Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Retrospect by Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström on the emergence of:
- user-centric web 2003-2006 from the document-centric web
- realtime web, originally in proprietary form (Twitter, Friendfeed), now open and decentralised (pubSubHubhub)

Work in progress:
- Portable profiles
- Distributed push publishing
- Synchronized conversation threads

Kaliya Hamlin on the OpenID/Infocard implementation at federal US sites.
The authentication at these sites will have the character of a "portable cookie" – no info exchange/data linking between sites (directed identity), no transfer of personal data.
See these posting by Andy Oram for more detail: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/07/shortening-cookies-using-openi.html and http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/08/privacy-and-open-government-co.html

Facebook's API and Facebook Query Language (FQL) give a view on Facebook data that misses the subtleties of the interface – so you get a "naked" and somewhat startling view on friends' (or just all people your app got access to) data:
"I didn't just get back future events my friends were attending. I got everything they had been invited to: past and present, attending or not. "
"I've been able to obtain status feeds, even for users who have very tight privacy settings, although I had to tweak my own application's privileges to do so."
"most interesting part of all of this have been dark users. Like dark matter, these users are not directly observable, usually because they've completely disabled API access."
"If your friend has granted the application the read_stream privilege, then it can read your status stream. Even if a friend of a friend has done this, and you comment on your friend's status entries, it's possible to infer your existence and retrieve those discussions "

"multi-level horizontal CSS menu created using a regular nested HTML list, then turned into a fully functional drop down menu using CSS and a touch of jQuery. The sub menus slide in and out into view, which also automatically reposition themselves horizontally if too close to the window's right edge"
Via @jeroendemiranda

Step-by-step on how to have a Google Custom search page on your WP blog.

Announcement of the new Twitter api that lets apps add location in a non-explicit way to every tweet.

breakdown of the various components of a cookie and what they mean for security.
Tips to:
* Limit the amount of sensitive information stored in the cookie.
* Limit the subdomains and paths to prevent interception by another application.
* Enforce SSL so the cookie isn’t sent in cleartext.
* Make the cookie HttpOnly so its not accessible to javascript.

software tool for an in-depth quantitative analysis of the whole Wikipedia project.
Has produced a number of graphs on article size distribution per language, number of authors versus article length, evolution of number of articles, etc…

Mentioned facts and opinions are pretty well know, still a good writeup on the impediments on and marginalisation of anonymous speech on the internet.
(covers both privacy and online culture).

- downloads albums (your own and albums you have access to) from the two popular image sharing sites Facebook and Flickr
- desktop photo organizer in its own right, supporting features like face recognition and mobile access to your library

a few steps to take to ensure some preferred level of Google privacy:
1. Use Google Privacy Greasemonkey Scripts (removing tracking scripts and redirectes)
2. Configure Your FireFox Browser (switch of referer string)
3. Disable Google Web History
4. Configure or Uninstall Google Toolbar

Going further in linking search data to economic behaviour. Search data might become one of the leading indicators of the economy?
"Google Domestic Trends track Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. Changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide unique economic insight."

"The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect."

"Over the past 8 months I tried and tested practically all of the key players in ’social media monitoring services’: Radian6, BuzzMetricsBrandwatch, Attentio, Techrigy (SM2) etc [...] And I have very few good words to say about them.
[...] the software and service is verging on epic fail – very problematic and clunky solutions wrapped in a big bold shiny (but rather hollow) promises."

"Greasemonkey userscript that will check your network at scheduled intervals to see if anyone has removed you and alert you when it happens"
There are Facebook apps that do this, but this userscript will have data stored in your browser, not in some 3d party server.

Dave Winer happy with WordPress choosing RSScloud as way to subscribe to real-time updates.
As Techcrunch puts it:
"This could also mean the beginning of a new format war for the real-time web, reminiscent of the old RSS vs Atom battles. Another groups of developers, lead by Brad Fitzpatrick, published a format and cloud hub known as pubsubhubbub, which is now being supported by Google Reader."

(deel 2 van een) goed geschreven intro tot schrijven voor het web.

(deel 1 van een) goed geschreven intro tot schrijven voor het web.

"The oauth_consumer generator creates a controller to manage the authentication flow between your application and any number of external OAuth secured applications that you wish to connect to"

"It’s like a virtual graffiti wall, a community bulletin board, and a poster-covered lightpost, all rolled into one. Using the GPS in your iPhone, it shows you messages that other people have left at the place you’re standing, and it lets you leave your own messages, too. It’s anonymous unless you decide to share more. You can even privately reply to other users while still remaining anonymous."
Just wondering how spamproof it 'll turn out to be. Nice concept, wonder whether it can ever work. But hey, that's what people thought of Wikipedia as well!

"Google's product search engine started to show suggestions when you type a query. The suggestions are obtained by comparing your partial query with popular searches."
Wondering whether it can be used as an api to fetch related keywords.

Brilliant. Cory Doctorow bashing Cloud Computing in The Guardian as it pushes business models we actually wanted to get rid of :
"Since the rise of the commercial, civilian internet, investors have dreamed of a return to the high-profitability monopoly telecoms world that the hyper-competitive net annihilated. Investors loved its pay-per-minute model, a model that charged extra for every single "service,""

Draft versie van een _leesbaar_, in gewoon Nederlands opgesteld websitereglement voor een user-generated content site.
Covert huisregels, copyright, liability, privacy en niet-doorgifte gegevens

like del.icio.us for iPhone apps…
"features ratings, reviews, automatically generated peer recommendations and a bunch of social features that the App Store clearly lacks."

Most popular pages on wikipedia during the last hour.
Given Wikipedia's dominance of the SERPS, this probably should give an indication as well on the most popular search queries of the last hour… ?

Just like http://zerozero88.com, Tweetmenews serves you personalised news on Twitter.
Design is nicer and signup is smoother than 0088.
Quality yet untested.

In which the person behind XKCD looks into the way men stand in toilets, and how to maximize and minimize their efficiency.
(Finally, mathematics solving REAL-world problems)
"And, of course, if you want to make things really awkward, I suggest printing out this article and trying to explain it to the guy peeing next to you."

"popularity algorithms from reddit, delicious, stumbleupon, hacker news, etc. Very thorough explanations of different popularity approaches."