Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Great quote on EU-US cultural differences:

"Europeans harbor much greater sensitivities to privacy issues while Americans tend to concentrate on matters concerning “property” (physical, personal and intellectual). This is evidenced by yesterday’s blow up around Facebook’s changes to their Terms of Service. On the one hand, there’s this weird American outcry against Facebook owning your data (in common, at least) forever. From the European side, it seems like the concern is centered more around what the changes mean to one’s privacy, rather than whether Facebook can perpetually “make money” off your stuff"

and another one illustrating the "privacy-sceptic" web geek view:

"this will be the year that people have their “mindframes” bent around new conceptions of personal privacy and control and ownership of data. [...] people’s desire to share will overcome their desire for control over their personal data, and that they will gradually realize that sharing will require letting go."

Hard disk erasing utility (so deleted file cannot be recovered).
Similar software: "Eraser", see http://www.heidi.ie/node/6

"This post starts off with a brief history of recent algorithm updates, and shows the enormous weight Google is placing on branded search results"
If Aaron Wall is right about this, established companies can breathe with relief and

"If I wanted to construct the most infectious biological virus possible, I would start with the most contagious existing pathogens and work off of them"

Jonathan Zittrain ('s pretty neutral stance) on the Facebook Terms of Service and data ownership controversy.

"Facebook and other social networks have an especially tricky time in this zone, since so much user data is relational. You upload a photo of you and me; I tag it with your name. I leave Facebook — does your name disappear from the photo since I was the one who originally tagged it? Should all traces of someone vanish from everyone’s news feed, or is the alert that X posted a photo (along with a thumbnail of the photo) a different contribution than … posting the photo? "

Antwoord dat ik als medewerker van CBP gaf gecopy-pastet op phpBB.nl forum.

De TNT postcode database (of postcode tabel) van Nederland is een commercieel product. Dit project probeert via crowdsourcing (à la Wikipedia, Openstreetmap) dezelfde database samen te stellen én beschikbaar te stellen als API.

"Google Analytics links and online manuals compilation "

Writeup of Digitalplanet interview with Chris Messina on OpenID.
I guess Bill Thompson had InfoCards on his mind when he talks about possible other solutions?

Essay by EPIC-Executive Director Marc Rotenberg on the privacy issues with Facebook: an overview of the main controversies so far and the info advertisers and application developers obtain.

"document management and collaboration are distinct activities:

- Document management is all about workflow, control, and risk mitigation. Its objective is summarized perfectly by the two words in its name: "documents" and "management". It got its start in the legal departments of pharmaceutical companies, who were concerned to make sure that their companies were producing documentation in full compliance with regulatory requirements. A DMS thrives where there are a) documents already being created as part of a business process; and b) those documents need to be closely checked in, checked out, supervised, edited, approved, and stored following a consistent and audit-proof process.

- Collaboration, by contrast, is all about people working together to share ideas, notes, questions, comments, etc. Collaboration does not typically follow a standard process; it is much more free-form and free-flowing. Documents are not typically the format of choice.

Over the past two years, McKinsey has studied more than 50 early adopters to garner insights into successful efforts to use Web 2.0 as a way of unlocking participation.
We have identified six critical factors that determine the outcome of efforts to implement these technologies:
1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.
2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale.
3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used
4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets.
5. The right solution comes from the right participants.Targeting users who can create a critical mass for participation as well as add value is another key to success.
6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk. A common reason for failed participation is discomfort with it, or even fear.

"the quickest way to see who several Twitter users have in common"
Only works for public accounts, but still extremely useful and interesting tool… especially when used for twitterers not known to you or with whom you only have weak ties with.
The lazyweb works http://twitter.com/pascalvanhecke/statuses/1136908753

"It requires you create a new CNAME record which have a value pub-123.afd.ghs.google.com. where pub-123 is your AdSense publisher ID."

Eenvoudig online facturen maken en versturen. Tot 3 facturen per maand gratis.
"De interface van MoneyBird.nl is een toonbeeld van duidelijkheid, waardoor het opstellen van facturen werkelijk kinderspel is. Belangrijk voor Belgische gebruikers is wel dat je bij de Instellingen de Nederlandse btw-tarieven (onze noorderburen hanteren 6% en 19%) even vervangt door de Belgische."
Zie bespreking t-zine http://blogs.tijd.be/tzine/2009/02/maak-en-verzend-in-een-handomdraai-facturen-in-je-moerstaal.html

if you're seeking to maximize your ranking ability for a given piece of content [...] keep it on 1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense)
Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com

Exceptions:
- SERP saturation: create extra subdomains to control more of the SERPs for a given keyword
- keyword as subdomain to make sure the keyword is in the url

"The most comprehensive people search on the web"
Name, username and reverse email and phone number lookup.
Judging on the results page, it has collected information on a lot of local profile databases (e.g. Hyves) to aggregate those deep searches most relevant for your location.

Deep search witin 41 social networking sites.

"Free People Search | People Finder"
One of the earliest People search engines, heavily relying on user contribution.
Discussed by Tim O'reilly here: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/why-im-so-excit.html

convention for translating an XML document into a JSON object

Article from 2005 explaining JSONP (or how to syndicate data via JSON while circumventing same-orgin policy – only use this when you trust the syndicating server!)

Converts a publicly accessible (not requiring any authentication) xml document into JSONp (a json object with parameterizable callback function) so you can use the xml data in your javascript and circumvent XMLHttpRequests's same origin policy.

"Ik word niet blij van dit vonnis. Het resultaat is dat dedicated search engines niet meer mogen zonder de toestemming van de doorzochte rechthebbende."
"Als je het databankenrecht zo gaat oprekken dat het cumulatieve effect van zoekacties geacht wordt te zijn het overnemen van een substantieel deel van een databank, dan geldt dat natuurlijk ook voor de non-dedicated search engines. Dus ook voor Google. Een uiterst onwenselijk resultaat waardoor het world wide web in zijn fundamenten wordt aangetast."
So true…

"add this <link> tag to specify your preferred version:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish" />
inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678"

The rel="canonical" directive will be supported by the three big SEs: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo

"Opmerkelijk en m.i. te kort door de bocht is de eis van het CBP dat ieder verzoek tot verwijdering van een leraar ingewilligd moet worden:

Het belang van een individuele leraar die aangeeft niet (meer) op de site vermeld te willen staan, dient daarom altijd te prevaleren boven het algemene belang van de verantwoordelijke.

Dit is opmerkelijk, omdat de privacywet in normaal een afweging van belangen en omstandigheden van het geval vereist. Als de beheerder van de site een groter belang heeft om de informatie te laten staan, dan mag de informatie blijven staan ook als de betrokkene deze eraf wil. Kennelijk is het CBP van mening dat dat per definitie onmogelijk is bij Beoordeelmijnleraar.nl. "

Open source file archiver – replaces WinZip

"command line too used to give you the cryptographic hash for a file"

Information resource on Web hooks, featuring http://blog.webhooks.org/ , http://wiki.webhooks.org/ and mailinglist http://groups.google.com/group/webhooks:
"Web hooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks. The idea is to have web applications let users register post-receive URLs for various events. This can be used as a lightweight alternative to XMPP for real-time push notifications, but also for integrating arbitrary web services."

"Your users rate stuff on your site. You want to put the highest-rated stuff at the top and lowest-rated at the bottom. You need some sort of "score" to sort by."
Make sure that ranking is meaningful!

Fill out your username… script will check tens of services to see whethe that name has been registered.

[Discussion of] the concepts of identity, authentication, and authorization, to help you understand their important distinctions
Identity: A notable characteristic of identity is that it is public, and it has to be this way
Authentication: Prove that it's you with a secret known (presumably) only by you
Authorization: token or ticket constraining your ability to roam freely throughout the system
(was quoted by Bruce Schneier as a good essay)

"suite of tools allows Delicious users to organize their bookmarks using facets. Facette offers a bookmarks browser that automatically organizes tags in a user's account. Facette also offers an enhanced version of Delicious' tagging tool"
Even without using the Facette-specific tags or notation, Facette makes a number of intelligent classification guesses (probably based on other users' input), see my own page: http://facette.csail.mit.edu/user/pascalvanhecke

"Wordpress plugin that includes the following features:

* Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
* ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
* A digg-like Tweet-This Button
* Automatic Tweeting of new posts
* A Most-Tweeted Widget
* A Recently-Tweeted Widget
* A My-Last-Tweets Widget
* A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget"

"Internet games, gambling and other forms of online entertainment have seen significant surges in use in the several months since the economic downturn deepened [...]
The number of visitors to online game sites jumped 29.9% during the fourth quarter of last year"

Highlights an old internet business issue: time-waisting sites attract economically poor users and are hard to monetize…

"An open redirect isn't a bug or a security flaw in and of itself—for some uses they have to be left fairly open. But there are a few things you can do to prevent your redirects from being abused or at least to make them less attractive targets:
- check the referer
- disallow off-site redirects
- use a whitelist
- sign your redirects
- exclude search engines from the redirect script"

"social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services: search results are aggregated from numerous popular social media sources, including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube etc. and remixed as a single stream of information"

"Rutberg was the victim of a new, targeted version of a very old scam — the “Nigerian,” or “419,” ploy. The first reports of such scams emerged back in November, part of a new trend in the computer underground — rather than sending out millions of spam messages in the hopes of trapping a tiny fractions of recipients, Web criminals are getting much more personal in their attacks, using social networking sites and other databases to make their story lines much more believable."
"Victims of the scam — or any bout with Facebook identity theft — should fill out this form: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=account_compromised. "