Pascal Van Hecke - Daily Links

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog on ever recurring issues: "site structure, geographic as well as language targeting, and content organization."
Specifically advises country-specific domains (TLDs) over language-specific subdomains and directories.
""Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users. Keep navigation and content in the same language on each page.

free tool to find complete information about a website. It is a mashup of over 30 data sources and many algorithms gathering information from Internet on various topics like domain owner, registrar, creation date, primary language, similar sites (*yawn* so far), traffic rank, blog rank, countries in which it's popular, description and "official" contact info, people involved, incoming links, social popularity, traffic, associated people, etc.

Somewhat comparable: builtwith.com

Blog comment crawler: finds comments from all over the Internet, puts them into a stream and makes them searchable.
Autocreates profiles based on the URL you sign with.
At the moment limited to the English-language world, so you probably won't find yourself if you never comment in English.

Writeup by Alper on how to get local coworking initiatives known and organised.

"Hendrik Speck is a Professor of Digital Media / Department of Computer Sciences/ Interactive Media "

Interesting work and publications, but no RSS feed to subscribe to!!

Fred Stutzman describes use cases for an in-enterprise Twitter-like system:
- social info (sender is as important as the message - so sender should be the eye-catcher as well as the message in the visualisation)
- time-critical but not persistent data (that should not end up in your email backlog because it'll be irrelevant when your read it afterwards)

Dipity timeline with the "history of Internet Memes".
Some 100 users seem to have contributed! (via bnox.be)

"Advanced version" of Google Trends:
"With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames."

Marketing gimmick by a "web globalization" consulting firm. Countries are represented by their TLD's, sizes are relative to population (via bnox).
"Although .com is the world’s most popular TLD, it is far from alone. There are more than 260 TLDs in use around the world, most of which are country code top-level domains (ccTLDs)… Each ccTLD is sized relative to the population of the country or territory, with the exception of China and India, which were restrained by 30% to fit the layout. At the other end of the spectrum, the smallest type size used reflects those countries with fewer than 10 million residents. "

But there are exceptions:
"Permission in advance is not necessary if the main content of communication is the exchange of opinions between private persons. If a company prepares a message and then an individual forwards this message to friends, permission must always be obtained. Information concerning the sender and the subject must also be such that a message is identifiable as communication between two private persons.
In order for a company not to have to ask for permission in advance, it cannot offer any kind of prize or benefit for sending a message, such as the opportunity to participate in a drawing or improve chances of winning. In general there should be no consequences to a consumer for sending or not sending a message. The person sending the message should know the content of the message he sends."

It looks like there's a chinese Wall between MS the software company and MS the media company after all… much more user control over privacy, including 3d party scripts/cookies:
"InPrivate™ Browsing lets you control whether or not IE saves your browsing history, cookies, and other data
Delete Browsing History helps you control your browsing history after you’ve visited websites.
InPrivate™ Blocking informs you about content that is in a position to observe your browsing history, and allows you to block it
InPrivate Subscriptions allow you to augment the capability of InPrivate Blocking by subscribing to lists of websites to block or allow."

"The 'micro-blogging' service Twitter gives you 140 characters to answer the question "What are you doing?" The answers, or tweets, are then broadcast to friends. It's a simple premise but internet consultant and author Clay Shirky argues as the service continues to grow, it's creating a complex and influential new way to communicate"

Slate reporter finds some simple ways to cooperate in a DOS attack:
"Paranoid that the Kremlin's hand is everywhere, we risk underestimating the great patriotic rage of many ordinary Russians, who, having been fed too much government propaganda in the last few days, are convinced that they need to crash Georgian Web sites. Many Russians undoubtedly went online to learn how to make mischief, as I did. Within an hour, they, too, could become cyberwarriors." (via lvb.net)

Japanese tabbed web browser, released by Fenrir & Co.
The browser's layout engine can be changed to either Internet Explorer's Trident or Mozilla's Gecko. (support for the Gecko engine limited)
Sleipnir had 6.0% of market share in Japan at September 2006.

"Europe has been colonized three times in the distant past, always from the south. // The pattern of genetic differences among present day Europeans probably reflects the impact of these three ancient migrations, // The map also identifies the existence of two genetic barriers within Europe. One is between the Finns (light blue, upper right) and other Europeans. It arose because the Finnish population was at one time very small and then expanded, bearing the atypical genetics of its few founders. The other is between Italians (yellow, bottom center) and the rest. This may reflect the role of the Alps in impeding free flow of people between Italy and the rest of Europe."

"Bored with manga avatars?

Why not switch yours to a Scrabble letter? Then encourage your friends to change theirs too!

Check your Twitter stream to see what words you can spell.

Just like Scrabble, only more pointless."

"it’s about to be brought home to the majority of mobile users that what they’re up to isn’t private information. "

Since Windows LiveWriter is my favourite desktop blogging tool, I should give this a try…
(the plugin provides you with related links and images based on the text you're writing)

A document from 2005 (!) on the infamous javascript + css browser history phishing technique…

"Her whole digital identity sat precariously on the foundation of her college e-mail account; once I had access to it, the rest of the security defenses fell like a row of dominoes. What's striking about Kim's case is how common it is. For many of us, the abundance of personal information we put online combined with the popular model of sending a password reset e-mail has our online security resting unsteadily on the shoulders of one or two e-mail accounts. In Kim's case some of that information came from a blog, but it could just as easily have come from a MySpace page, a sibling's blog (speaking of their birthday, mom's name, etcetera) or from any number of places online."