nic Newman (Technology Controller, BBC Future Media: Journalism), Pete Clifton (Head of Editorial Development, Multi-Media Journalism and former Head of BBC News Website) and Richard Sambrook (Head of BBC World News):

Hi Steve,

Just wanted to drop you a line to say that I’m really disappointed with the change to the site today. As you may know I’ve been living in San Francisco since leaving the BBC, so I’m an international-based user these days

Understanding the way the site is published I completely comprehend the point on your blog post that “all the same content will be available as now so you’ll still be able to get both UK and international news wherever you are” but that’s only true in so far as the stories themselves.

The specific editors decision as to what is most current and prominent across the domestic and international newscape for a British-focused audience – ie the UKFS Front Page – is no longer available to me (well it is at http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/ukfs_news/hi/default.stm – but that’s only because I know the hidden urls of the system).

Today is a pretty international news-orientated day because of the Iranian elections, North Korea issues and Guantanamo Bay. However, I notice that a number of uk stories that appear high up in the UK homepage right now have no placing in the top 9 slots of the International Front Page at all. The “News from UK” is way down below the fold, and requires scrolling to get to – it’s nothing more than an after-thought.

I guess I’m not communicating anything new that hasn’t already been voiced by others, other than to say that I’m really really disappointed – both has a user and as a former employee. I understand the technical issues you are dealing with around serving templates built for advertising to the international audience while maintaining non-advertising templates for UK users. And I understand the video issues as well, where rights are not available.

From a product development perspective there are three user stories the BBC News Website has always served:

• I am a UK user wanting to view British and International news
• I am an International user wanting to view world news
• I am an International user wanting to view British and International news

By implementing the changes to have made today, you have effectively trashed that third use case. Or incorrectly assumed the last two are the same, which they are not. It’s very sad and disappointing.

Let me know if I can brainstorm with you guys solutions that you could implement to help you get back to offering all three use-cases. I’m guessing that no one that works on the product development for the site actually uses it outside of the country, so let me know if I can be an advocate to that.

Best wishes,
Ben

Steve wrote to thank me for the email and promised to pass it on to the product development team. I will update this page if/when I get any further replies.

Update: Or, you could just check out the amazingly hilarious yet familiar looking NewsArse instead.

Disclosures: I am a former BBC News Website employee and companies I have a financial interest in supply technology to BBC

Here’s a test query to start you off and get you in there: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+invented+the+telephone

So far I’m impressed with the Natural Language Processing of plain-text queries and the amount of factual data it has – but I’m not clear where it really adds a lot of value of my life (so far, at least).

Let me know what you think.

Seesmic for Facebook lets you keep track of your friend’s Facebook status and easily update your own. It is based on the technology behind Twhirl, our popular desktop client for twitter, seesmic and indenti.ca.

This is very much a beta release from us (for those who remember the old skool definition of beta). We wanted to get something out soon, to gauge people’s reactions and product requirements. We’re not sure (/not saying!) where this is all heading but rest assured we’ll be bolting on a lot more functionality onto the Facebook client as we further develop it and the Facebook API matures further.

You can try out Seesmic for Facebook by checking out the application on Facebook. It’s based on Adobe AIR, so you will need to have that installed already (don’t worry, it’s free and painless).

hey! 23/Female. Come chat with me on my webcam thingy here www.chatweb*********.com

(redacted by me).

A quick search on Twitter Search shows this is happening to a very large amount of people. (If you do visit the site, be aware it’s NSFW).

How is this happening?

The most likely vector of this attack is probably via one of the numerous 3rd party Twitter services that ask for your username and password in order to provide additional functionality (statistics, alerts, etc).

It’s unlikely that any reputable service would have done this intentionally, but very likely someone was able to maliciously gain access to their database and steal all of the twitter username/passwords. Because these services must authenticate with Twitter directly it’s not possible for them to store the passwords hashed.

The answer to this is oAuth, which Twitter is in the process of launching.

A most recent check of Twitter search shows that the last message was posted 2 hours ago of the time of writing, which probably means Twitter put a stop to this – presumably by blocking any posting of the specific string of text. That doesn’t mean the attackers won’t try again with a different message

My advice is:

• Change your password, especially if you have been attacked by this.
• Never use the same password you keep for Twitter anywhere else
• Limit the number of sites you put your Twitter username/password into.
• Change your password often to stop old sites you don’t use still having access to your account

I usually give Jason Calacanis a rough ride – the guy wants to be a “jock of the internet”, comes across as such and so the nerds are going to throw shit from the peanut gallery. I don’t get what why that’s really a big surprise – I just get frustrated that I just become part of the spin as I feed into it.

But on this one I actually congratulate Jason for having the courage and the integrity to make a decision based on the actual situation rather than bowing to ‘keeping a front’ that would be more media and investor friendly.

As Jason points out in his blog post, many of us with powerful technical skills and understanding have at least experimented with putting those skills to less-savory uses. We all have a past, even people like me who don’t work directly in any IT-security related areas of the industry. But from what I can tell John was employed to work in a security-orientated position and those are the very people you want to have a past in this area – so they know their field of expertise inside or out.

I’m not sure I’d hire any engineer or ops person to work in a security-related position who I knew didn’t have a history on the other side of the line. Of course, I would want to know they are done with that part of their lives.

This is true for other areas in technology: If you’re building an online music store you’d hope that your product people download a lot of music illegally using bit torrent and kazzar (so that they are totally across the other options out there). If you’re developing Windows OS for Microsoft, it would be a good idea to regularly use Apple and *nix operating systems to understand what’s out there. This is a design pattern I don’t see anywhere near enough in business, and it’s the root to a lot of failures.

Back to the Schiefer story: some folks in the media, such as Rafe Needleman on Webware, have spun up a load of FUD around whether Schiefer had access to personal information and the level of ’supervision’ he was given once Calacanis found out about his past.

What Rafe and others needs to consider is that all technical employees at a company have full and complete access to their customer’s data. In fact they have the root and master accounts, so they don’t even need to know any cracking skills to gain access. The fact Schiefer could crack doesn’t give him any greater access to this data.

Now, the argument could be raised that Schiefer’s history meant he shouldn’t be trusted. But I ask you to consider what %age of Google, Facebook or any other tech company’s engineering team is made up by people who have dabbled in illegal technical activity? The fact they may or may not have been caught shouldn’t reflect on whether you trust them more or less. The bottom line is most people are not caught. One of the biggest employers of engineers who have been caught committing cyber-related crimes are governments.

Further still, what about people with the same level of ‘master’ access at companies you patronize who have committed other crimes of moral turpitude? This even follows through not only to engineers but non-tech staff too, even as far down as call center staff.

The bottom line is that all companies need to have measures in place to protect their customer’s data inside the firewall, as well as outside. And it varies as to how good a job they do.

But to take issue like this specifically because someone had a history of cracking shows a vast naivety of the business. You want people who have this kind of history in your security team.

It seems pretty clear to me that Facebook’s business model is shifting towards one of data mining and analytics – where they are able to leverage the collective thinking of everyone contributing their ’stuff’ into the Facebook bucket.

Let’s take a quick look at the theme of Facebook’s recent announcements:

• early Feb: Terms of Service changed to give FB perpetual right to keep all data you give them (later repealed due to public outcry)
• Feb 19: Commenting on public pages with FB Connect
• Mar 4: New Publisher (twitter like) and Highlighter (ranking content) functionality,

Let’s take a quick look at what those announcements gave us:

First off was the ToS changes – which for me was a clear indicator Facebook wanted to do more with the data it holds then just display it to your friends and use it to make recommendations on other content you might be interested in. If Facebook is going to move into a data play then it needs to make sure it can retain all of that data despite what the user might want to do with their view of it. It becomes tricky to have to remove arbitrary data from the cube because a user requests it, plus it devalues your model – and why would you want your model devalued?

OK, so they backed off with those sweeping changes, but only because of the fallout it created for the company. At that point, they had still partially shown their hand.

In addition to the data Facebook keeps inside it’s database there is also the metadata that Facebook can gather about what’s going on outside it’s domain – and that’s where functionality like commenting on external pages, released at the Facebook garage come into play. Putting Javascript calls on foreign pages also allows Facebook to match up visitors with a Facebook cookie and track their usage of that site even if they never interact with any Facebook powered functionality.

Today’s announcement of the Publisher functionality built on top of rudimentary twitter-like functionality with status requests that we’d begun to see with the Facebook comment boxes used during the Presidential Inauguration and more recently the live streaming of Demo 09. Highlighter also further aids the recommendation and collaborative filtering of content by peers in order to work out what is currently most interesting and most engaged with. Facebook call the subset that you can see of your friend’s output as your “social lens”. This is true, but at the macro level of the system, Facebook ends up with a complete lens of what everyone is filtering and sorting and ranking.

So where is this all going?

Facebook is moving into a new gear, encouraging constant flow of status updates and conscious thought (publisher, status messages), creating deeper indicators of intent and interest (highlighter, like functionality, etc) and behavioral indicators (integration with location based services such as brightkite, events, etc).

What this gives Facebook is the ability to gauge what is hot, popular and current in real time. It also gives Facebook historical data to track changing interest and attention over time. There are many uses for this data – including in the financial and trading sector, brand management, competitor analysis, real time consumer attention tracking.

Twitter is also doing this, but they have one dimension of data (text). Facebook has many dimensions of data that can go into their cube, and their sample size is much higher given their 175 million users vs Twitter’s 4-6 million.

I spent a lot of time working with MySpace last year, and one of the things that impressed me the most was their ability to monetize their pages with advertisements – ones that used a combination of technology (for user targeting) and business development (for high-yielding ‘take over pages’, sponsorships, promo tie ins, etc). They’re probably the best in the business at it.

However advertising on it’s own is a Web2.0 business model, and while I don’t want to go so far as to say data mining is going to be the Web3.0 business model, I do think we’re going to see a greater use of it moving forward – with industries who can benefit from it becoming a lot more receptive and engaged with the process in the same way that the digital agencies became popular as advertising wanted to move into the online space.

Risks for the ecosystem

The benefit of being ‘open’ and part of the ecosystem is that everyone gets to play and share and new 3rd party innovation and business can be created with it. While this is true, those 3d party participants in that ecosystem need to be careful not to loose sight of their own ability for commercial success. All of these announcements have included new ways to leverage the Facebook APIs to help users shovel more stuff into the Facebook Bucket. Those ’spades’ must be clear how they will make money given that they will not have access to the data or ability to monetize it like Facebook will.

I’m not trying to be bearish on the Facebook API or platform – far from it. I merely wish to offer a sense of perspective and to urge developers to consider carefully the business models of everyone within the stack they are participating in. There is opportunity and success in here for everyone, but we must all be cognizant of where it lies and to what extent each level in the stack is able to capitalize upon it.

Never the less, @Sofia is live tweeting in English the sentient points from the live Swedish audio stream of the trial. Check out http://twitter.com/sofia or her blog post.

You can also get the Pirate Bay’s defense perspective by reading the details of their yesterday press conference.

Just a quick note to say that Twhirl 0.9 was released this afternoon. Yes, sorry for the self-promotional plug (I’m an advisor to the product and am involved with it’s product development) but we’re really excited about the features in this release – persistent search, spell check, @reply notification if your name is mentioned anywhere in a tweet (not just the start). I’ll leave it to Loic’s blog post to explain the features in depth.

Also, look out for version 1.0 that will be released shortly – we have some amazing super-secret features coming up and we’re not hiding that we will also support the biggest request of the product – a groups feature. That’s on top of the uber secret cool features we’re building.

Twhirl is of course totally free and available for download at http://www.twhirl.org.

I ended up choosing the Dell Mini 9 as it appears to be the only Netbook whose chipset doesn’t have any major incompatibilities with OS X’s driver set. (MSI Wind is a close second, but the internal mic doesn’t work – which is a deal breaker for Seesmic and Skype).

And now Engaget and ZDNet have noticed that Dell have slashed the prices on these babies. You can also pick up great deals over on Dell’s Outlet site. I managed to pick up a pristine 32Gig SSD/1Gig/Web Cam/Bluetooth refurb machine for $260 after 20% rebate with free shipping (such deals come and go, keep an eye on SlickDeals.net).

BTW: it’s wroth noting that the baseline model being touted is a Dell Mini 9n which is a slightly different model to the non-N and I don’t know whether it is equally as OS X compatible.

Why is this a future product line for Apple?

Because the iPhone doesn’t suit everyone as the truly portable Apple experience. Like many, I can’t stand typing anything longer than a twitter or SMS on the iPhone on-screen keyboard. It also still doesn’t give me multitasking of multiple applications nor true ‘full internet’ browser experience.

Laptop owners are buying Netbooks as second machines for times when they don’t want to carry their full-size and highly expensive main units. Desktop owners are buying them as their toe-dip into the laptop water – perhaps not really needing one but wanting to experiment given such a low entry point.

In many ways, a Mac Netbook is what the Mac Book Air should have been – especially as for many it serves as a secondary Apple laptop to a primary MacBook Pro 15 or 17 machine.

The fact that it can fit in a manila envelope is technically amazing but but doesn’t make it more practical to lug around than a Mac Book or Mac Book Pro. You certainly can’t fit it into a purse or regular non-laptop bag. That’s because it’s uber-small on the wrong dimension – thickness. What was the last time you complained your laptop was too thick.

Netbooks are often as much as an inch thick – but crucially only 10″ x 7″ or so, making them carriable in practically anything – even just your hand. They often also have as many as 3 USB ports on them, plus VGA and network ports (compare to the Air’s cripplingly situated single USB and no standardized NIC or VGA/DVI ports).

The Mac Book Air design is also inherently expensive, and arguably it’s biggest flaw. It should have been a cheap affair – like the White Mac Book – rather than the pioneer for Apple’s expensive aluminum unibody design.

Steve Jobs has described the netbook vertical as ‘a race to the bottom’ – but by that he’s been referring to the price point. But with all of the mainstream netbooks based around the same Win XP/Intel Atom CPU platform with a 9″ or 10″ screen, the only differentiator any of them can offer is price.

However, an Apple Netbook would have a guaranteed notable differentiator in it’s operating system. Factor in the fact that it’s also likely Apple would make an aesthetically amazing unit and you already see a compelling alternative proposition, even at a higher price point.

Apple have never competed on price and they would be foolish to do so in the Netbook market. But if Dell can sell me a unit for $260 then there is no reason why Apple can’t manufacture such a unit with the kind of profit margins they enjoy on their other lines. The Dell Mini 9 utilizes a commodity Intel stack that runs OS X with little problem and clearly the same chip-set could be purchased by Apple for the same price Dell does.

Factor in that an Apple OS X Netbook would probably be a $600-$750 affair running on the same internals as my $260 Dell and you can see where Apple’s healthy profit margin is.

And despite that margin I know that I would gladly pay $750 for such a unit.

MacBook Air/MacBook Pro photo by Maury McCown

UPDATE: Gizmodo has a great guide on how to install OS X on to a Mini 9. I’m guessing its now going to be hard to get the larger capacity drive units on the Dell Outlet site as everyone will be wanting one!

For my part, I feel I am not so much ‘hostile’ towards TechCrunch but more ‘holding to account’ of it’s activities. With my media background I find myself doing that with all media outlets that I consume from blogs through to mainstream media.

However, where deserved criticism is highlighted so should deserved praise – and I’d like to take a moment to highlight the excellent piece of reportage posted today on the site by Mike Butcher: A Year Later, AOL Is Contemplating A Bebo Sale. Mike Butcher also serves as editor of TechCrunch UK, of course.

Clearly there is a lot going on behind the scenes at AOL around it’s somewhat ill-judged acquisition of Bebo – emphasis being behind the scenes. However through some great working of his contact network not only has Mike Butcher been able corroborate the rumor that Bebo might be for sale but also pulled together some fantastic analysis of what went on before the sale that led AOL to agree the purchase.

I don’t bash TechCrunch to be jerk, I bash TechCrunch because most of the stories these days seem to have become toothless startup reviews or the puffing of ‘announcements’ (which read between the lines as simply lines fed to Arrington during last night’s drinks with a VC/similar who has a product to push or a gripe to air).

Good quality analysis or reaction to said information has been sorely lacking on TechCrunch since Marshal Kirkpatrick left.

What I like here is that Mike Butcher has taken the time to provide analysis on top of the fact-checked lead. It’s great stuff, and I would love to see TechCrunch publishing more of these longer form pieces.

Some of us don’t have ADD and can actually read through 10 minutes worth of text with the aim of finding out what’s really going on behind an announcement.

UPDATE: Hours after writing this piece, news emerged that Michael was assaulted yesterday at the DLD conference. He also revealed that during 2008, threats to kill were made towards both himself and his family. I want to stress that while I allude to some of my differences with Michael, they are of course only professional. I want to make it clear I am as shocked and disappointed as everyone else with today’s news, wouldn’t wish this kind of despicable behavior on anyone.