Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Tips for (young) users of social networking sites to protect their own (and others') privacy. By Digibewust.nl, an online education initiative of the Dutch government.

"Enter a URL, and we'll give you a screenshot"
The service is quick and simple, and uses a GET request on the url, so you could create a bookmarklet out of it:

http://www.superscreenshot.com/getscreen.php?url=pascal.vanhecke.info

high-level comparison of the cloud computing offerings from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Some excerpts:
Amazon (AWS)
* Most mature offering of the three.
Google (AppEngine)
* I get the sense that Google is trying to appeal to a small and focused audience (well, as small as Google can). There is nothing wrong with this approach, but I think long term I would feel handcuffed on their platform.
Microsoft (Windows Azure)
* Microsoft still has a lot of "execution" to complete, but overall I am thoroughly impressed with the total breadth of their offering.

"userscript that pares down Google Reader to what I consider to be the essentials. In particular, it's made for looking at feeds in the expanded view, using Keyboard Shortcuts instead of on screen buttons [...] ideal for using with Fluid.app or Mozilla Prism to create a standalone application"
I guess we'll see more of these…

"extension for Firefox that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image. With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window – from a small selection, to a complete page."
Note: a version that posts the image to a WP blog is at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8204

"Adobe AIR based RSS Feed Reader with offline/online Google Reader synchronization built in.
Keeps track of multiple Google Reader accounts simultaneously. Read, tag and star your scoops/posts on the train or wherever you like and Scoop will synchronize your changes with Google when you’re back online"
(Note: RSS bandit is a Windows based alternative)

Turns RSS feeds into PDF magazine, emailed to you at regular intervals.
Could be useful to feed to paper office workers?

Good writeup: "Google SearchWiki — a new feature that allows you to move and comment on search results — has been out for less than a day, and it’s amazing to see how much confusion (as well as commentary) there is already developing. So below, some clarification on how it works, opportunities search marketers should consider, some privacy issues and ideas for improving it."

Javascript using Jquery library to that transforms a series of div's into a slider

Workflow on how to register with an infocard at a WP blog (such as Kim Cameron's) with the Pamela Project extension.
(I left a comment at http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1027#comment-6540 on the necessity of email addresses during registration)

"The FireFox Identity Selector extension implements support for CardSpace on Windows, giving FireFox parity with IE."

"All downloads on this site (except for the SVS products) are "pre-packaged" for SVS using the virtual software archive (VSA) format. Therefore, the SVS client is required to install any of the downloads. It is the use of SVS that makes our downloads 100% safe. "
I used to use SVS when it came out… revisiting this list of possible downloads on top of SVS made me reinstall it.

"Good Data is a complete, on-demand business intelligence platform combining analytics, reporting, data warehousing and data integration. Our service allows you to start analyzing data and sharing your findings immediately."
Inspired by a blogpost by Tim O'Reilly apparently…

"[facebook] will facilitate our illusions of friendship and connection by making such social contact nearly effortless and highly insulated [...] It maintains our friendships for us by storing a configuration of the network of all the people who have ever mattered to us while exempting us from that particular effort that we had already, in fact, stopped bothering to make."
Yep, forget management still lacking…

"Carl Hewitt is principally known for work dating back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he helped lay the foundations for a declarative, message-oriented model of computation."
Complementary to an interview Jon Udell made with Carl Hewitt at http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/11/24/carl-hewitt-on-clients-everywhere-scalable-semantics-and-wikipedia/

"Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it [...] When all our ephemeral conversations can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply. Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence." (Schneier on Security)

firefox greasemonkey enhancement called “searchwiki on/off“ which lets you turn Google SearchWiki on if you need it

you can make the cluttering (Google SearchWiki) icons dissapear with Adblock plus (Firefox users): add the following “element hiding rules” to Adblock Plus:

google.com#BUTTON(class=wci)
google.com#BUTTON(class=w10)
google.com#BUTTON(class=w20)

"scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Google map"

"uses Yahoo! Search and Delicious to help you analyze the pages that are linking to a given URL"
Powerful and permalinkable.

Andy Baio’s in-depth tutorial on submitting HITs to Mechanical Turk (with transcription as an example)

"Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send [...] the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or more than $2m (£1.28m) per year.
While this was a good return, said the researchers, it did suggest that spammers were not making the vast sums of money that some people have predicted in the past."

"lightweight OpenID based Internet identity server. Instead of registering at every web site with different username and password combinations you use your identity server to log you in"
(From the people behind the Around me open source collaboration app)

"Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?"
About $0.50.

"Facebook officials believe someone obtained Adrian's log-in credentials through a "phishing" scheme, luring him to a dummy site where he was asked to enter his Facebook password."
(Nigerian scam on Facebook and other social networks – another example of username-password antipattern consequences)

"The goal of this work was to gain an understanding of youth new media practice in the U.S. by engaging in ethnographic research across a diverse range of youth populations, sites, and activities. A collaboration between 28 researchers and research collaborators, this was a large ethnographic project funded by the MacArthur Foundation"

Difference with a traditional wiki: you see other editor's changes in realtime, so you effectively work together on the same document without overwriting other person's changes.
Typically to be used together with a voice and Im connection.

Long biographic piece on Chris Messina and Tara Hunt in San Francisco magazine, exploring how open people can be about their private lives, and on the difficulties they inflict upon themselves when personal relationships turn sour.
Chris Messina: “I think information should be open and free and available,” he says, “but not everyone should let all information about their relationships be public all the time. Some things should be private.”

really simple plugin that redirects your WordPress searches (?s=search-term) to the pretty-looking URI version: /search/search-term, and also converts spaces (%20) to plus symbols

Niall Kennedy took up the task of rewriting Twitter frontend on Google App engine, using Twitter's api and probably some screenscraping.
Reads as a checklist for localisation, usability, seo and caching. Not sure whether Twitter will like a copy of its site with advertisements though.

companion wiki to the "Designing social interfaces" book that Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone are currently writing for O'Reilly Media: "We decided to share the patterns as we write the patterns and the book to get community feedback. We think that hearing a variety of opinions about these topics will make the material stronger and more representative of what's happening in social interfaces. As we complete sections of the book, we will be adding the patterns. "

French privacy and digital rights group

"Het reactieformulier zoals dit op duizenden sites te vinden is, lijkt de grootste dooddoener voor de wet. Zo'n formulier valt onder het elektronisch verzamelen en verwerken van gegevens; zelfs wanneer iemand dit vrijwillig invult. Ook een script waarmee het aantal bezoekers wordt geteld valt hieronder, zodra de IP-adressen zichtbaar zijn voor de beheerder."

As usual from Dare Obasanjo: a clearly written analysis.
"Windows Azure is currently a Platform as a Service offering, not a utility computing offering"
To me, it seems like the "Azure" moniker is as all-encompassing as the .Net moniker almost 10 years ago… It does look impressive though.

Janrain's hosted (OpenID) authentication service, "handles the UI, authentication, and import of user profile and registration data".
Should take the headache out of delegated authentication – just wondering about possible lock-in.

Technical summary:

- Adding RPX to your website doesn't require any changes to your database, and its only requirements are the ability for your servers to make outbound HTTPS calls and to parse JSON or XML.
- When configuring the sign-in interface, you supply a token_url parameter to where the user will be redirected once they have finished the OpenID authentication process. A token parameter is passed to the token_url, which you must extract and pass into the auth_info API call.
- RPX normalizes profile data from our sources into a standardized format (Facebook, Hcard, Sreg…)
- you get the userdata using the token and the back-channel API calls you will make to the RPX servers

Google has (apparently) integrated the bookmarking/tagging functionality into Google reader…
This gives you the possibility to integrate and mix stuff you share from within Google Reader with external pages (that are not part of an RSS feed)

On Facebook platform and Google Opensocial – which risk to be abandoned, according to the author:
"we're left with a bitter taste in our mouths after the latest moves from some big platform players. The platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization"

"building a platform isn't just about making the developers who use the platform successful but also making sure that the platform itself furthers the goals of its developers in the first place"

"Yahoo! has allowed users to opt-in to allowing an application used by a member of their social network to access their personal information. This is a very user-centric approach and avoids the draconian practice of services like Facebook that get around this issue by not providing any personally idenitifable user information via their APIs. Instead a user can specify which pieces of their personal information they don't mind being accessed by 3rd party applications being used by their friends"

AWS content delivery service:
* Store the original versions of your files in an Amazon S3 bucket.
* Create a distribution to register that bucket with Amazon CloudFront through a simple API call.
* Use your distribution’s domain name in your web pages or application. When end users request an object using this domain name, they are automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content.

"Advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 2003 Server and DOS.
Eraser is Free software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License."

"a content delivery network has servers across the world and they automatically determine the fastest (or the shortest) route between the server hosting the site and the end-user [...]
If you are using Amazon S3 for hosting images, you can consider using their their new CloudFront service for content delivery. Like Amazon S3, CloudFront is inexpensive (you pay for what you use) and gives all the benefits of a typical CDN service."

Service that captures a screenshot of (part of a) web page and translates it into image area map html code so you can embed ("quote") a visual representation of the page with all the links preserved. Has a context sensitive versionas well, that does the selection for you.
Has bookmarklets.

"This OpenSocial application provides the ability to write and save JavaScript code samples to execute against OpenSocial containers. This helps rapidly test sample OpenSocial code."

Another Iphone app directory (like http://appshopper.com/)
"Sort, comment, rate, review, and search for the best iPhone Apps." Apparently built using WordPress!?