Archive for May, 2008
Monday, May 26th, 2008
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“we rolled our own subsystem for logging chat messages (in C++) as well as an epoll-driven web server (in Erlang) that holds online users’ conversations in-memory and serves the long-polled HTTP requests. Both subsystems are clustered and partitioned”
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“You’ll use CompuServe’s Electronic Mail system (we call it Email™) to compose, edit and send letters to friends or business associates. The system delivers any number of messages to other users anywhere in North America.”
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“Hypothesis: Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists. If there’s no porn, the tool doesn’t work. If there’s no activists, the tool doesn’t work well.”
Examples of activist uses of the web, often by political dissidents.
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Sunday, May 25th, 2008
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Netlog (35 million users across Europe) supports OpenSocial. Judging by Patrick Chanezon’s tags, it’s implemented with Shindig.
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Populist Dutch politician Rita Verdonk collects input for her political program via a wiki…
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Friday, May 23rd, 2008
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Dries Buytaert asks for your thoughts on reputation system built on OpenID.
Interesting: “Mollom keeps track of past behavior, and updates the behavior as it receives more data about the user. At the same time, Mollom forgets.”
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“social network portability [seems to be] all about letting data flow freely. There are many purposes that might cause people to want use discretion and context in social network sharing”
Social network data sharing stories respecting privacy and context.
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Message: “people will be more inclined to sign in with OpenID if that page really says something about them, ie if signing in with their url = conveying a message (= I am that person).”
Nice, but: more functionality -> more security issues, more ID theft.
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for any group (smb, family, organization) that wants to issue custom OpenIDs to members.
Either by Wildcard subdomain (xyz.domain.com) or openid.domain.com/xyz.
Adding members by typing in email addresses - they get a wizard to set up the account.
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fact sheet with pro’s and cons of UA (OpenID): cost savings, customer comfort, customer acquisition, specialisation, time-to-market, data sharing by the IP (-> data subscription), ID system integration… Cons: usability, loss of control, reliability…
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Microsoft Live stops digitizing books themselves, and give the digitized versions back to the publishers… Hope to keep “crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries”, will “focus on verticals with high commercial intent”…
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Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
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“Een regeling in het gebruiksreglement of de algemene voorwaarden kunnen helpen. Door af te spreken dat de provider in mag grijpen bij klachten waarvan de provider denkt dat ze terecht zijn,is er geen sprake van wanprestatie als de provider het toch doet”
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“De toespraak van 37 minuten [over rassenkwesties] werd uiteindelijk door meer mensen op YouTube (5 miljoen) bekeken dan op alle kabelzenders in de VS samen” [zo werd] “voor het eerst in veertig jaar, de trend van steeds kortere soundbites werd omgekeerd”
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[Dutch] Over intellectueel eigendom, e-business en IT
Advocaat bij Bird & Bird, houdt zich bezig met auteursrecht, e-business, licentiecontracten, databankenrecht en open source software. (via Arnoud Engelfriet)
(inrss tag indicates RSS subscription)
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“Microsoft is taking the CPA model, which lowers risk to advertisers, and combining it with a straightforward payback mechanism to users. Only about 1/3 of searches are commerce related, but those searches generate 80% of search revenue.” MS VRM?
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Who bookmarked the same pages?
The more bookmarks another user has in common, the higher your similarity
The smaller the number of people who bookmarked a page, the more significant
If a user has lots of bookmarks, common bookmarks are less remarkable
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Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
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Contrary to what the promo-video suggests, a snippet of javascript will _not_ improve your search Engine rankings - using the API with a serverside script on the other hand, will!
Wikified content as a service is really interesting -> standardized API?
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This plugin lets you post/edit via Oauth, so without username/pswd.
I’ve had this idea for about half a year now to write a plugin to publish Oauth-protected blog posts and read them with an Oauth-enabled RSS reader - seems like everything is in place now
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…for more democratic control of the EU. Too much formulated as “should” though, without detailing how they should be achieved. Better would be to indicate specific and tangible partial goals, and campaign for those, instead of for the bigger, vague idea
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Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
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“explores exactly how Google’s new Friend Connect works, with screenshots, data flow, and examples. Friend Connect is a strategic move to use the 3rd party social networks to drive value for Google and businesses both.” (Banned by Facebook meanwhile)
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“neo-newspaper that grabs the freshest links posted to Twitter. Get the most out of citizen journalism with Twitter and TweetWire”
Lays out Tweets like a newspaper — Election, technology, Sports, Celebrity
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partner sites may not include “advocacy against any individual, group, or organization.”
Enturbulation, a fledgling site dedicated to promoting activism against the Church of Scientology, ran Adsense _paid by_ the Church of Scientology.
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memetracker that tracks most shared stories on FriendFeed
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“Opmerkelijk is nu dat een Belgische rechter vorige maand in een vonnis letterlijk stelde dat de grondwettelijk gewaarborgde vrijheid van drukpers enkel geldt voor geschriften, en dus niet voor tekeningen, cartoons of illustraties.”
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It is not too late yet to take both political and technical action in the “Western world”.
Privacy is eroding thanks to date-retention laws, routine government processing of personal data and large scale collection of personal data by commercial entities.
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“Its goal is to provide a complete framework to develop Jabber-related applications or scripts in Ruby.”
“provides all the necessary backend to write scripts or applications acting as Jabber clients or components.”
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“add-on for Internet Explorer and Firefox that allows you to securely save and access your usernames and passwords for sites that are not OpenID-compatible”
Passwords are stored either on hard disk or online at myvidoop.com.
(Sxipper has similar service?)
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“Scott and Luke talk about why SourceForge went OpenID, their support of the Open Source community, identity (why IDP vs. RP) and what issues they ran up against while implementing OpenID.”
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“The Gillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington, Dana Gardner, and Robert W. Anderson - ask former Twitter architect Blaine Cook about Twitter internals including the valuable Track feature. Google engineer Bob Lee joins again.”
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the PPSD combines the USB smart card form factor and USB flash memory on a single platform:
- Smart cards on their own can store a maximum of 256kb
- USB flash drives can hold up to 8 GB
- flash memory’s security is lacking relative to the smart card
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Web 1.0: advertise in traditional media at high rates to get people to our site, in order to sell ads at low rates
Duh!
Web 2.0: get users to create content (ucg) and then promote the service to other people (viral marketing)
How will this be “Duh!”?
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Monday, May 19th, 2008
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Twitter Friend Recommendations. Like Twubble, but serverside and configurable for popularity and region. Permalinks for your own recommendations page: whoshouldifollow.com/accountname
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automatically displays comments made by a post’s author in a distinctive style with no need to edit your template files, etc. All you do is provide a snippet of CSS styling to be applied to author posts.
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Friday, May 16th, 2008
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2 types of applications:
- Enhanced Results replace standard results with a richer display, all links point to the site
- Infobars are appended below search results and can include metadata about the result, related links or content, or user actions
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Introduction to Firebug - handy to refer to for the list and illustrations of (most of) the features
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Scaffold generators for creating your Rails website’s OAuth provider and consumer services. Also great to run as local service to test against your code if you are developing OAuth libraries.
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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
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Google’s (attempt to create an) encyclopaedia of web development.
A.O. by Mark Pilgrim of “Dive into” fame.
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Standards, best practices and actual open source libraries for developing (self-hosted) social media applications.
From the people behind findmeon.org, see http://www.mediaslate.org/wp/2008/04/25/dataportability-in-motion-podcast-episode-5/ for a podcast.
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Tip for Firefox/Opera users with wide screens!
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- skip login screen by adding”&skipauth=true”
- direct link to download for non-logged in users: http://docs.google.com/MiscCommands?command=saveasdoc&exportFormat=ppt&docid=ID
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“We processed 1,024,908,267,229 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,176,470,663 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,588,391 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.”
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Google extracts the most important locations from web pages and lets you see the search results on a map. To restrict your search to web pages, you need to click on “Show search options” and select “Mapped web pages” from the new drop-down.
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If incorporated in Google Apps for your domain, another blow to traditional enterprise software… (from Official Google Gadgets API Blog)
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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
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Sharing links with people you’re connected with via other social networks
(integration with Facebook, del.icio.us, tumblr etc)
Allows you to track link popularity through your network.
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“You need to own hundreds of web domain names before Google accepts you in their program but using the form below, you can immediately know how a website would look had it been an AdSense Parked domain - just enter the URL of some website and hit Submit.”
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“Authenticate using MyOpenID, and the service calls your phone. Pick up and press # to confirm. If you don’t, sign-on fails.”
Phone-based two-factor system that eliminates the need for expensive tokens, card readers, and other devices.
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Veteran tech industry commentator. Too verbose and too US-centric though, so I gave up. (exrss indicates RSS unsubscription)
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“Imagine that we lived in a world where all photography was the kind you see in magazines.. models at the peak of their career.. If you had your picture taken normally, you’d think you were hideously ugly” On UGC in general, excellent anti-Keen argument
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experimental protocol to allow messages to be sent between people without the need to give out an email address
The client (message-sending software) can find the REST endpoint using XRDS/Yadis
(by singpolyma.net)
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by Stephen Paul Weber, author of several WP plugins under the DISO project
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