Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

"Association for Computing Machinery – Special Interest Group Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining "
Data mining researchers' association.
"The primary focus of the SIGKDD is to provide the premier forum for advancement and adoption of the "science" of knowledge discovery and data mining. To do this, SIGKDD will encourage:
* basic research in KDD (through annual research conferences, newsletter and other related activities)
* adoption of "standards" in the market in terms of terminology, evaluation, methodology
* interdisciplinary education among KDD researchers, practitioners, and users "

Google gives insight in the wifi/cell antenna data they collect.
Remarkable: it is technically not feasible to determine whether access points are encrypted or not (see page 3 of the linked pdf).
They do see if SSID's are broadcasted or not (that could be interpreted as an indication the hotspot owner considers his/her wifi hotspot as "private").

verify the validity of a VAT number issued by any Member State

Quick implementation of the Facebook Graph API. Shows you what is public about your profile (available to everybody)

David Recordon describing the most important new standards coming from the Facebook F8 announcements:
- No 24-hour caching limit as long as apps are keeping it up to date and agree to remove it at a user's request.
- realtime update subscriptions (not via Pubsubhubbub, that only models public entries, but via Webhooks: a first implementation of a central data store for private information!)
- open graph protocol that benefits the web: not only Facebook's graph API but also the Open Graph Protocol: increases the amount of semantic data on the web and does so in a fashion which builds on RDFa and Microformats that anyone – including Google, Twitter, and the OpenLike project – can make use of.
- OAuth 2.0 as the only way to interact with the new API: "Want my public data, fetch http://graph.facebook.com/davidrecordon. Want private data, just switch to using SSL and add `access_token` as a parameter"

Comments on F8 announcements from Dataportability point of view (by Elias Bizannes)

- the metadata is good, can be reused by other services (released under the Open Web Foundation Agreement, Version 0.9)
- social plugins (widgets) are FB-specific. If implemented by others, this will lead to Page Real estate war.
– gestures: DP group wants all gestures public so other services can datamine them!? (my view: gestures privacy-sensitive and context-dependent!)
– 24 hour cacheing: a step in the Good direction !? (logical if you want all data to be public…)
- for publishers: host sites have no access to the user’s data, gestures or friends <-> FB has full clickstream and other actions
- Privacy for users: Opt-out -> FB interested in on-ramping its entire userbase rather than user choice

Goal: semantic search engine and e-commerce recommendation engine bootstrapped by pblishers hosting their social widgets and users making proprietary gestures with FB login default auth system

Canada's privacy commisioner warns against Facebook's decision to let app developers store facebook profile content for more than 24 hours (BTW I think she should have been more critical on data exchange with app developers in the first place!)

"One of the changes allows third-party developers who design games and other Facebook applications to store user data indefinitely. Previously, developers were required to delete the data after 24 hours.
“I’m very concerned about these changes. More than half a million developers will have access to this data,” Jennifer Stoddart, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, said in an interview in her Ottawa office. “The information will be stored indefinitely and it opens the possibility that a lot of people can be blackmailed from all corners of the world.” "

BTW ironic: Under the article: FB's new Like (Spy!) Button "788 people like this"

"Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products. The map shows the number of requests that we received between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009"

Google undoubtedly lashing back to governments complaining about privacy…

"Identifying and certainly explaining your business model is often the most challenging part of communicating your start-up ideas [...]
3 tools very helpful to visualize different business model ideas: "

- Business Model Canvas (by Alex Osterwalder)
- Plan Cruncher – Crunch your business plan on 1 page
- 10 Blocks To Design Your Business Model

"The purpose of the presentation is to show the coming bleeding edge features for modern desktop and mobile browsers."

JS:
- new selectors
- web storage, Web SQL db
- web workers (= some form of threading)
- web sockets (aka COMET)
- notifications
- drag and drop
- geolocation

HTML:
- new semantic tags (header, hgroup, nav, section, article, aside, footer)
- new link relations (archive, external, license, noreferrer, pingback, sidebar, tag)
- microdata (itemprops nested within item)
- ARIA attributes (rich applications accessibility)
- new form field types (range, autofocus, placeholder, and some others to come)
- canvas
- audio, video
- canvas 3D

CSS
- new selectors
- new font support (embedded fonts)
- text wrapping
- columns
- other graphical elements
- transitions/transforms/animations

Gewaagde suggestie: 301 redirects op oude archiefartikels die goed scoren op keyword waar je een actueel artikel op hetzelfde onderwerp wil laten op scoren…

The German DPA lashes out to Google for capturing MAC-addresses while capturing data for Google Streetview.
This is a practice/technique already in use for years by local German companies and institutions and by Skyhook, who started the commercial exploitation of wlan location lookup databases.

There already was the gcal2excel { google calendar to excel converter} but that required username+ password.
Install this gadget to export your Google Calendars to Excel.
I keep my Business activities Calendar in a separate account so I can export my activities list (urenregistratie) to Excel for the Dutch tax services…

Funny: buzz contacts list (populated with frequent Gmail contacts) causes embarrassement for ex-Google lobbyist, now in the Obama administration.

A low-tech approach to Drupal distributions: zipped code + database dump
"A "distribution" of Drupal is one or more installation profiles included with Drupal itself and all of the required modules. Distributions can either be offered as a convenience to site builders by bundling together frequently used components, such as Acquia Drupal, or they can be used to offer a version of Drupal specifically targeted to a unique use case, such as Open Publish. "

200$ schema drawing tool, or rather a library of tech/biz/marcom visual language (all of the cliches you can imagine).
Probably worth its money though if you spend a lot of time in Powerpoint. The diagram libraries really cover a lot of fields.

Looks like a good alternative for Altiris SVS (which doesn't work on Windows 7).
"Sandboxie – Sandbox security software for Windows. Install and run programs in a virtual sandbox environment without writing to the hard drive. "

Or in other words: people will pay for discounts with their data…

Course at the University of Pennsylvania that looks at the economic drivers of Web2.0:

"Networked Life looks at how our world is connected — socially, strategically and technologically — and why it matters. ]

# What science underlies these companies?
# How might a social network influence election outcomes?
# What are the economics of email spam?
# Why do some social networking services take off, and others die?
# What do game theory and the Paris subway have to do with Internet routing?
# What structural properties might we expect any social network to have?
# How does Google find what you're looking for…
# …and exactly how do they make money doing so?
# Why do some people spend their time anonymously correcting punctuation on Wikipedia, without compensation or recognition?
# How does your position in an economic network (dis)advantage you?
# How are individual and collective behavior related in complex networks? "

"Kwedit Promise gives you digital content and virtual goods *now* in exchange for Promises to pay for them later. When you’re ready to pay back your Promises, you can use any of the methods provided by Kwedit Direct. Partial or late payments will lower your Kwedit Score and you may no longer be eligible to use Kwedit.'"

Service aimed at teenagers to buy _virtual_ goods… Sounds like a really nifty marketing scheme…

"Here’s how Kwedit works: they let users take on fake debt instead of paying for virtual goods with real money (or via scammy or legitimate offers). A user promises to pay later. It’s not an enforceable promise, and there is really no consequence if a user doesn’t pay. But there are built in incentives to pay it off, and Kwedit expects some percentage of people to actually do so. "

"The HTML5 test score is only an indication of how well your browser supports the upcoming HTML5 standard. It does not try to test all of the new features offered by HTML5, nor does it try to test the functionality of each feature it does detect. Despite these shortcomings we hope that by quantifying the level of support users and web developers will get an idea of how hard the browser manufacturers work on improving their browsers and the web as a development platform. "

Service that automatically saves the links you tweet to del.icio.us.
For me, it's still another medium though: Twitter is timely, conversational – Delicious is about storing and annotating resources.

"Content monetization is the downstream industry, and access is the upstream industry. Google doesn’t have to take over the upstream industry to increase its profits; it just has to destroy their toll booth. By disrupting complementary industries and making them more competitive, Google is increasing their profits in their downstream industry."

Totally disagree with the conclusion though:
"The broader lesson is that monopolies will provide public goods in complementary industries, meaning that they are not as economically harmful as a static analysis would suggest. This is something that policymakers and government agencies should keep in mind as they prosecute firms for antitrust violations."

"The LinkedIn API utilizes OAuth as its authentication method. OAuth is a standard model for negotiating developer authorization and granting access on behalf of specific users for performing API requests. One of OAuth's strengths is the availability of many third party and open source libraries, allowing developers to authenticate with LinkedIn quickly and in a similar manner to how they may authenticate with services like Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and Netflix "

"Accomplish your life goals with public commitment on Twitter – use the #dailygoals hashtag in your tweets to get started."

"With all this privacy erosion, those CEOs may actually be right [on privacy being dead] –but only because they're working to kill privacy. On the Internet, our privacy options are limited to the options those companies give us and how easy they are to find. We have Gmail and Facebook accounts because that's where we socialize these days, and it's hard–especially for the younger generation–to opt out. As long as privacy isn't salient, and as long as these companies are allowed to forcibly change social norms by limiting options, people will increasingly get used to less and less privacy. There's no malice on anyone's part here; it's just market forces in action. If we believe privacy is a social good, something necessary for democracy, liberty and human dignity, then we can't rely on market forces to maintain it. Broad legislation protecting personal privacy by giving people control over their personal data is the only solution."

Online drawing/photoshopping tool for the artistically challenged (like me)
Have a look at http://www.sumopaint.com/help/ for all of the options.

Arvind Narayanan musing on the Facebook "publicly available information" that still is not available for scraping and republishing.
"Technologists draw a simple distinction between data that is public and data that is not. Under this view, the notion of making data more public is meaningless. But common sense tells us otherwise: it’s hard to explain the opposition to public surveillance if you assume that it’s OK to collect, store and use “public” information indiscriminately."
See also Pete Warden's own blog post at http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-got-sued-by-facebook.html and press coverage:
- http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18721-data-sifted-from-facebook-wiped-after-legal-threats.html
- http://www.denverpost.com/ci_14823250

"a PHP unit test and web test framework. Users of JUnit will be familiar with most of the interface. The JWebUnit style functionality is more complete now. It has support for SSL, forms, frames, proxies and basic authentication. The idea is that common but fiddly PHP tasks, such as logging into a site, can be tested easily"

"You may elect to opt-out of Rapleaf and have all your information permanently deleted from Rapleaf's database by submitting your email address below."
(if you don't want Rapleaf to expose your social networking memberships based on your email-address)

By Omar Shahine, Windows Live Lead manager, outlining some design principles:

"
- People don’t want all their data to be public. …
- Different people have different tolerances for how openly they share.…
- People have different privacy needs for different kinds of content. …
- A one-size-fits-all model for privacy is untenable for everyone. …
- Accidentally sharing something private can be disastrous. …
- Not all friends are the same. …
"

Nice meme:
"YoungmeNowme is a collection of photographs of people re-staging photographs from their childhood! Submit yours today…"

What it says:
Facebook has 400 million active users. 50% check in every day. The average Facebook user … spends 55 minutes per day on Facebook … has 130 friends … sends 8 friend requests per month … becomes a fan of 4 pages per month … is invited to 3 events per month … clicks the "like" button on 9 pieces of content per month … is a member of 13 groups.
Author: Henry Blodget, Silicon Alley Insider, March 29, 2010