An argument among XML developers has seen a splinter group reject W3C Schemas for the Relax NG standard.

Main criticisms raised of the W3C schema focus on coding difficulties, and potential interoperability problems.

Proponents of RELAX NG - which stands for REgular LAnguage for XML Next Generation - point out that it is already a recognised ISO Standard: ISO/IEC 19757, Part 2.

Already some developers have already been coding XML in Relax NG, before compiling to W3C Schemas.

Overall, while this may seem like distant debate, the actual coding platform for XML is an important issue.

XML formats - especially RSS and Atom - are becoming an increasingly common part of computing, especially for communications between websites.

And with Microsoft and linux providing increasing support for XML between computing platforms, the debate as to which XML standard is followed could have widespread repurcussions far into the future of modern computing.

However, as pointed out elsewhere, the core issue deciding the matter isn’t which set of schemas developers are happy with - as much as which standard business is going to support.

Linux users have voiced concerns about Novell’s planned support for Open XML in Open Office.

Since Novell signed an agreement with Microsoft, there has been a general perception that Novell have sold out.

The main accusation from vocal critics is that the agreement simply turns Novell - and their Linux Suse products - into a way in which to funnel open source users into Microsoft’s proprietary systems.

The recent announcement by Novell that they will be releasing a new edition of Open Office - and provide support for Microsoft’s Open XML - has helped amplify these criticisms. This is especially as Microsoft apparently have no plans to support ODF and OOXML in Microsoft Office - even though both are used in Open Office.

However, despite this, other Linux users simply ask what’s so wrong with supporting OpenXML. After all, isn’t cross-platform compatibility to be embraced?

Overall, it shows the high degree of distrust of Microsoft Corp, but it remains to be seen what the advantages of the Novell-Microsoft relationship are by its fruits, rather than disadvantages through speculation.

BT has selected Motorola, Inc to provide mesh Wi-Fi network infrastructure and services for six of BT’s Wireless City initiatives in the UK.

Under the terms of the agreement, Motorola will design, deploy and manage city-wide Wi-Fi networks with BT in cities such as Birmingham and Newcastle.

The Mesh Wi-Fi networks will deliver wireless broadband for use by public services, businesses and citizens in each of the cities. BT Openzone hotspots will be extended to enable wireless web access and email.

Contiguous Wi-Fi coverage will be provided to enable real time applications using for example, BT Fusion dual mode devices. Virtual private network (VPN) services will be provided for enterprise customers. These will also e-enable local authority workforces. Wireless closed circuit television (CCTV) will be provided to aid community safety and security.

Motorola will supply solutions from its MOTOwi4 wireless broadband portfolio. The solutions will be deployed across the cities on existing sites such as lampposts. The Motorola solution allows data to be backhauled wirelessly.

This saves the cost, time and disruption involved with building a fixed network. The networks will be Mesh-enabled, making them secure and robust and allowing the network to “self heal” should individual access points fail by rerouting traffic.

The Microsoft small business directory at bCentral appears to be closing down.

Microsoft is no longer accepting submissions to the directory, and additionally are directed to a new set of online services - which are focused on website design and development.

The news comes only weeks after the DMOZ directory broke.

Overall, while it’s not surprising that Microsoft would wish to focus on Office integration online, , the loss of the bCentral directory further cuts back on the potential for new business to develop strong links online.

Christmas is coming - but retailers are reportedly feeling a pinch in overall sales compared to the same period as last year.

The British Retail Consortium has warned that Christmas may not come to the high street until the last week or two before Christmas day itself.

Already retailers such as Argos, Currys, Debenhams and Borders are among the high street stores leading price cuts.

Other retailers, such as House of Fraser, Homebase, Focus, Tesco, Halfords and Superdrug, are following close behind.

However, although the high street is worried, online retailers should expect a continued boom as shoppers increasingly turn to the internet for a simpler and easier shopping experience.

It remains to be seen just how divided the spend is between both, once the ONS releases figures after festivities have died down.

The UN has issued a warning about internet privacy.

The warning focuses on two key issues:

1. The trend for internet companies to gather as much user data as possible
2. The trend for internet users to re-use the same login information

Combined, it means that a security breach in one ISP could have bigger repurcussions, with user login data potentially exploitable across different companies, products, and services.

Overall, it’s a not a surprise that this is a concern - the UK claims £1.7 billion lost due to identity theft the last year.

The surprise is that the UN has issued a statement warning on privacy issues.

However, it’s a warning likely to fall on deaf ears.

User data has become a commodity in its own right, and ISPs are much more likely to consider additional security protections, rather than reduce often extensive collection of user data.

The Google Adsense admin login is currently down.

This means that webmasters cannot currently access their Google Adsense stats.

The downtime is unscheduled, but Google Adsense is still running publisher sites.

No reason is given, other than technical difficulties:

The Google AdSense website is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later.
We apologize for any inconvenience.

Previous downtimes have continued to count valid clicks for publishers.

We can only hope the situation at present also does the same. :)

ADDED: The admin panel was back up an hour after posting this.

The Great British Pound (GBP) has reached a 14-year high against the US dollar.

Early today £1 was worth $1.956, its highest level since Black Monday in 1992, when Britain leave the ERM (Eurpean Exchange Rate).

The rise in currency value comes at a time when the Bank of England may be considering further rate rises in an increasingly unstable global economy.

Additionally, weak economic data in the USA is devaluing the USD.

Overall, the news will not be good for exporters due to the relatively higher prices of their goods on the US consumer markets.

However, for those of us who buy services internationally, where the USD is the major currency - such as for webmaster services and webhosting - this is a nice peice of news indeed. :)

Small and medium businesses are interested in the new technology of VOIP, but not so much that their interest over comes the pains involved with getting into the market.

The lack of movement by the small business is not a good sign for the VOIP vendors. Small businesses are usually the first to jump on the technology bandwagon, but the VOIP market has too many potential problems – mainly due to the number of vendors involved with basic set up.

New technologies, such as mobile telephony and data, laptops, and mobile computing, have allowed small business to compete in ways that would have been near impossible otherwise. VOIP does offer great advantages to these businesses, including reduced costs, but the market is just too complex.

Because of the numerous pieces involved with VOIP set up, there are lots of opportunities for something to go wrong. It takes much more to fix a problem, which means lots of time consuming trouble shooting. The smaller companies just are not able to do this.

To lure in the small companies, vendors are going to have to find a way to bundle and manage services. The research has shown that small business are 2.5 to three times more interested in VOIP when it is offered through a managed IP telephony and offers site to site VOIP services.

VOIP is the right direction for the small businesses. It’s just that no one is getting it right for them in terms of sales and delivery.

Rollout of wireless connectivity across Westminster is to begin by the end of 2006.

Work will start in Soho and the West End and it is expected that the whole City of Westminster, a total of 28 square kilometres, will be connected by the end of 2008.

Wireless connectivity will increase the efficiency of council workers, allowing them to input data into a handheld device rather than having to return to City Hall.

It will also be beneficial to the general public, who will be able to pay to use connectivity in the area. Residents will also be able to access the system for free to carry out transactions such as paying for parking tickets.

A wirelessly connected CCTV camera system will be trialled during the pilot of the project. The scheme was announced by Westminster council in early 2004, and was extended across Soho and into some council estates in 2005. Work will now start on rolling out the network.

The scheme is part of BT’s Wireless Cities initiative, and BT will build the system and sell access under its Openzone brand. However, the actual operator is Vertex, Westminster Council’s strategic partner.

The system will be a mesh network based on a core fibre backbone, and Cisco’s mobile access routers which will be fixed on to lampposts and other street furniture. There is potential to add WiMax capability in the future.

Intel Corporation plans to include the IEEE 802.11n standard, which is not expected to be ratified before the first half of 2008, into its Centrino chips by next year.

Industry analysts have voiced concerns about plans to deploy high speed IEEE 802.11n devices before the standard is ratified.

It is believed that while a pre-standard version might be suitable for home-use where the technology exists as a closed loop, in an enterprise with a heterogeneous wireless environment there is the potential for it to cause interoperability problems.

802.11 is a group of specifications developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) for wireless local area networks (WLANs).

The specifications define an over-the-air interface between a wireless client and a base station (or access point), or between two or more wireless clients. The technology is more commonly known as Wi-Fi.

The next generation wireless LAN (WLAN) standard - 802.11n - is designed to power data-intensive media, including multiple HDTV and digital video streams. 802.11n will substantially increase the speed of Wi-Fi connections, supporting consumer electronic devices at speeds of 500 Mbps or greater.

It will eliminate the need to lay and maintain Ethernet cabling, will handle more clients and also increase the range and performance of hotspots.

Google Answers is to close down.

Google announced that although they would leave the existing site up as an archive, they would no longer be taking new questions for the service.

The project began more than four years ago, and started with four people administrating it. More than 800 staff would later be involved in the project.

Ironically, no answer was provided as to why the service was closing.

Overall, it’s always a shame to see online services close down.

However, considering Google’s extensive range of online services - many of which have yet to move out of beta, or see widespread uptake - it’s hard not to see this as a general refocusing of the company onto other services.

Forum admins are today being warned of a new wave of spam coming to forums.

It comes after Russian hackers developed a script to auto submit spam posts to a wide range of forum software - and released it onto the open markets.

The script is able to post to forums even when email validation is required - a common anti-spam tactic used by forum admins.

Targeted forum software claimed open to attack includes vbulletin, phpbb, Invision Power Board, PHP-Nuke, yaBB, IconBoard, UltimateBB, exBB, phorum.org, wiki, different types of bulletin boards and even custom-written code.

Forum admins are advised to follow basic anti-spam procedures, and ensure they have common Russian email addresses blocked, such as mail.ru, inbox.ru, cashette.com, and gawab.com.

For those tempted to use high volume forum spamming, it needs emphasising that forum spam rarely lasts more than a few minutes on valuable forums, and the returns are likely miminal.

However, damage to reputation and standing could be considerable, and may additionally subject the user to legal proceedings under the Computer Misuse Act.

The DMOZ directory is still suffering serious technical problems, a month after they first appeared.

The problem - attributed to a hardware issue - prevents DMOZ editors from being able to log in and edit entries.

The technical issues were first announced on October 25th - but nealy a month later, the original technical issues have not been fixed.

DMOZ - also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP) - is currently owned by AOL, but there remains no word yet an whether AOL are even interested in addressing the technical issues.

DMOZ and has being heavily criticised in recent years over issues such as corruption of editors, poor quality editing, and social politics driving out established editors.

While this has left a lot of bitterness around the webmaster community about the project, it seems that claims that it is dying are finally being realised.

At present DMOZ editors are not being updated as to progress with the technical issues, though it has been speculated that the database itself has failed and may be being rebuilt.

Of course, that presumes that AOL have any interest in dedicating resources to fix it.

Overall, whatever the complaints about DMOZ, I can only hope we see the site archived, if it is not to be fixed.

After all, it was a part of internet history, and while it has suffered some very real problems with operations, it would be a shame if AOL were to simply allow the project to die completely - and be deleted.

However, it could simply be the case that technical problems are being addressed - in which case the question to follow from that is as to what useful role DMOZ can play in a Web 2.0 internet.

Mobile operator O2 has decided to support GSM and 3G mobile technology, rather than Wi-Fi in its next generation of phones. At a London summit in November, O2 rejected Wi-Fi hotzones and WiMax.

Dave Williams, O2’s chief technology officer said “We’ve played with UMA and SIP, but they would require new phones”.

At the summit, Mr Williams demonstrated an Ericsson-built GSM indoor base-station which would use the customer’s DSL to connect to the mobile network.

The box does not need UMA or SIP because it includes a reverse-engineered Sony Ericsson phone which connects to the phone network over the Internet.

The box has a slot to include a SIM card. O2 is considering distributing the box to customers in 2007 as the basis of a triple-play broadband service rolled out by O2’s recently acquired broadband division, Be.

O2 plans to deliver service only to unbundled exchanges, where it does not have to resell BT services. It has decided to delay the launch until it can reach 50 percent of the UK population from such exchanges.

O2 is also considering launching My Bluebook - a service to back up sentimental photos and texts to an O2 server.

Internet users were reminded to be wary of social news sites, after Digg posted a false story claiming that 650,000 Playstation 3’s had been recalled.

The story continued to be front-page news on the site, even after a slew of community members had flagged it as false.

Marketer Michael Gray has already commented that there is an inherent bais in social media sites, and that pro-Apple and Nintendo, and anti-Microsoft and Sony, stories, are frequently regarded as front page news.

For some time there has been a rising war cry online that bloggers and social media sites will replace traditional media - but unfortunately, all we’ve seen them do so far is replace the bias.

Shares in Google have topped over $500 each today, creating a market cap of over $154 billion.

This makes Google the world’s 22nd biggest company by market valuation.

However, Google has only a quarter of the revenues of the lowest earning company in the top 30 by comparison, and isn’t even in the top 60 companies for earnings.

At present, the biggest companies by market cap, are as follows:

As the table illustrates, Google’s excessive ratio of market cap to earnings can only mean the Google stock bubble is getting bigger.

The likelihood is that this can only burst in future - and take a number of related tech stocks down with it.

The IPTV market is enjoying looking to get a boost from the hospitality industry.

One of the leading IPTV vendors, Exterity – whose products are targeting the education, corporate, and hospitality industries – has created a bundle specifically for the hotel industry and is set to launch.

Service providers have dominated the hospitality markets in the past, but more hotels are looking to combine their communications into one package. Exterity is one of the first to create a bundle of TV, internet, and telephony technology into one package customized specifically for the hotel industry.

In an industry that survives or fails by the whims of the customer, many hotels are looking to make their operations more technologically friendly. Over the past few months, hotels have found their way to IPTV.

Since the hotel market is relatively an untapped area for resellers and integrators, Exterity is working with their partners to take advantage of the opportunities by launching the new package, Exterity Hotel IPTV Kit.

Traditionally, the 25 UK Exterity partners have worked with corporate and education. With the transition towards hotels increasing, Exterity is looking for more partners to target the hospitality industry.

Although the innovative vendor does not have any hotel clients at the present, the future looks bright for this market. Exterity Hotel IPTV Kit will give the hospitality industry greater control over their communications and will allow them to adapt the bundle to fit their specific needs.

CBS’s chief research officer, David Poltrack, has said that he doesn’t want their content off YouTube - even if illegally uploaded.

The statement came in an address to the Future of Television Forum at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

According to the Advertising Adage report, David Poltrack said: “When you have something the public really wants, the economic value in that is to come up with a way to satisfy the rights holders and serve the consumers.”

It’s certainly a different stance to the MPIAA and RIAA, who have vigoriously chased claims of copyright violations to ridiculous extremes, such as issuing legal proceedings to dead people and children.

However, what is interesting is that TV networks such as CBS are ad-supported content disitributors in themselves - pretty much like YouTube - while music and film recordings are purchased directly.

The fact that someone at CBS has such a forward thinking approach can only be positive for IPTV in general online - especially as unless is able to put in place relevant disitribution agreements, they are likely set up to receive a train of legal proceedings over copyright.

LG Electronics has extended its mobile phone portfolio with the launch of the SB-120 - the world’s first ‘time-machine’ satellite DMB phone.

Worldwide handset sales are forecast to reach one billion a year by 2009 and advanced technology phones, which provide a wide range of functions, are expected to feature strongly in the global mobile market.

The SB-120 incorporates a standard home TV antenna function to receive broadband DMB that adopts the DMB-receiving System-on-Chip (SoC).

The chip allows users to watch television broadcasts and talk on the phone at the same time.

The phone stores broadcasts in memory that have been received while it was being used as a communications device. It then replays the broadcasts afterwards, enabling continuous viewing.

The handset uses LG Electronics’ handset design technologies and terrestrial broadcast-receiving chip.

According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, LG Electronics retained the fourth position in handset sales globally in the third quarter of 2006.