I'm in Edmonton. Turns out to be the farthest north I've been on land (53 degrees 37 minutes at the peak) after another turn through the Icefields Parkway, surely one of the most scenic drives on the planet. My 4th time along it, though this time it was a whiteout. Speaking tomorrow at the CIPS ICE conference on privacy, nanotechnology and the future at 10:15.

TONIGHT, April 20th, there will be a debate on the issue of per-message charges for E-mail, sparked by the recent debate over Goodmail and AOL.

The debate will feature former EFF Chair Esther Dyson, who has become a surprising supporter of pay-to-send E-mail, and EFF Activist Danny O'Brien, NTK author and coordinator of EFF's involvement in the efforts against Goodmail. Esther is also publisher of Release 1.0, host of the PC Forum conference and former chair of ICANN.

Next week (Mon-Tuesday) I will be speaking at David Isenberg's "Freedom To Connect" conference, on an open net, in Silver Spring, Maryland (Washington DC.)

April 10 I will be at UCSB's CITS conference (Santa Barbara, obviously) on growing network communities.

The next week April 19-21 sees the annual Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop, always a good time.

See you there.

Each year since 1992 the EFF has given out the EFF Pioneer Awards to a wide array of online pioneers. Check out the lists on the web site.

We're seeking new nominees for this year's awards, to be given at CFP 06. We need them by Feb 28. Check out the web page, and e-mail us the nominee's name and contact info with a description of their contribution. Organizations and Systems can be nominated, as well as individuals.

Who do you think has helped make the cyberworld what it is? Get them recognized.

We've been working on an inherited house in the Irving Street/23rd avenue neighbourhood of the Outer Sunset of San Francisco. This is one of SF's "new chinatowns" -- the original one on Grant St. long ago given over to the tourists. Irving is where the real asians go to shop and eat. I've been impressed at the incredible quality to price ratio of the food here, I think it's the best locus of value in the city.

While I have been using Google ads on the blog for some time (and they do quite well), they don't yet do RSS ads outside of a more limited beta program. So I'm trying Yahoo's ads, also in beta but I'm on the list.

They just went live, and all that's showing right now is a generic ad, presumably until they spider the site and figure out what ads to run. Ideally it will be ads as relevant as Google Adsense does.

Competition between Google and Yahoo will be good for publishers. Just on basic click-rates, one will tend to do better than the other, presumably. If one is consistently doing not as well, they will lose all the partners, who will flock to the other. The only way to fix that will be to increase the percentage of the money they pay out, until they get to a real efficient market percentage they can't go above.

Read on for examination of the economics of RSS ads.

This week I will be doing some demos of Voxable, my system that combines VoIP, presence and all sorts of cool stuff I won't be writing about in the public blog to create a new user interface for the phone that is both as modern and internet as it can get while also being a reflection of the ancient interface for the phone that was lost.

At the EFF, we're announcing today a membership drive around our various efforts for blogger's rights.

In the EFF blogs in my blogroll, you will have read this year about our legal guide for bloggers, and the various free speech cases we've done protecting publishing rights online, anonymity and assuring reporter's privilege for online journalists.

I've arrived this morning in Melbourne, a very pleasant city in which I haven't allocated enough time, as per usual. Lots of interesting food, seems very livable with great transit, pleasant spaces and parks and architecture. And also surveillance cameras, everywhere. And warnings about stopping terrorism even though there hasn't really been much here.

In addition to the EFF party, here are some upcoming conferences I will be attending and/or speaking at:

• Sunday, a half-day at Accelerating Change 2005, Stanford

• Monday, Sept 19th at 10pm, panel on CALEA Wiretap rules for VoIP, at Pulver Voice on the Net conference in Boston at The BCEC (not Hynes as I reported earlier) Convention Center. I'll be at the conference for most of the week.

Join us for a party.

When:  Sunday, October 2nd, 2005 at 5 p.m.

Where:  EFF Headquarters in San Francisco, 454 Shotwell Street, 94110

EFF is 15 years old this year, and we are going to celebrate! We're having an anniversary bash at our San Francisco headquarters on Shotwell Street on Sunday, October 2nd, 2005. The party starts at 5 p.m.

All my sites were off today as I did an emergency switch of servers.

The whole story is amusing, so I'll tell it. I used to host my web sites with Verio shared hosting, but they were overpriced and did some bad censorship acts, so I was itching to leave. One day my internet connection went out, so I went onto my deck with my laptop to see what free wireless there was in the area. One strong one had an e-mail address as the SSID, though it was WEP-locked. Later, I e-mailed that address with a "hi neighbour" and met the guy around the corner. He had set the SSID that way to get just such a mail as mine. (I have a URL as my SSID now for the same purpose.)

My neighbour, it turned out, knew some people I knew in the biz, and told me about a special club he was in, called "Root Club." The first rule of Root Club, he joked, was that you do not talk about root club. Now that I'm out, I can tell the story. Root Club was started as a group of sysadmins who shared a powerful colocated web server, and all shared the root password and sysadmin duties.

I am told an interview I did a few months ago on USENET and elements of its history will air today on the American Public Media show "Marketplace." The audio can be played from the Marketplace web site in realplayer format. It airs on most NPR stations at times ranging from early afternoon to about 6:30pm.

I've switched the blog from Movable Type to drupal. Drupal is a PHP based, open source blog and community system that will allow me in the future to support all sorts of fancy things, such as discussion forums, polls, multi-user blogging and a lot of other stuff. Drupal is entirely another class of application beyond MT, though I won't be using all of what it has at first.

I've disabled the trackback feature that allows other blogs to tell this blog they have pointed to it. It's being abused by spammers. Unlike comments, which can have a little turing test on them, trackback needs to be automatic to work, so it's a lot harder to protect against spam except through complex blacklists etc.

Dan Gilmor notes that he is concerned about a new program called the "Silicon Valley 100" in which a marketing company identified 100 influentical silicon valley folks with plans to give us stuff in the hope of generating buzz. Dan worries whether people will disclose they got the stuff for free as part of this venture.

I'll be speaking at three conferences in the near future, and can offer discounts to blog readers for two of them.
VoIP
Coming up October 19, I will be speaking on the future of SIP, and whether IAX2 or Skype might kill it, at the Pulver Voice on the Net conference in Boston.
Nanotech and Privacy

I regret to get in anybody's way, but the volume of comment spam I have been getting has been driving me nuts, and Movable Type makes it a royal pain to delete. There is no point in them spamming, I turned off putting links on URLs they include in the spams, but they do it anyway.

I have accepted an invitation to join the Board of Directors for the Foresight Institute for Nanotechnology.

Foresight was created by Chris Peterson and Eric Drexler, author of "Engines of Creation" to act as advocate and watchdog in the field of molecular nanotechnology, of which Eric can claim to be the modern father. I've been a senior associate of the institute for some years and spoken at their conference. I will MC the conference coming up next weekend.