Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Interesting: apart from the normal domain tools, this site also archives historical registrant information of domain names…

"some tools and resources you may not know about that can streamline your link building campaigns"

An essay by Bruce Perens on how we became too dependent on network connections and hosted computing and communications infrastructure.

"Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city."

"Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people.

What's new is something consultant and social technologist Clay Shirky calls "Coase's Floor," below which we find projects and activities that aren't worth their organizational costs — things so esoteric, so frivolous, so nonsensical, or just so thoroughly unimportant that no organization, large or small, would ever bother with them. Things that you shake your head at when you see them and think, "That's ridiculous."

Sounds a lot like the Internet, doesn't it?"

at last a voice of reason in the valuation debate on url shortening services… by a guy who ran some of them in the nineties…

Works like usernamecheck.com: run a username availability check on about 120 popular socialmedia services.
"Thwart Social Media Identity Theft, check Username Availability"

(via @pforret)
1. View high quality videos
2. Embed Higher Quality Videos
3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part
4. Hide the search box
5. Embed only a part of Video
6. Autoplay an embedded video
7. Loop an embedded video
8. Disable Related Videos
9. Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering
10. Download Video

(Many of these tricks can of course be expoited by bookmarklets, Greasemonkey userscripts or browser extension…)

Have a look at the HTML source.
The images are base-64 encoded and embedded in the source.
"most browsers get image tags that use data URIs starting with data:image/png;base64, but IE gets served a Content-type:message/rfc822 header and a MIME formatted multipart/related document, as used by e-mail clients to embed inline image attachments"
So the php code caters for that. (via Simon Willison)

John Battelle asks the question whether Google isn't using its power in search to advance its position in the social networking arena… ("register with us if you want to be found in the SERPS") – which is basically an incitement to egospamming.

Danny Sullivan on
- the history of Google profiles
- the "profile optimisation" battle that probably will start in "crowded namespaces"
- linkspamming via Google profiles
- the username = gmail account name issue

BTW: at this moment, all of this (including the search [me] gimmick) only seems to work for Google.com, not the localised versions

"reBoxed sorts unread emails in your Gmail Inbox by the importance of the sender. You start by voting on pairs of contacts – "whose emails are more important?". Your votes are then combined with your friends' votes. reBoxed's algorithm then sorts your inbox based on this input."

Would be unthinkable under EU laws…

Inventory of bookmark popularity lists (à la Digg Frontpage or Del.icio.us popular)

"web application that organizes information chronologically. Google News Timeline allows users to view news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and more on a zoomable, graphical timeline."

The search box is very powerful, but you first need to pick a category from the drop-down. Google lets you add different sources: blogs, newspapers and it shows structured information from Wikipedia and Freebase."
See paintings example at http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-news-timeline_20.html

"The Mine! project is about equipping people with tools and functionality that will help them:
1. take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge),
2. arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) it according to their needs and preferences and
3. share it on their own terms
4. whilst connected and networked on the web."

"De cursus Logica in actie introduceert op toegankelijke wijze de kernbegrippen van de logica en de belangrijkste logische systemen, zoals propositielogica en predikaatlogica. Deze cursus met een studielast van 25 uur laat ook toepassingen zien in de informatica, wiskundige bewijzen en speltheorie. De auteurs streefden niet naar volledigheid in thema’s en interdisciplinaire connecties. Wel wilde men de actieve lezer voorbereiden op de vele mogelijkheden die met enige kennis van logica zichtbaar worden want de logica is verbindend thema tussen alle disciplines: alfa, bèta en gamma."

Google Friendconnect gadgest as yet another lightweight event organisation helper…
(signup + calendaring + mapping + social a strong combination of functionality!)

"combines identities across various social network/media sites and provides you with a profile about an individual. Simply navigate to the profile page or a blog of an individual you are interested in and on Windows press Alt i or on the Mac press Ctrl i."

"Robots.txt has been with us for over 14 years, but how many of us knew that in addition to the disallow directive there’s a noindex directive that Googlebot obeys? That noindexed pages don’t end up in the index but disallowed pages do, and the latter can show up in the search results (albeit with less information since the spiders can’t see the page content)? That disallowed pages still accumulate PageRank? That robots.txt can accept a limited form of pattern matching? That, because of that last feature, you can selectively disallow not just directories but also particular filetypes (well, file extensions to be more exact)? That a robots.txt disallowed page can’t be accessed by the spiders, so they can’t read and obey a meta robots tag contained within the page?"

Eran Hammer-Lahav compares "Sign in with Twitter" versus Facebook Connect (on is based on standards, another isn't) and sign in with Twitter versus OpenID: the first makes sense as additional _identification_ on top of already existing authentication. Or: It only makes sense to add the button if you have implemented Twitter Oauth and really do something with Twitter functionality. If you just want anyone to log in, use OpenID.
Yet: Twitter is not an OpenID provider yet, so a lot of people will implement this as an extra "proprietary" OpenID…

Could become a popular alternative to signing in with Facebook Connect, Friendconnect or OpenID.
Just unclear to me why not become standard OpenID provider – OpenID popup also is just one click…?

With the inlinefeed plugin you can display and embed RSS/ATOM feeds in your WordPress posts and pages using the following shortcode:

[inlinefeed rss_feed_url="http://feed.xml"]

"Click or otherwise focus openid text field to automatically put your openid in it. When installing, replace 'http://arty.name/' with your openid"
(depends on the naming convention 'openid_url' for openid input fields)

"ADDING noise to search-engine records could help keep surfers' identities private. A team from Microsoft Research in Mountain View, California, says the technique is a major step towards "provable privacy"."

"notes and research on distributed key-value stores that might be suitable as RDBMS replacements under the right conditions"

4 tips, 3 apps to help you.

Drupal Administration Menu, FCKEditor, TinyMCE, IMCE, Pathauto, Metatags, Page Title, XML Sitemap, Google Analytics, Views, CCK, CAPTCHA

"Google search result pages will link to a gateway URL before delivering the visitor to his final destination. These gateway URLs will replace search result URLs exposed via the Referer HTTP header"

Before

http://www.google----escape_autolink_uri:a6cb1b44e5dacb46f97d43037f8f087a----.tld/search

After

http://www.google----escape_autolink_uri:a6cb1b44e5dacb46f97d43037f8f087a----.tld/url

Scripts & plugins will have to change. _Every_ click will now be tracked, instead of relying on a JavaScript onclick event.

Several issues here: by exposing your profile you also expose your gmail account.
And once you know the URL of a Google profile, you can find other things: Google Maps reviews and edits, Google forum questions, Google Books collections and probably other activity pages.
Making content or data public or even discoverable that was not written with publicness in mind, is always asking for trouble…

Screensharing (live screencasting) for $5 for a 24h timeslot.
Switching screens is easy, so you can use it for webconferencing as well.
Analogous to Yuuguu and dimdim. Review: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pocket_meeting_a_5_webex_killer.php

Auto-follow back service. Analogous to SocialToo and Twollow (which happens to be on sale right now).
(I know you should not use this – however it could be useful if you set an automated bot in the market – so people can dm and thus email you)

How to combine two cookies
( Google already knows this, but you might not )
1. On the Google home page, force the browser to fetch an invisible image or iframe from DoubleClick.
2. Overwrite the doubleclick.net cookie ID to match the google.com ID that was just recorded.
3. Keep it up until nearly all browsers show a Google ID in their DoubleClick cookie.

Bookmarklet to "zip up" articles into one page that are spread over multiple pages using "previous/next" navigation.

Rand Fishkin's appreciation and visualisation of how ranking factors have evolved.

Essay: in the olden days, when we went from one stage of life to another, or from one place to another, we could leave behind our old selves and reinvent a new identity, unhindered by social control or the expectations of our old friends and family.
Will the new generation lack that freedom?

Mashup of Twitter search engines – combines tweeted links and pictures, as well as authoritative Twitter users to the actual tweetsearch.

A simple, open, web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol & open source reference implementation that runs on Google App Engine.

Decentralized and free. Anybody can run a server or anybody can use an open server (like our reference implementation).

(Another) Online favicon generator (from uploaded or linked .gif or .jpg)