Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Round-up of anti-longtail research and theory:
"easy digital replication and efficient communication through cellphones, email and social networking sites encourage fast-moving, fast-changing fads. The result is a homogenisation of tastes that boosts the chances of popular things becoming blockbusters, making the already successful even more successful."

Overzicht van jurisprudentie rond user-reviews en vergelijkingssites
(van Arnoud Engelfriet)

"state of equilibrium [...] between surveillance and sousveillance [...]
This balance (equilibrium) allows the individual to construct their own case from evidence they gather themselves, rather than merely having access to surveillance data that could possibly incriminate them.
Sousveillance, in addition to transparency, can be used to preserve the contextual integrity of surveillance data. For example, a lifelong capture of personal experience could provide "best evidence" over external surveillance data, to prevent the surveillance-only data from being taken out of context."

dead simple music search engine with huge library:
"online jukebox that was designed with the express aim of being simple and easy to use. designed with the future's web technology web 3.0, fizy offers videos and music from a library of more than 50 apis"

Can government agencies use online services (analytics, hosted video) who's privacy policies are unclear and that track each and every visit, mostly unknown to the internet user? (that is, apart from the branding issues)
Strange, because:
"Eight years ago, the issue of cookies tracking users on government sites was a fairly big issue in tech policy circles, drawing the attention of those in Congress. Eventually, the Office of Management and Budget issued a directive that forbid the use of persistent cookies on federal agency sites."

EFF uses a Drupal module that shows a Youtube video screenshot hosted at their own servers instead of the embedded flash file. Only if you click the screenshot, the embed code will be loaded.

"The problem is that Google Analytics cookies are not third-party cookies, they are true first-party cookies. To opt-out using Firefox you need to block all cookies on all domains that are using Google Analytics. And that would also make some of the websites harder to use since many websites uses cookies to save your prefereces."

Microsoft's image search has the option of searching for similar-looking images starting from one result in its image search…

Feature comparison of online polling services Toluna, Micropoll, Google Docs, Polldaddy, Strawpoll, Poll Everywhere, Notifu, Vizu Polls

"- free Windows application that makes it easy to view and manipulate files stored in online services like Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, Windows Live Skydrive and Amazon S3
- mounts a network drive and lets you access the files from remote servers in Windows Explorer"
(using Jungledisk at the moment myself – does the same thing)

"Greasemonkey script that enhances Google's cached pages by adding a virtual scrollbar with all the matches of your keywords. Google highlights your search terms using different colors and this script shows the position of the matches. The virtual scrollbar is clickable and it shows snippets for each match of your search terms."

"MultiMatch is developing a multilingual search engine specifically designed for access, organisation and personalised presentation of cultural heritage information"
EU-funded project (€3 million budget) run by a consortium of scientific institutions

"As an intermediary, the OSP finds itself in a position to collect and store detailed information about its users and their online activities that may be of great interest to third parties [...] In this paper, EFF offers some suggestions, both legal and technical, for best practices that balance the needs of OSPs and their users’ privacy and civil liberties."

Writeup of a widget development project for the Dutch government as a proof of concept of how government data can be used.
- mapping out the data sources
- for personal dashboards or SNS profiles?
- target platforms: Hyves and MSN Live
- open standards and no vendor-lockin
- technical platform choice (ie API)
- definition of a test widget
- widget distribution via galleries (rejected because of mixed branding)
- set of widget archetypes (news, events, images, videos, geodata, calculation, infodisplay)
- reference implementations of each archetype on file so that a request for a new widget can quickly be fulfilled by taking an archetype widget and customizing that

"BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform"
- lets you display search results in the format you like
- add image thumbnails to your results page (similar to Cuil)
- you can even hide certain web pages from appearing in search results
- Yahoo! has promised that they’ll brings ads to Yahoo! Boss so you will be able to monetize site search in the same manner as AdSense for Search

Impressive and handy checklist!

"foaf+ssl is architecturally a simpler alternative to OpenID (fewer connections), that uses X.509 certificates to tie a User Agent (Browser) to a Person identified via a URI"

Comparison of Free and Open Source applications in the social networking/profile aggregation space:
- there are few or no existing well-known sites that provide social networking services to the public with Free Software
- Social networking sites like Facebook are some of the most egregious walled gardens on the Internet today — yet they remain incredibly popular
- discussed: Elgg, diso, AroundMe, Noserub, HelloWorld, Mugshot project, community CMSes like Joomla, Drupal, Tikiwiki…

"Microsoft Subnet blogger Mitchell Ashley is a security expert and social networking junkie. He brings you 12 tried-and-true tips for staying safe as you mingle in the online world."
(all of it pretty obvious, but interesting as an example of user education)

"first comprehensive analysis of the law and policy of privacy on social network sites, using Facebook as its principal example. It explains how Facebook users socialize on the site, why they misunderstand the risks involved, and how their privacy suffers as a result"

VRM samengevat in het Nederlands, vertaling van een engelstalige blogpost van Adriana Lukas

Arguments exchanged between Johannes Ernst and Eric Sachs OpenID product manager in charge at Google, on the unreadable automatically assigned long OpenID URLs as being used by Yahoo and Google.

Brilliant idea: code up a one-page html iPhone app, encode in base-64 and create hyperlink with this form:
<a href="data:text/html;charset=utf-8;base64,Base64EncodedGibberishHere">Link Title</a>
Now you have an html iPhone app that is accessible offline!

Llifestreaming standards and formats – future knowledge hub.
(part of the DISO project)

"[Google Knol] suffers from the same problem as Squidoo, there seems to be a law of the internets where the more freedom you give people to express themselves, the lower the quality is of the content created."
(by Alex Bosworth's Weblog)

"It would seem, despite the best efforts of those who conceived of it, that we've ended up in just the very situation OpenID was designed to prevent — scattered identities that should be, but aren't, linked to each other in any real way.

But in some ways when OpenID first got off the ground it was a solution without a problem. Now that the problem has arrived, will OpenID offer a way out? Given a scenario where you are forced to choose an identity (where we are now) and where you can define your own identity however you like (which OpenID could possibly offer), not needing to choose is almost certainly the winning idea."

"new guidelines, which take effect later this month, impose tough protections on information gathered, for example “on a community page for prostate cancer sufferers” because anyone visiting such a page could be assumed to have the disease. But no such protections need be accorded to someone reading a Web page that simply describes the symptoms or treatment of prostate cancer"

The trade group represents two dozen companies including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL.

Semantic search engine, supports "relationship search":

"Each row is a single result. The first column contains the source of each relationship, or the entities that are performing some action. The second column contains the action (or verb) that defines the relationship, and the third column contains the target of the relationships, the receiver or object of the action.
The Relationship Search result display is designed to solve the problem of finding very specific data within large result sets, where desired information may not be found on the first few pages. One advantage of Relationship Search is that it allows you to define exactly what you are looking for, quickly scan through results, and go straight to the sentences that contain the information you seek. "

Try [scientist] > invented > penicillin as search query: http://tinyurl.com/4z4ftp

"optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set"

Tracking demographics data since november 2008 (probably by screenscraping the advertisers' targeting wizard at http://www.facebook.com/advertising/ ).
Every comparison is permalinkable, so you can share it easily. Graph visualisation can still be better though (e.g. better baseline setting)

"non-intrusive, extensible open source platform that helps you to add social network features to your Ruby on Rails apps"
Compare http://lovdbyless.com/ , http://portal.insoshi.com/ (who position themselves as apps rather than framework)

A plugin developed within Facebook. Looks more light-weight (no "community page") than the alternative

http://www.sociable.es/facebook-connect/

BTW:
"To reduce spamming WordPress automatically adds the nofollow attribute to all comment links, but this is undesirable when the links are generated by a trusted source (e.g the plugin). For this reason the plugin will remove the nofollow attribute from all Facebook user comments. This is configurable on the Settings page. "
Which means signing in with your Facebook credentials goes further than SingleSignOn: it implies you actually want your Facebook profile to be public and searchable…

"The key reason [for not having inline comments] is that we want the feed to be about what your people in your network are doing and not what people you don't know are doing or saying. However with the Facebook feed I often have lengthy threads from people I don't know in my feed taking up valuable space above the fold."

Apart from that, "public" comments in the news feed are privacy-invasive since most people do not realise it's visible to all other connections and other people who have access to the Newsfeed…

"The value of Facebook Connect to Facebook is obvious. They get to become a centralized identity provider for the Web including the benefit of tracking every single time one of their users logs-in on a partner which lets them build an even better advertising profile of their users."

"the genuine question of whether users really want to use one friends' list across every site regardless of context (e.g. interacting with the exact same people on LinkedIn, MySpace and XBox Live) or whether they want to have universal access to any of their friends lists and bridge them when necessary?"

In this opinion published in Nature, scientists call for the availability of drugs such as Adderall, Ritalin and Provigil to healthy adults:
"[These drugs], along with newer technologies such as brain stimulation and prosthetic brain chips, should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology — ways that our uniquely innovative species tries to improve itself."

"Like all new technologies, cognitive enhancement can be used well or poorly. We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function. In a world in which human workspans and lifespans are increasing, cognitive enhancement tools — including the pharmacological — will be increasingly useful for improved quality of life and extended work productivity, as well as to stave off normal and pathological age-related cognitive declines"

Online service that goes through a text and checks how much of it has been published online already

1 Copy & paste your content in the text field or upload a file in such formats like .txt or .doc.
2 Click analyze and our system will compare your text with the search engines' data.
3 Look at the results – you will see Plagiarism percentage %, as well as all the links of sources, where plagiarism was found.

"For hard-core keyboard lovers!
"Don't waste your afternoon drawing UML Sequence Diagrams.
Just enter the description here, and click "draw". The SD/MSC Generator is an easy alternative to using mouse-centric tools like Microsoft Visio

another site which shows what keywords a particular page/domain ranks for… "Parsed approx 44,000,000 keywords with depth of 20 first Google results!"

free open source social network platform built with Ruby on Rails.
Similar older effort: http://portal.insoshi.com/
"Current Features
* Follow a user, mutual following is friending.
* User-to-User Messaging
* Profile Comments
* User Blogs with Comments
* Photo Gallery with Captions
* Site Search for Friends
* Profile Bio and Information
* User Dashboard (Recent Activity of Friends)
* Emailed Activity
* Flickr Integration
* YouTube Integration"

HTML Lorem-Ipsum type filler text fragments for paragraphs and list items of varying lengths.

Suggests Greasemonkey plugins, Adobe Air apps.
Completely under the control of the site owner, since it relies on "link rel" type of autodiscovery. That makes it kind of pointless for Greasemonkey scripts (the site controller can include the functionality anyway…), and also a lot of other extensions/scripts often reflect more the user's than the site owner's interest… Wondering whether there's already an extension that checks userscripts.org for every site you visit?
Idea by Dion Almaer (Ajaxian, former Googler, now @Mozilla).

Compress most toolbars into one and hide most of the browser chrome using extensions.
Good tips if you're using a netbook.

"Keywordfinder uses your term to search the web, extract the relevant keywords from the 50 most successful pages returned and sorts them by frequency."

"make three categories of tags/labels within Google Reader (think folders for old-schoolers). These are:
1. Priority
2. Subject
3. Location
Mine look like this:
* Priority (general importance): Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
* Subject (classical organization): Security, Programming, Design, Humor
* Location (contextual consideration): Industry News, Important World Events, etc.

This is a strategy I use as well, but I'm experimenting with still other qualifiers: frequency, mobile or desktop, timeliness, online/off-line, length, mood…

Google seems to expose more of its internal knowledge base.
Interesting resource if you want to read something in-depth on some browser security topics.

small gadget allowing you to physically share your socialnetworking profiles with friends.
There's a Belgian startup doing exactly the same.

- separate database just for WordPress, limited rights to dedicate WP user
- WordPress secret key generation tool to generate random salts for WordPress cookies in wp-config.php
- change admin username (and secure pswd : obviously…)
- _only_ login over ssl or ssh

"a fusion of sorts between learned, direct language and rapid, practical digital missives takes place with Leetspeak and macros. Both relay a great deal of information in a small burst of code. Each depends on the receiver of the information having working knowledge of the culture and its references. In a sense, these serve as argots, and help identify both sides of the information transfer as belonging to the subculture where they appear. The in-joke is part of the communication. The separation of ingroup and outgroup helps drive the rapid evolution of both leetspeak and macros."

Identity fraud: 1 hour lecture by Prof. dr. mr. Jan Grijpink
Information and Computing Science, UU en Raadadviseur, Ministerie van Justitie

js-based widgets for visualizing and interacting with time-based data

Surprisingly light Firefox-addon for one-click screencasting. Either full screen or browser window.
Only produces .avi however – and only for Windows.
Could be useful for screencasts to be uploaded to video hosting sites.

"Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially."

"multilingual dictionary search page where you can not only look for word meaning but also hear the audio pronunciation of a word or translate it into different languages."
(wondering if I can package this into bookmarklets to make it more handy than the "define" operator)