Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

"current and under-construction Google data center locations that are known today."
(Note: since google doesn't give any details themselves, all of this is guesswork…)

More here http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/11/map-of-all-google-data-center-locations/

"personal pages, profiles and social networks are serving as fodder for companies looking to fill jobs. To mine its employees’ social networking contacts for potential hires, a business can pay for services from companies like Appirio or Jobvite, whose service Mr. Kennedy used. Both are based in the San Francisco area."

And of course I'm wondering what Appirio and Jobvite do with the data once processed…

"How does it work? Put an # in the title, or autopostr as phototag, at every flickr photo you want to be posted on twitter. @autopostr will send automatically a tweet with your new post to all your Twitter friends."
(needs username + password however, the guys should update it to Oauth…)

Tweet this, auto-tinyurl, twitter followers, badges, avatars, latest tweets etc…
With actual php code.

Google Wave will not just be a Google-hosted service with an API, but also have open specifications for a Federation Protocol, the underlying network protocol for sharing waves between wave providers.
It looks like this could be an enterprise-grade DISO…

Tiddlywiki syntax on one page – as a Tidllywiki of course!

services that can be embedded into any web page without requiring coding skills.
Known stuff (embed maps, search results, calendars, news, spreadsheets, presentations, YouTube channels), but now handily bundled in one page

2005 (pre-twitter) article on how Little Brother (us observing each other) will be prevalent in a few years' time.
Focuses on camphones and also mentions the Microsoft Lifebits project.

"Normally, a deleted file is only removed from the directory entry of the file system and still can be easily recovered back from a file recovery software. If you want to completely wipe out any trace of a file, a file shredder or permanent file deleter can do the trick. It completely overwrites junk characters on the space occupied by the original file and makes it unrecoverable."
For Windows:
- http://www.fileshredder.org/
- http://www.sys-shield.com/fileshredder.htm
- http://www.heidi.ie/node/6
- http://www.e-eeasy.com/fileshredder-shreddingsoftware.aspx

Social network sites that use content delivery networks (such as Facebook, that uses Akamai) fail in actually making pictures unavailable that users (think they have) deleted.
Research done by the same guys that published research on analysis of partial social graph information:

http://mobblog.cs.ucl.ac.uk/2009/05/20/8-friends-are-enough/

Intro on programming with key-value stores.
" I'll explain the design and the implementation of a simple clone of Twitter written using PHP and Redis as only database. The programming community uses to look at key-value stores like special databases that can't be used as drop in replacement for a relational database for the development of web applications."

"Winston is a user interface library consisting of common elements in websites and web applications. These elements work together in an ecosystem of conventions, guidelines and best practices. The goal of this library is to provide designers and developers with a solid base to build user interfaces."

(Experimental) extension that displays Wolfram Alpha next to Google Search results

"Free-OCR.com is a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool. You can use this to perform OCR on any image you supply.
Takes either PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF or BMP format. Images must not be larger than 2MB, no wider or higher than 5000 pixels and there is a limit of 10 image uploads per hour."

"Where self-important tweets get the recognition they deserve. "

Just too funny. A Digg-clone for tweets screaming self-importance.

"Twitter Data lets people embed bits of data in their tweets so that computers can read the data and do cool stuff #twitterdata"

It uses the "$name value" tuple convention. Amazing how we geeks revel in recreating functionality on Twitter that used to be in command line interfaces…

Article by Steven Levy (not: Steven Levitt ) on Hal Varian, Google chief economist and the application of auctions to all kinds of logistical, organisational or economic problems.

by Ralf Bendrath, (a.o.) presented at Sigint http://sigint.ccc.de/sigint/2009/wiki/Hauptseite
PDF version of the presentation at http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/Bendrath_Technologie-Privatheit-Ueberwachung.pdf

geoparsing Web service: "Provided with free-form text, the service identifies places mentioned in text, disambiguates those places, and returns unique identifiers (WOEIDs) for each, as well as information about how many times the place was found in the text, and where in the text it was found."

"While Placemaker's database covers the globe and will work for texts in 21 different languages (including texts using double-byte character sets in Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese), it will – at least in this first iteration – work best for texts in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish."

Yet Another Searchengine Needing … ?
Peoplesearch/profileaggregator + reputation management site.
Germany-based.

First of a series of posts on social media and control.
"Social media is cloaked in this language of liberation while the corporate sponsors (Facebook, Google et al ) are progressing towards ever more refined and effective means of manipulating individual behavior (behavioral targeting of ads, recommendation systems, reputation management systems etc.). As with the enlightenment the tactics of control are shielded by a rhetoric of emancipation. Let's not forget that the output of all of this social participation is massive dossiers on individual behavior (your social network profiles, photos, location, status updates, searches etc.) and social activity. "
Part 2 at http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/captivity-of-the-commons.html
Part 3 at http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/the-digital-panopticon.html

Bookmarklet that loads comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, HackerNews and any blog mentioning an article (or a domain, if you're on the homepage) and will load it in a handy sidebar.

"archive of about 63,374 pages which have been deleted from the English-language Wikipedia. Deletionpedia is not a wiki: you cannot edit the pages uploaded here. An automated bot uploads pages as they are deleted from Wikipedia."
Looks like the ultimate adsense + screenscraping idea BTW: no risk of duplicate content

Development environment for creating OpenSocial apps, consisting of Eclipse plug-in and an Apache Shindig server.

"Google is releasing support for parsing and display of microformat data in their search results. While the initial launch will be limited to a specific set of partners (including LinkedIn, Yelp and CNet reviews), the intent is that very quickly, anyone who marks their pages up with the appropriate microformat data will be able to make their information understandable by Google. This technology would allow you to explicitly search, for example, for only printers that had an average customer review of 3 stars or higher."

I think we'll see more of these traditional "data collectors" (credit/background check services) snap up so-called people search engines or aggregators. Reminds me of the Hitwise acquisition by Experian: http://www.experiangroup.com/corporate/news/releases/2007/2007-04-17b/

Collection of WP plugins and themes that "turns WordPress MU into a social network platform".
The developer was hired by Automattic some time ago, and now there's an official first release.
Social networking functionality is limited to the WP-MU installation internally (contrary to the DISO ambitions)

"Running a corporate wiki is much different than running a public wiki. People inside a corporate environment expect certain things that (most) public wikis simply don’t have to worry about. These things include single sign on/integrated authentication, WYSIWYG editing, search that finds more than just wiki pages, formalized input, document versioning (draft, stable, published, etc.), document importing, and document exporting."

Comparison matrix as of April 2009, by Pieter Hofstra.
He's blogging in Dutch on his experiences on how to start a web shop at
http://www.pieterhofstra.com/ and http://www.frankwatching.com/archive/author/pieter-hofstra/

For a marketeers' audience.
Source (in Dutch): http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/20090510_sparkcast_interview_met_tim_oreilly/

A Dutch judge has concluded (in a preliminary judgment) that a website is liable for a wrong suggestion in the snippet text of ‘its’ Google search result. The judge has ordered the webmaster to change its website in a way that will stop the wrong suggestion from showing up in Google.

Note that the offending suggestion "companyname… bankrupt" did not appear on the website itself, but was the consequence of the juxtapostion _by Google_ of two text fragments on that page that contained the keywords searched for: [companyname bankrupt]!

[Dutch version of the story at http://blog.iusmentis.com/2009/05/16/website-aansprakelijk-voor-google-samenvatting/]

Hilarisch oordeel van rechter die vindt dat website-eigenaar verantwoordelijk is voor de juxtapositie in een Google search snippet van een bedrijfsnaam met het woord "failliet". Dit door het feit dat Google twee tekstfragmenten uit de pagina aan elkaar knoopt die beide zoektermen bevatten