Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

1 if you have a good connection, play it from the web with teh YouTube Wizard plug-in from skp.mvps.org
2 from you hard disk: convert to .avi with Zamzar.com or MediaConverter.org
3 embed an html page with the video in Powerpoint using the liveweb plug-in

Johnny Chung Lee is the guy that got famous by his youtube movies where he explained how to build a $14 Poor Persons Steadycam and cheap multi-touch interactive systems built with a Wii. Got a job at Microsoft. Too geeky and too hardware-related for me though.
(exrss tag indicates RSS unsubscription)

Weblog gedwongen tot prijsgeven van ip- en mailadres van commenters (lasterlijk tov 3de procederende partij)

"…beschikking van de Voorzitter van de Rechtbank van Eerste Aanleg van Brussel [...], stelt dat ik het volgende moet doen:

(i) de identificatiegegevens mee te delen van de personen verantwoordelijk voor de lasterlijke comments op uw blog

(ii) de comments voorlopig off line te brengen en te houden,

(iii) beide op straffe van een dwangsom van 10.000,00 euro per dag vertraging."

Octobre 2008 report–presented by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and posted to the Federation of American Scientists Web site–examines the possible ways terrorists could use mobile and Web technologies such as the Global Positioning System, digital maps, and Twitter mashups to plan and execute terrorist attacks.
(via http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10075487-83.html)
On Twitter:
"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," the report said."
(sounds a bit incredible terrorists would use something as public as Twitter to plan their activities, doesn't it?)

Bookmarklet that lets you send any image you found in a web page to your account.
Was provided by Flickr years ago, and the backend code still works but the bookmarklet was nowhere to be found anymore.

Google releases a handy guide/checklist with the basic principles of SEO.
"We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. "

userscript that inserts 2 javascript libraries so you have the same functionality of the Oomph IE8 plugin on Firefox: discovery and easy export/download of hCard and hCalendar microformats

Platform-as-a-service, with integrated IDE, object database and javascript as server-side programming language. Founded by 3 ex-Googlers, went live december 2007.
You _can_ host the created applications yourself (java middleware)

(Executive editor of Wired) Kevin Kelly's book in progress.
Unfortunately most of the postings are too long and too philosophical for quick reading snacks. I guess I'll wait for the book then…
(exrss tag indicates rss unsubscription)

"Yahoo! Query Language. YQL treats everything on the Web like a database table; the syntax will be familiar to anyone who's ever used MySQL. [...] all YQL calls need to be signed with oAuth. As long as you are absolutely sure you're not revealing a consumer key that is also used to access user data for some other application, a two-legged oAuth call can be done entirely on the client side with JavaScript."
By Yahoo's Kent Brewster

While Bill Thompson is one of the smartest commentators out there, and I enjoy him on the Digital Planet podcast, his blog with musings and opinions didn't add enough value to the heap of tech opinion blogs I already follow…
(exrss tag indicates rss unsubscription)

"I've taken a crack at creating a typology of what I'll call "network strategies." By that, I mean the various ways a company may seek to benefit from the expanded use of a network, in particular on the Internet:
- Network effect
- Data mines
- Digital sharecropping
- Complements
- Two-sided markets
- Economies of scale, economies of scope, and experience"

Useful classification of Cloud Computing by Tim O'reilly:
# Utility computing (Amazon, Azure)
# Platform as a Service (Force.com, Google App Engine)
# Cloud-based end-user applications

Discrepancy: "Study found Internet users claim to be very conscious about their privacy and guarded about their personal details. Some 84% said they would not give away income details online, however, 89 percent actually willingly did – without any pressure or persuasion."
The actual numbers are at http://www.privacygourmet.com/blog/2008/07/in-june-aol-con.html

Nic Carr points to an interesting analogy to blogging: amateur radio:
"When "the wireless" was introduced to America around 1900, it set off a surge in amateur broadcasting, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the airwaves [...]
But it didn't last. Radio soon came to be dominated by a relatively small number of media companies, with the most popular amateur operators being hired on as radio personalities. Social production was absorbed into corporate production [...] A lot of amateurs continued to pursue their hobby, quite happily, but they found themselves pushed to the periphery. "

"the average "front page" (note, by the way, how the mainstream-media term is pushing aside the more personal "home page") is nearly a megabyte, and three-quarters of the blogs have front pages larger than a half megabyte"
(Nic Carr quote on this study, http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/11/who_killed_the.php)
Images and scripts are the largest contributors to size

"Door fraude met zijn identiteit stond een man dertien jaar onterecht geregistreerd als harddrugscrimineel in informatiesystemen van de overheid. Een drugsverslaafde bleek zich voor hem uit te geven. De man is slachtoffer van het falende registratiesysteem van de [Nederlandse] overheid."

Someone had to jump in with a better alternative to the dreaded Iphone interface…

an api for extracting the semantic signature from free text : "Rather than use ranking algorithms such as Google’s PageRank to predict relevancy, Semantic Search uses semantics, or the science of meaning in language to produce highly relevant search results. In most cases, the goal is to deliver the information queried by a user rather than have a user sort through a list of loosely related keyword results."

Wired article on devices that extend human senses with e.g. absolute sense of direction and how quickly the brain adapts

"Internetbedrijven moeten, naast hun vestigingsadres en een e-mailadres, nog minstens één ander communicatiemiddel op hun site vermelden. Dat mag een telefoonnummer zijn, maar dat hoeft niet." Een contactformulier kan ook, ongeacht wat de verwerking van de input is (omzet naar email of input in ticketingsysteem)

"Firefox Extension which lets you pick a content element on a website. Then the appropriate Microsummary Generator is built on the fly and installed into Firefox. If you then make a bookmark of the same web page, you will get the option to give it the Live Title which you just selected. And this title will get updated in the future, as long as the web page layout is not altered in a drastic way."

Plugin inserting Microsummary info with number of comments approved or in spam/moderation queu:
"Ce plugin vous permettra de suivre, dans un LiveBookmark Firefox, le nombre de commentaires approuvés, en attente et marqués comme spam par votre WordPress."

We can expect a new wave of people discovering pdf documents on ego-searches:
"Google has indexed documents that were saved as text-based PDFs for quite some time. But many documents wind up being made into PDFs through scans, which store the text as images.
[...]
While adding OCR to Google's indexing engine will certainly make more information searchable and accessible, Google may run into opposition from organizations or universities with scanned PDFs that were placed online specifically for humans, not machines."