Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

"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.