Then last night I read that TechCrunch was also hacked (their post on it seems to re-direct to an interstitial ad – which I’ve never seen on TC before and makes we wonder whether they are trying to put up ‘interference’ here)..

From what I can see it looks as though the vector that I have seen could also have been used to do this to TechCrunch. I don’t know what version of WordPress TechCrunch runs.

I’ve decided not to give the details who was affected or too much info about the attacks, although the two common occurances I’m seeing with all of the sites exploited are:

1. They are using WP-Cache or WP-SuperCache
2. They are running on the RackSpace Cloud Sites serving platform

I should state for the record that at this point I do not have any evidence that RackSpace Cloud Sites is vulnerable, I’m just noting that all of the examples I’ve seen have occurred on RackSpace Cloud Sites, and I believe TechCrunch runs on Rackspace Sites too. Conversely I’ve not heard of any non-RackSpace Cloud Sites blog having any problems, and I’ve not had any issues with my blogs either (other than a botched upgrade to 2.9.1 just now due to human error, doh!).

Although I don’t want to give out specific information, some interesting discussion is occurring on a thread of HackerNews, especially this sub-thread.

Advice

While we wait to see if/how the WordPress developer community responds to this, my only advice is to make sure all of your directories and files are locked down (chmod 700 works fine on RS Sites), and that you are running the latest version of WP & all of your plugins. You might want to keep an extra eye out if you are using RackSpace Cloud Sites (or your hosting reseller does) and make use of WP-Cache/WP-SuperCache

I remain a massive fan and supporter of WordPress.

Indeed, at the time of writing this, the top two books in the Kindle Bestseller List (Cape Refuge and Southern Storm both by Terri Blackstock) are free. In total, 15 of the current top 25 Kindle Bestseller books are available free of charge.

(UPDATE: Terri Blackstock left useful comments below)

But what doesn’t add up is that Amazon forces authors publishing works into the Kindle Marketplace to set a minimum price of $0.99c (see notes in red near bottom of the page).

I’ve just checked and confirmed this important fact, missed by Motoko Rich who wrote the NY Times piece, with my partner Violet Blue. Violet is an Amazon Bestselling author herself who has published 24 of her books into Kindle format.

Using her account in Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) I confirmed she is unable to set any of her books below 99c. In fact, she told me she would like to offer some of them for free if she could. (Violet has screen-grabs of her DTP interface on Flickr)

Back to the New York Times article, it paints a now familiar “free culture kicks it to the old guard” story of how independent writers smaller publishers are publishing their works to Kindle for free and then getting signed/distribution deals with publishing houses to sell hard-copy versions commercially.

Something fishy going on

But this doesn’t stack up, as it is impossible for an independent author like Violet to publish free for Kindle. From what I can see there is one of two possibilities here, both of which make a much more deeper and interesting story:

Possibility #1: Amazon is entering into special agreements with certain independent writers smaller publishers – and thus not playing a square game with the rest of their authors. Perhaps this is to drive traction to their e-reader, but to the detriment of maintaining a level playing field and equal publishing ecosystem. Or…

Possibility #2: Mainstream publishers (who apparently use different platforms to publish ebooks into Kindle marketplace) are able to set a zero price on their books. I note this option because those two free books written by Ms Blackstock are also available as ‘hard-copy’ paperbacks for $10.19 published by publishing house Zondervan.

I’ll leave the fact that Zondervan is an overtly Evangelical-style Christian publisher, and thus the burning question as to whether they are gaming the Kindle ‘free gets you to the top of Kindle Bestseller” hack to spread covert pro-Christianity rhetoric in the forms of works of fiction, to the conspiracy theorists out there.

I write the above with the disclosure that I find the DRM-laden nature of the Amazon Kindle almost as abhorrent as the spreading of pro-religious rhetoric via means that appear secular on initial inspection (see Alpha Course, books by C. S. Lewis, etc.)

UPDATE: Upon a second read of the NY Times piece in follow up to a comment left below, I noticed that the piece was centered around smaller publishers rather than independent authors per se, so I have struck out those references where made. However, there remains a big story here which is why publishers are able to offer books for free when the independent authors seemingly can’t.

Now, I’m not trying to paint a dark and bleak picture of the current situation. But it is fair to say that future of Yahoo!’s API landscape going forward is confused and unclear.

And I say that not as a nay-sayer or doom-merchant – I’ve been a champion of open API’s for a long time now and even supported Yahoo! by actively participating in their Hack Days around the world, building hacks on top of the platform and even famously slapping a stupid sticker on my forehead to promote the cause (which I hear was a favorite slide in the decks of certain Yahoo! executives for a while).

However the bottom line is this: Yahoo! has successfully dug deep roots in the API platform space over the years, probably more so than any other company I can think of. And if some of these roots are dug up and removed it’s going to leave massive holes in the ecosystem.

The Yahoo! Shopping API is one example that has already occurred. Practically speaking the impact of this particular API is not massive as it was hardly a core API proposition. However, I still remain very concerned about the future feasibility of core services such as Yahoo! BOSS given that Yahoo! is retiring it’s search activities and handing the baton over to Bing. Its not clear to what extent the platform will be serviced and maintained once search is powered by Microsoft.

I know many startups that are utilizing BOSS openly and many more that utilize it covertly behind the scenes – the loss, should it be removed, would be great.

Another example where developers have demonstrated caution has been Yahoo!’s implementation of OpenSocial across it’s many properties. Not only has the implementation been unclear (there isn’t even an official “OpenSocial on Yahoo” homepage) but developer have found it difficult to justify building apps for platforms that could be deadpooled or sold off with little notice.

So where does this leave us?

Well, Yahoo! in it’s current position is probably doing the right thing to trim back the fat by closing under-serving properties (and the API’s that go along with them). But it leaves a cautionary tale for both API vendors and API consumers.

API Vendors need to consider their long-term strategy of what they are propositioning. That big “we’re so open it hurts” fanfare is going to cost you down the road if you can’t maintain it. In many ways, removing an API is worse then not offering it all.

API consumers need to consider carefully the viability of the services they are using, especially if they are leveraging them for commercial use or as an intrinsic part of their value proposition. Look for freemium models that indicate viability, or build agile adapters that can be quickly swapped out to a different vendor at short notice (assuming there is one).

My prediction for 2010 is that we will see a lot of APIs and platforms go dark during the year, especially in the ‘free’ space. It will be interesting to see the fall out from these and the way that startups pivot around the sudden departure of a key provider in their value chain.

I’ve been working with Darryl Siry (former CMO Tesla Motors) on this project since Spring, with us producing a demo for investors in September/early-October. That seemed to be successful because we managed to raise $545k angel round, led by a group of private investors, Darryl and ZelkovaVC (although the note remains open to $750k if anyone wants to get in at this early stage!).

So what are we building?

Well, the problem space we are addressing is the perpetuation of of miss-information and inaccurate information within the online news environment. A piece is written up about your product/service/company that contains some incorrect facts or draws a conclusion that didn’t include a pertinent piece of information. Maybe you are frustrated the journalist didn’t reach out to you during the creation of their article and you want to reach out. Or perhaps a piece on a competitor misses an opportunity to present an alternative perspective around your product/service/company.

The solution is a professional communication platform that allows PR/corporate communication professionals to engage journalists and pro-bloggers in a ‘velvet rope’ vetted environment. There are a number of products we’re building on top of this platform, but we’re not talking about implementation points right now — we have some very interesting ways to solve these problems.

Some of these problems (and solutions) are new. Some are just reducing the friction of the existing communication mechanisms these folk already have in place.

What’s under the hood?

Everything is Ruby on Rails… very agile, very rapid development. It’s my first time working with RoR and I’m really enjoying the experience. Pivotal Tracker continues to be an amazing productivity tool for development, and I’m beginning to wonder how I ever worked before DropBox, EtherPad and BaseCamp.

BTW if this all sounds like fun (which it is) we’re looking for top Ruby on Rails talent right now, working out of our digs in South Park, SF!

Busy bee

Plato’s Forms is obviously going to be my main project and focus moving forward, although for now I will continue to work with Seesmic on a small scale (my BlackBerry app shipped last week) and maintain my advisory board responsibilities with my portfolio.

Oh and I’m going to be in Europe for most of December – MC’ing at Le Web in Paris again, and then Christmas at home in London.

Well, the plot thickens as the most damning photos of the event have mysteriously been removed from public viewing. Flickr user CocoChou had taken probably the most damning photos of the the stripping event and uploaded them to his Flickr set of the Hack Day under a Creative Commons license.

However, the 4 photos – which many blogs were embedding and linking to – have been made private in the past few hours, although curiously all of the other 72 photos from the event are still public.

It’s not clear whether Yahoo!, which of course owns Flickr, has put pressure on CocoChou to remove them or whether he removed them independently of any interference. However, it’s difficult to think of reasonable motivations why someone would remove these 4 particular photos from their original 80 and keep the rest up. I have, of course, emailed CocoChou to find out – and I’ll update this post if/when I hear back.

Fortunately I downloaded copies of these photos before they were removed, and in the public-spirited nature you’ve all come to know and love, I’ve re-uploaded them to my Flickr account. Of course I am able to do so legally as they were originally released under a Creative Commons license, which I have perpetuated:

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

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.