Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Both the presentation layer as the scraping part…
"EveryBlock.com is an experimental news Web site that provides information at a "microlocal" level — by neighborhood or city block. It was funded by a grant from Knight Foundation, which requires the site's backend code to be open-sourced. Here is the code."

Goed geschreven samenvatting hoe OpenID, XRDS, Oauth, en apis als PortableContacts en OpenSocial samenwerken om gedistribueerd social networking ecosysteem te bouwen.

Treat Twitter #hashtags like an IRC channel.
Project by Alex Bosworth
See http://tweetbe.at/#cot and http://tweetbe.at/#hackdeoverheid as examples
Uses Twitter Oauth to post.

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood's developer community site.

Code snippet sharing site.
Apparently Activestate is popular in the Python community…

Matt Mullenweg on the question whether Wordpress themes are a derivative work (thus GPL) php+html mix is derivative, thus GPLed, css + images are not.
Drupal has a similar point of view: http://drupal.org/node/272652 and so has Joomla, http://www.joomla.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3510&Itemid=74 (although they say that javascript is data too)

"Garbage reminder app:
* Simply punch in your address and find out your garbage zone (no more guessing if you live on the border of a zone)
* Get an email or SMS notification 15 minutes, 1 hour, 12 hours (whenever!) before pick up
* Download the garbage schedule into your calendar using XML, HTML or ICAL"

We actually had exactly the same idea at Amsterdam barcamp/govcamp last month, and extended the idea with crowdsourcing the screenscraping job for every Dutch municipality/city. See http://www.lifesized.net/2009/06/16/hackdeoverheid-a-geeks-meet-government-event-held-in-amsterdam-june-2009/ and http://www.zylstra.org/blog/archives/2009/06/hack_the_govern.html and my own writeup in Dutch: http://weblog.vanhecke.info/hackdeoverheid/

Why not publish your public key via autodiscovery? This proposal describes three ways to do it

Twine's Nova Spivack donates 10.000 dollar to anyone who can port Tor to mobile devices.

Detects the backend software of the current website (Drupal 5.x, 6.x, Wordpress 2.x, Django, phpBB, MediaWiki, MoinMoin, Joomla, Reddit, …).

Consumer trust metric derived from search frequency of search queries for travel, loans, jobs…
Appears to be a Dutch project, so far not replicated for other countries.

Google wants to make us better citizen journalists:
"resource to help you learn more about how to report the news. It features some of the nation's top journalists and news organizations sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting. "

Bookmark your own page as http://www.twitterforbusypeople.com/index.html?screenname=[your username], mine is http://www.twitterforbusypeople.com/index.html?screenname=pascalvanhecke for example.
See in just one glance who recently tweeted.

"Chris Kelly, the Californian web company's chief privacy officer, the five-year-old startup has been engaging in talks with government officials in various countries for some time, but its growing size and importance means it is essential they "understand our philosophy".

He said: "There is a concern we've had for some time that – in a well-meaning attempt to protect consumers – legislators or regulators would end up passing laws that would keep people from the beneficial sharing of information." Jim ­Killock, the executive director of the Open Rights Group, which campaigns for the rights of British citizens online, says technology companies are increasingly choosing to exert pressure at European level, rather than in more tightly monitored environments, such as Westminster."

"presents the state of the art of search interface design, based on both academic research and deployment in commercial systems
Topics include:

* How to Design Search User Interfaces
* How to Evaluate Search User Interfaces
* Models of the Information Seeking Process
* Search Interfaces Fundamentals, including:
o Query Specification
o Presentation of Search Results
o Query Reformulation
* Advanced Topics, including:
o Integrating Navigation with Search
o Personalization in Search
o Information Visualization and Search
o Mobile Search
o Social Search
o Multimedia Search "

Easy web site creation. Most convincing feature: you can host it on your own (sub)domain.
For those occasions when even an auto-installed WP at Dreamhost is too much work.
The clean urls still allow you to migrate afterwords BTW.

An position doc for the 2009 Web2.0 summit.
Key ideas:
- more and more data comes from sensors instead of from users
- our conversation with the web is enhanced by sensor input (GPS, voice, context…)
- we do not need to wait for unique identifiers for a given domain: descriptive information is most of the times good enough
- realtime feedback loops will become more common

Note on privacy: "There is a race on right now to own the social graph. But we must ask whether this service is so fundamental that it needs to be open to all."
Funny how also Tim O'Reilly considers the social graph as data on itself, and not something that is context-sensitive (so no real "shadow" of the real world).

"You use your iPhone camera to take a photo of a map that contains details not found on generic mapping applications such as Google maps – say a trailhead map in a park, or another hiking map. Use the phone’s GPS to set your current location on the map. Walk a distance away, and set a second point. Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps."

Article stresses the consequences of the notion of "data controller" for users (although that will actually depend on the EU country's own interpretation…).
The household exception is quoted incorrectly as an exception to the SNS provider' responsibility – it is an exception to the users' responsibility.

This FT article came out even before the Opinion was published… ironic that it asked US privacy advocates to comment on it.
"The European move marks the first attempt by regulators to address the “open” internet platforms that the social networks, led by Facebook, have rushed to create. By letting other applications ride on top of their systems, tapping into personal data about their members, the networks have sought both to tie in users for longer and create money-making opportunities."

A whole bunch of tools for SEO, performance, analytics, usability, backlinks…

Interview with Simon Willison, who developed The Guardian's crowdsourcing (expenses-scandal) experiment:
- 170 000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours
- 20 000 volunteers
- set up like a game
- participation shot up when he added the smiling face of the MP to the expenses
- lists of top-performing volunteers
- use framework (Django) and scalable hosting (EC2)

Like the HTML Validator but for your server’s HTTP headers.

Collection of points of interest with itinerary and time to spend:
"You just specify the location of your hotel and the length of your trip and City Tours will map out an itinerary for you"
A permalink can be constructed as follows: http://citytours.googlelabs.com/search?city=CityName&reset=true
More at http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-city-tours.html

Great quote on the failed AI-efforts and the success of statistics-based approaches:
"No one alive as these words are being written will live to see a computer pass the Turing Test. What's more, the idea of a humanlike computer will increasingly come to be seen as a kitschy, mid-20th-century idea, like hovercraft and dinner pills on The Jetsons"
(Pet subject of Google's Peter Norvig as well)

Yet another…. converts standard text areas to richt text editing.
Offers hosted javascript, so you only have to include their snippet.
Created by a 22yr old guy, donationware.

Wired period piece on the Google versus Facebook struggle:
"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search."

Long article, simple idea: analyse the backlinks of sites that are high in the SERPS for your niche to see how they did it.

Fascinating how visible an impending crisis is in email patterns:
"the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.
[...] may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely."

Google resource center on performance optimization.
Articles, videos and downloadable tools.
Includes tips on how to optimize CSS declarations, how to optimize JavaScript code and avoid memory leaks, how to use the best image format and prefetch resources.
Also released Google equivalent of YSlow, Yahoo's Firefox extension for performance tips.

MS version of Google Translate

… with Andrew Lewman, the Executive Directory of the Tor Project + some legal guidance from Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Summary at http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/tor-and-the-legality-of-runnin.html

Bing.com's equivalent of Google Trends.
Apparently more up-to-date than Google Trends, but non-US data is really poor.

How Wordpress'Matt Mullenweg spends his day

The home of the handy Wordpress iPhone app.
You can write and edit pages and posts, but the most practical application is probably comment moderation.

"Web 2.0 was created so that people could publish cute photos of their cats. But this same cat dissemination technology has proved extremely helpful for activists, who’ve turned these tools to their own purposes.
[...]
But blocking a tool that is mostly used for amusement or communication between friends has consequences – the users looking for cute cat videos get annoyed that YouTube is blocked… and learn about their government’s willingness to constrain speech. This cost doesn’t mean that governments won’t choose to block these tools, but it makes the calculus more complicated."

Apparently every Latin character has a flipped-upside-down version somewhere in Unicode?
Somewhat older version of same idea at http://revfad.com/flip.html.

Impressive Dutch concept: generic "augmented reality browser" for Android.
"Layars" already available: immo data (Funda), ATMs (ING), jobs, places to go out (Hyves)…

Resources on Linked (aka semantic) data, collected by Tom Heath, Researcher in the Platform Division at Talis.