Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Every hasthag becomes a chat room.
Login in (with Twitter OAuth) and tweet with hashtags automatically added.
Like Tweetbe.at – although tweetbe.at doesn't require login to just display the searchstream/channel.

[Multitaskers are] "suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them."
"They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing," Ophir said. "The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds."

Kevin Marks on Twitter:
- Flow: not an unread count of messages, just a list of recent ones, so you don't have email's inbox problem
- Faces: taps into deep mental structures that we all have to looks for faces and associate the information we receive with people we decide to trust
- Phatic: full of social gestures that are like apes grooming each other (ununderstandable for outsiders)
- Following: Making the relationship asymmetric enables the network to grow, yet keeps it an intimate experience
- Publics: there is no such thing as ONE public sphere
- Mutual Media: spontaneous order that emerges from people communicating in parallel
- Small world networks: we're used to the idea of having an institution tell us what is news—but that is really a left-over anomaly from 20th Century mass media

Dare Obasanjo speculates why RSS readers never got mainstream:
- prevalent folder and inbox paradigm inferior to river of news
- read- only, doesn't allow for feedback/conversation within the tool itself
- "faces" are missing! (feeds/feed item visualisation is impersonal)
- hassle of RSS-subscribing
Dare:
"I hope eventually get fixed since it is holding back the benefits people can get from reading blogs and/other activity streams using the open & standard infrastructure of the Web"

I'm still using an RSS reader and find it superior to twitter for useful stuff that takes a bit more patience than the umpteenth viral item…

Eerlijke presentatie door ingehuurd communicatiebureau over een "social media" project dat op een tenenkrommende manier is geflopt door onbegrip van de opdrachtgever (College Den Haag):
- feedback vragen over een document dat al helemaal uitgewerkt en af is. Misschien wilden ze enkel lof horen – of zagen ze social media (de laatste hippe trend, toch) enkel als verspreidingskanaal, in plaats van conversatiekanaal?
- geen aansluiting of gaan opzoeken van al bestaand communities (nee, het stadsbestuur wou er nog eens zijn eigen kanaal bij..)
- aanwending wiki voor dit omvangrijk en abstract document dat al af was (resultaat: wiki is niet gebruikt)
Resultaat: 2000 bezoekers (voor stad van 500.000 inwoners), bounce graad 50%, 500 bezoekers uit stadhuis zelf…
Noot: het document zelf is wel degelijk aangevuld en bijgestuurd. Niet duidelijk of de online campagne daar echt wel bij geholpen heeft…
Interessante lessons learned!

WP plugin that finds "conversations" on your posting elsewhere (Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg…) and allows you to display the associated comments inline with your own.

FB's official reaction to the Canadian Privacy Watchdog's conclusions on the Facebook platform:
"Facebook will introduce a new permissions model that will require applications to specify the categories of information they wish to access and obtain express consent from the user before any data is shared. In addition, the user will also have to specifically approve any access to their friends’ information, which would still be subject to the friend’s privacy and application settings"
So it looks like it will be a combination of application – specific requests for granular access from the part of the user that installs the application, combined with default settings for application access from each of their friends.

Posting on Facebook developer blog in response to Canadian Privacy Watchdog's conclusions:
"we've committed to requiring developers to specify in advance what categories of user data they will need. When users authorize an application, they will have the opportunity to opt out of giving certain pieces of information. There may be some fields that, at minimum, are necessary for the application to function. We will make it clear that the user must authorize the required fields in order to use the application. We also anticipate that users will need to opt in to giving applications access to their friends' data"
The goal of course remains:
"We plan on providing users with examples of ways applications utilize their data to create great social experiences. This should result in better informed users who are more eager to engage with applications on Facebook."

The experiences of the Windows Live team when rolling out OpenID support:
- one namespace for their hotmail, live.com, msn.com etc.. users -> so an extra alias: confusing
- different places to sign in: confusing
Conclusion:
- they 'll use directed identity and hide the alias for users!
(which is the SSO approach – versus the "url = identity" approach)

Test how your Google search results for your web pages page might look like after marking them up with Microformats or RDFa.

After the investigation by the Canadian Privacy Commission, Facebook will need to redesign its application platform so that it:
"will prevent any application from accessing information until it obtains express consent for each category of personal information it wishes to access".
"Canada is the first country in the world to complete a comprehensive investigation into Facebook’s privacy practices. I know that European regulators and the Australian Commissioner have also begun looking at social networking issues."

http://priv.gc.ca/speech/2009/sp-d_20090827_e.cfm

However:
"Application developers will only have access to the personal information of the user’s friends if the user provides express consent. Even then, those friends can stop their information from going to developers, for example, by blocking all applications or specific applications."

http://priv.gc.ca/speech/2009/sp-d_20090827_ed_e.cfm

So apps will still have access to friends' data, even without their approval.

"Create natural sounding words that contain some character sequence" (and check if the .com and .net have been registered!)
(via @bnox on Twitter)

Host your OpenID provider on your home server: : in this case, a your home computer (or even a $100 appliance made by them) that runs a webserver on port > 1024. You'll need to enable port forwarding at your home router and use their dynamic dns service. A bit too convoluted, if you ask me…

Proxy that transparently adds OAuth headers to requests, so you can browse OAuth protected resources

"robot that will help you get the most out of your Twitter network by finding the best news stories for you"
Sounds like what microplaza.com is doing?

This document describes all the parameters that are available in the YouTube embedded player. Appending these parameters to the SWF URL allow you to set things like color and borders, as well as whether to enable the JavaScript API for the player.

just append #t=XXmYYs to a YouTube URL, where XX is the number of minutes and YY is the number of seconds. For example:

YouTube's embedded player has a parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that should be skipped before starting to play the video.
Append &start=[number of seconds from the start of the video] to both URLs.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk&hl=en&fs=1&start=15"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk&hl=en&fs=1&start=15" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Twitter might become one of the most important ways to annotate physical space:
"You will be creating a trail of mini-reviews and news as you go through life."

Yet another great online "Dive into" book by Mark Pilgrim.
TOC:
A Quite Biased History of HTML 5
Installing an HTML 5-capable Browser (or Two, or Three)
Stop Littering (Your Markup)
Let’s Call It a Draw(ing Surface)
Multimedia in a Flash (Without That Other Thing)
SELECT * FROM BROWSER WHERE 5 > 2
Thread The Needle, Thread The Script
Let’s Take This Offline
You Are Here (And So Is Everybody Else)
Web Forms, Reinvented
“Distributed Extensibility” And Other Fancy Words

Blog post in which Google calls upon people to turn on location data for Google maps for Mobile – so people contribute to crowdsourcing traffic data.
Privacy safeguards are: start and end of journey will be dropped, phone data is anonymous.

Blog by (anonymous) white hat web application hacker on security and privacy issues with Social Networking Sites.
(inrss tag indicates RSS subscription)

I had considered a similar FB app myself but this is done ever so much more brilliantly: by taking the quiz, you learn about the most problematic privacy aspects of Facebook applications.
Done by an ACLU guy: Chris Conley http://blog.aclu.org/author/cconley/

"WALTER WAUTERS ergert zich aan sporters die alleen nog twitteren en niet meer met journalisten willen praten."
Heerlijk. De betreffende journalist klaagt over de wijzigende machtsverhouding: de sporter (vervang door om het even welk individu die een publiek wil bereiken en dat voorheen via de pers moest doen) heeft de journalist niet meer nodig omdat zij/hij zelf rechtstreeks kan communiceren via Twitter (wat dus blijkbaar beter aanslaat dan blogs een paar jaar geleden).

"Microsoft Research and Bill Gates have been working on a project together to release what Gates believes are some of the greatest science lectures ever recorded. These “Messenger” lectures were given by physicist Richard Feynman back in 1964 at Cornell University and Gates had the opportunity to watch them all while on vacation some 20 years ago. Gates felt after watching them that these lectures should be available to everyone because they explain what science is about while remaining engaging. He set about buying the rights to the seven lecture courses included in the series and making them available on the web. The result is Project Tuva (named after the Russian republic Feynman was fascinated with) which uses Silverlight as a base to present the lectures in a browser window. There is also an introduction video by Bill Gates explaining why Project Tuva exists and a video taking you through the features available on the site."

What it says.
Video lectures from a number US (US == Earth apparently) Universities on a range of subjects, sometimes entire courses you can subscribe to (e.g. game theory).

Here you can modify privacy and other settings for Adobe Flash Player. Strangely enough, "privacy" for Adobe just means access control to your camera/microphone, Flash cookie information is governed by storage settings. Check out:
- Global storage settings panel: Move the slider to the left to make the website ask for more storage
- Website storage settings panel: here you can control individual data storage per website
Other settings are on data storage, security, notifications of updates, and the use of the camera and microphone installed on your computer.

Firefox extension to manage flash cookies aka LSO's, Local Shared Objects, that many sites are now using to get around blocked browser cookies.
"Better Privacy serves to protect against not deletable longterm cookies, a new generation of 'Super-Cookie', which silently conquered the internet. This new cookie generation offers unlimited user tracking to industry and market research. [...] Flash-cookies (Local Shared Objects, LSO) are pieces of information placed on your computer by a Flash plugin. Those Super-Cookies are placed in central system folders and so protected from deletion. [...] BetterPrivacy can stop them, by allowing to silently remove those objects on every browser exit."

State of affairs when it comes to usage of flash cookies:
- usage is widespread: more than half of the internet’s top websites
- usage is diverse
- in extreme cases, flash cookies are used as backup to reinstate deleted traditional browser cookies
- cookie management is intransparent and only possible via a flash control on Adobe's website

The blogpost announcing tr.im will be shut down by lack of monetization options:
"nobody wanted it in exchange a token amount of money. No one perceived any value in it, or they wanted to operate a shortener under a differently branded domain name"

Chris Messina on Branding and Openid, how OpenID accounts can be a branding vector – or a reputation vector you can buy:
"symbiosis of making an intentional choice about identity: Creative Commons finds a new revenue opportunity and members of the community have a way to express their affiliation and promote the brand"
Reminds of the prestige that was linked to an apache.org email address, and how people were accused of becoming committers just to have that domain in their email

Comic strip formatted blogpost by Jeremy Keith (Adactio).
On the xhtml/html 5 debate. Great!

"Het project OpenTaal maakt vrije Nederlandstalige taalhulpbestanden voor gebruik in opensourceprojecten. We werken aan schrijftaal in de vorm van spellingcontrole, woordafbreking, synoniemenlijsten en grammaticacontrole."

Discussie over zin of onzin van SSL.
Security4all maakt ophef over gebrek aan SSL bij overheidssites.
Andere security specialisten nuanceren noodzaak (geeft schijnzekerheid) en leggen nadruk op app security problemen.

I expect more visualisations of serps over time will be built now this has become possible…
"After performing a search, click on "Show options", select "Custom date range" and enter at least one of the two dates."
Afterwards you can fiddle with the url

Start from an English phrase, have it translated to Japanese and then back and forth between En and Jp until "equilibrium" has been reached.
Would be nice to have a similar service for Dutch

Interesting when you already use Google groups to communicate: group membership can be used to grant access to Google docs.
"sharing calendars, sites and documents with multiple people is easy — instead of adding people one at a time, you can simply share with an entire Google Group"

Great visualisation of (ego)search results.
"Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile."
Via Bnox.be : http://www.bnox.be/2009/08/how-internet-sees-me.html