Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

"OPEN BRIEF aan de Eerste Kamer": argumenten tegen het opslaan in een centrale databank van twee vingerafdrukken (templates) van elke Nederlander die een reispaspoort krijgt uitgereikt (in tegenstelling tot opslag op énkel het reisdocument zelf, of eventueel enkel hashes in plaats van templates).

Different types:
- One-click Analysis Tools: When you need to know simple things, like the amount of links that point to a specific page or domain
- In-Depth Analysis Tools: might show link building efforts, structures, or maybe even data from the past
- Link Target Tools: help you find new link targets

Year old blogpost by Chris Messina elaborating the differences between Facebook and Opensocial's privacy model:

"So the major difference here is in the mechanism of data delivery and how the information is “leased” or “tethered” to the original source, such that, as Morin said, “when a user deletes an item on Facebook, it gets deleted everywhere else.”

The approach taken by Google Gadgets, and hence OpenSocial, for the most part, has been to tether data back to the source via embedded iframes. This means that if someone deletes or changes a social object, it will be deleted or changed across OpenSocial containers, though they won’t even notice the difference since they never had access to the data to begin with.

The approach that seems likely from Facebook can be intuited by scouring their developer’s terms of service"

"He was a speaker at the Management of Change conference and FederalNewsRadio's Chris Dorobek got to sit down with him.

We talk with Shirky about his thoughts on government 2.0 and the challenges that agencies are facing. "

"It gives real costs on on their servers, how many servers they have, what they are used for, and exactly how they use S2, EBS, CloudFront and other AWS services. This is great information for anybody trying to architect a system and wondering where to run it."

"companies are racing to achieve namespace dominance over your online profile.
Tim O’Reilly warned [us] in his definition of Web 2.0: one of the new kinds of lock-in in the era of [cloud computing] will be owning a namespace. There you have it — who are you going to trust to own yours?"
More than ever the message is: buy your own domain name, and aggregate your public activities over there

service that lets you translate documents by editing the translations automatically generated by Google. Has collaborative features.
Combines the raw statistical power of Google with the work of thousands of human translators that will be feeding their work into a huge Google "translation dictionary" that will improve with every translation performed with the system…

Dries Buytaert's post on Google's structured data announcement:
"Every webmaster wanting to improve click-through rates, reduce bounce rates, and improve conversation rates, can no longer ignore RDFa or Microformats. Structured data is the new SEO."

“Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. ”
About 1400 people bookmarked this story in del.icio.us so far… I’m not the only one who thinks this is a fascinating story…

So far they believed in (statistical) analysis of human-produced content: computers should be able to understand how humans write, humans should not adapt their writing to computers.
Let’s see how it turns out…

An analyst’s job is to translate new developments into metaphors decision makers can understand.
This is how Jeremiah Owyang describes the evolution (a.o. to user-centric identity) in social software:
“The Five Eras of the Social Web:
1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services”
His own post is at http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/04/27/future-of-the-social-web/

On any Amazon product page, click “Link to this Page” in the Amazon Affiliates Toolbar on the top of the page, then click the “bitlyAmazonAffiliateLink” bookmarklet and you will be redirected to bit.ly with a short, trackable link waiting for you.

Create a searchable archive of all of your paper library!
“Using a simple USB-powered barcode scanner, you can easily add your books from off your bookshelf at home to the My Library feature in Google Books”

“search engine taste test.

Type in a search query above, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. The columns are randomised with every query.

The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results?”

“Like the Bing service itself, the API is a re-branded and enhanced version of the Microsoft’s Live Search API:
* Developers can now request data in JSON and XML formats. The SOAP interface that the Live Search API required has also been retained.
* Requested data can be narrowed to one of the following source types: web, news, images, phonebook, spell-checker, related queries, and Encarta instant answer.
* It is now possible to send requests in OpenSearch-compliant RSS format for web, news, image and phonebook queries.
* Client applications will be able to combine any number of different data source types into a single request with a single query string.”

"ikregeer.nl stelt haar data beschikbaar via een Application Programming Interface (API). Dit document is de officiële referentie voor die functionaliteit.
Om gebruik te maken van de REST API moet je in het bezit zijn van een API Key. "

[lessen] uit een aantal wiki-implementaties bij diverse (overheids)organisatie:
- succesvolle wiki’s zijn ontstaan uit een zeer concrete behoefte om een kennisbank op te zetten rond een specifiek onderwerp
- de scope was in eerste instantie klein en afgebakend en is deze later uitgebreid
- langs informele wegen ontstaan: geen sprake van formele besluitvorming of gestandaardiseerde projectuitvoering
- ‘vanuit de werkvloer’ ontstaan, in tegenstelling tot de minst succesvolle die op directieniveau geïnitieerd zijn
- verkochten zichzel: Enthousiaste gebruikers namen de rol van ambassadeurs
- gebruiksvriendelijkheid afgestemd op de doelgroep
- openheid, snelle interactie en dynamiek
- initiële gebruikers mensen met een meer dan gemiddelde affiniteit met ICT

"TOSBack keeps an eye on 44 website policies.
Every time one of them changes, you'll see an update here"
A.o Facebook, Automattic, Flickr, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, Youtube, Amazon.

Q: "Will anonymized data still be able to identify an individual user by cookie or IP address?"
A: "Logs anonymization does not guarantee that the government will not be able to identify a specific computer or user, but it does add another layer of privacy protection to our users’ data."

Transforms the full url of a Flickr.com pic to the Flickr-owned Flic.kr url shortened link

Really bizarre results if you ask me:
- there are less men than women on Twitter, but men are more active and follow more people (wondering whether they filtered out the porn spam accounts???)
- men are more likely to follow other men – even women are more likely to follow men, contrary to other SNSes where content produced by women gets more attention (by both men and other women)

"Would your best friend have been your best friend if you had not been in the same class for three years? And if you had not got to know your wife via mutual friends but in a dodgy bar then would she still have become and remained your wife? "

Research outcome: the influence of the social context on similarity did not differ between partners, friends and acquaintances. This reveals how strongly opportunities to meet influence the social composition of personal networks

Same in Dutch: http://www.nwo.nl/NWOHome.nsf/pages/NWOA_7RJAKH

"searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames"

Campagnesite van Philippe De Backer en Alexander De Croo, beide kandidaat voor de Europese verkiezingen van de Open VLD.
Bevat een privacy zelftest (vooral over social networking) en een aantal voorstellen (vooral op EU niveau).

[Angie Byron is a Drupal community leader]
"Many key individuals who are driving forces within open source projects got their start by fixing typos in documentation or answering other users' support questions. [...] The ultimate goal is to make it as easy as possible, and to provide as many ways as possible, for a “user” to cross the threshold into a “contributor.” "

Perfectionism is the biggest enemy when it comes to user contribution:
- analysis paralysis
- when he ultimate, “immune to criticism” state is achieved, they can develop a deep emotional attachment to their contribution
- Working in isolation eliminates transparency
- “release early, release often” for more interaction and mutual learning

Advanced (but unobstrusive) javascript lightbox code for embedding image galleries, video or external pages.
Built on mootools library.

- Als je geen Mac hebt is je beste optie om Safari 3 en Google Chrome te downloaden voor PC.
- Testen met IE6, 7 en 8: virtualisatie

… of je skipt IE6, en test op IE8 met IE7 compatibility view