Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

"RSS Mixer allows you to mix multiple feeds into one. Your new feed will be available in the following formats: Feed, HTML, Mobile, Widgets. RSS Mixer can handle most podcast and multimedia feeds. This includes mp3, mp4, Flash video, QuickTime, and most image file formats."

Looks like a good solution for one-off, throwaway jobs where Yahoo Pipes would be overkill (but there are a dozen services like this and their business model is questionable)

"Global marketplace for logo design, business card design, graphic design and website design"
Name refers to the crowdsourcing concept. Ask "the community" and choose the best design. You need to pay as soon as there are more than 25 entries, regardless whether you choose one or not.

On the trend to log and store ever more (at first sight) apparently meaningless data (eating habits to sex life), to be able to analyse and improve your own behaviour:
"Self-tracking [...]is partly about the recording, but also as much about the analysis that goes on after the recording.

The apparent meaninglessness of data recorded over time is actually what makes it profound."

NTC: article explains the mindset of young geeks who see a lot more disadvantage in _not_ tracking data and benefiting from it, than risk in the fact that data might get spilt/known/abused

"Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives."
(Official Google Blog)

Stefanie Olsen's coverage of Rapleaf's reaction to her own damning report on August 31 (ZDNet)

Rapleaf's reaction to the damning coverage by a.o. Cnet/Zdnet on their email harvesting and profile coupling practices

"and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded"
The complex history of the user string: now I understand why IE calls itself Mozilla and Chrome calls itself Safari…

An "inside perspective" on the Google-Mozilla relationship, published back in february, and resurfaced with the Chrome release.

Merlin Mann cutting down everyday distractions:
"What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks — empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen."

"Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”"
Quote from an essay on "ambient awareness", the demise of privacy and identity experimentation en the return of social control… and other social media trends by Clive Thompson – NYTimes.com

such as "find on this page" and "open links in new window"
You can skip the rest of the list, rather have a look at Shaun Inman's shortwaveapp.com.
BTW: select a browser on your pc you don't use anyway (Safari probably ) to manage and sync your bookmark(let)s.

Good writeup in Dutch on dataportability:
"‘Een sociaal experiment met radicale transparantie’, zo noemt Chris Saad zijn Data Portability Project, dat gebruikers van sociale netwerken meer controle wil geven over hun data. Facebook, MySpace, Google en Microsoft praten mee, maar niet met dezelfde agenda. Stiekem gaat deze strijd om openheid vooral over zakelijke invloed."

"quite surprised how many Firebug extensions already exists out there:
* YSlow
* Firecookie
* FirePHP
* RainbowForFirebug
* Jiffy
* Firequark
* LiveCoder
* PixelPerfect
* FirebugCodeCoverage
* Firebug Net Panel History Overlay
* Fireclipse
* Chromebug"

"interface to encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any web page using GnuPG.
Adds some features to the Gmail1 interface, to let you use GPG's features directly in your webmail.
More webmails will probably be supported in the future."

"there’s something else behind all this that I think is super important to realize… and that’s that our fundamental notions and expectations of privacy on the web have to change or will be changed for us. Either we do without tools that augment our cognitive faculties or we embrace them, and in so doing, shim open a window on our behaviors and our habits so that computers, computing environments and web service agents can become more predictive and responsive to them, and in so doing, serve us better. So it goes [...] Each of us will eventually need to choose a data brokers or two in the future and agree to similar terms and conditions, just like we’ve done with banks and credit card providers; and if we haven’t already, just as we have as we’ve done in embracing webmail."