Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Much anticipated project by Mathematica-create and overall genius Stephen Wolfram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram
Instead of a search engine, he built an "answering machine" by extracting formal knowledge from the internet's unstructured data.

"With filters (and labels) you can use Gmail to handle a ton of incoming mail. [...]
But managing the filters themselves has been another story. Each filter has to be crafted individually [...]
Filter import/export, available today in Gmail Labs, helps you work with filters in bulk, rather than just one at a time."

This is a feature I (and other users) suggested a few months ago: http://twurl.nl/bzylvh
Especially useful when you want to move from regular Gmail to Gmail hosted on your own domain.

Long transcript of a 1-hour interview with Eric Schmidt.
Interesting quotes on transparency and privacy (typical for the engineering attitude):
"transparency is how you keep societies honest. … they serve as a form of check and balance on the powerful, the rich, the people who might exploit others."
"the fact of the matter is that we’ve given up something in terms of privacy in return for these other things."
"the trick is that people should have control over what they choose to — people should have control over what they — what information they publish. As long as the answer is that I chose to make a mess of myself with this picture"

Great 3d party Flickr iPhone App, more than worth its $0.79

"Technorati for Twitter": decodes Twitter URL shorteners, and then provides a domain search on it. Good for ego searches: fill in your domain name and subscribe to the search feed of tweets where a url within your domain was mentioned.

Online book:
"In writing this book, we have tried to use our own experience to explain (and condense) a selection of the thousands and thousands of available pages of documentation. We spend time on spelling out unwritten customs and pointing out the implications of the most basic policies for a new editor to give a view of Wikipedia and how it actually works."

Report a deceased person to Facebook. I guess they send an email with an undo-link to the reported account…

Depending on the http referer, the WP-greet box will show a customised greeting and suggest the reader to sign up for further updates (rss, twitter…) or promote the blog post or page on social bookmarking services.

"it's now much easier to get content from different Web sources and to build mashups—if you have access to the right APIs and tools. Discover how you can combine an obscure cross-domain call technique (JSONP) and a flexible JavaScript library (jQuery) to build powerful mashups surprisingly quickly."

- Sort links by linking domains :LinkHounds, Domain Backlinks Checker, Seobook BackLink Analyzer
- Analyze external anchor text: Backlink Watch, Smart back links, Analyze Back Links, Link Diagnosis, Link VooDoo, Seobook BackLink Analyzer
- Visualize your links Link VooDoo, Link Diagnosis
- Gives your link profile overview: Linkscape

"The story of the Gaussian copula function that made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels – and which almost destroyed the economy as a side-effect."

"The story of the Gaussian copula function that made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels – and which almost destroyed the economy as a side-effect."

Genesis as the first ecological parable… fascinating!

Interesting story on how the impact of social software/collaboration tools remains limited if they just rely on voluntary contribution/participation.

"The growth of the collective intelligence site so far largely has been fueled by early adopters and enthusiasts, according to Rasmussen. About all those who would have joined and shared their knowledge on the social networking site have already done so. If the intelligence agencies want to get further gains from the site, they need to incorporate it into their own formal decision making process, he contended. Until that happens, the social networking aspect of Intellipedia is "just a marginal revolution," he said."

Have my doubts on the artistic value of the project, but it brings home the message really good: your search history gives insight in your life and most intimate thoughts…
"August 4, 2006, the personal search queries of 650,000 AOL (America Online) users accidentally ended up on the Internet, for all to see. These search queries were entered in AOL's search engine over a three-month period. After three days AOL realized their blunder and removed the data from their site, but the sensitive private data had already leaked to several other sites."

(Skype) interview with Chris Messina by Boaz Sender
Transcript at http://htmltimes.com/chris-messina.php