Pascal Van Hecke - Daily Links

Wired article on devices that extend human senses with e.g. absolute sense of direction and how quickly the brain adapts

"Internetbedrijven moeten, naast hun vestigingsadres en een e-mailadres, nog minstens één ander communicatiemiddel op hun site vermelden. Dat mag een telefoonnummer zijn, maar dat hoeft niet." Een contactformulier kan ook, ongeacht wat de verwerking van de input is (omzet naar email of input in ticketingsysteem)

"Firefox Extension which lets you pick a content element on a website. Then the appropriate Microsummary Generator is built on the fly and installed into Firefox. If you then make a bookmark of the same web page, you will get the option to give it the Live Title which you just selected. And this title will get updated in the future, as long as the web page layout is not altered in a drastic way."

Plugin inserting Microsummary info with number of comments approved or in spam/moderation queu:
"Ce plugin vous permettra de suivre, dans un LiveBookmark Firefox, le nombre de commentaires approuvés, en attente et marqués comme spam par votre Wordpress."

We can expect a new wave of people discovering pdf documents on ego-searches:
"Google has indexed documents that were saved as text-based PDFs for quite some time. But many documents wind up being made into PDFs through scans, which store the text as images.
[...]
While adding OCR to Google's indexing engine will certainly make more information searchable and accessible, Google may run into opposition from organizations or universities with scanned PDFs that were placed online specifically for humans, not machines."

Too rough and hackerish given my current time constraints
(exrss tag indicates RSS unsubscription)

Google Reader + Feedburner is indeed an interesting way to merge and republish a number of feeds (and easily maintain the list), instead of Yahoo Pipes or dedicated feed-splicing services.

Page 5 of this pdf presentation contains a map that displays locations where users are more likely to post their photos as "public," which is the default setting, in green. Places where Flickr users are more likely to put privacy controls on their photos show up in red. The sample set was 1 million Flickr users who self-reported their locations, in 2005, probably just after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo.

"it would be nice if some company would jump on that and provide the whistles and bells for iCal/vCal feeds (like those of Google Calendar), just like Feedburner did with RSS/podcast feeds [..] So I introduce the following concept: CalendarBurner"
Some excellent ideas by Peter

"All over the world – from the Americas to Europe to the Middle East to Africa and Asia – companies in the Information & Communications Technology (ICT) sector face increasing government pressure to comply with domestic laws and policies in ways that may conflict with the internationally recognized human rights of freedom of expression and privacy.

In response, a multi-stakeholder group of companies, civil society organizations (including human rights and press freedom groups), investors and academics spent two years negotiating and creating a collaborative approach to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector, and have formed an Initiative to take this work forward."

A critical note at EFF: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/10/global-network-initiative

"Third-party web sites and applications can now let users sign in with their Google user accounts. The OpenID standard eliminates the need for users to establish separate login accounts for every web site they visit–and conversely, for every web site developer to manage login information and security measures–by providing a framework in which users can establish an account with an OpenID provider, such as Google, and use that account to sign into web sites participating in OpenID. "

A history of this page is probably even more interesting than the page itself, try
http://delicious.com/url/a00c98e5675f9437b6fd8d8f2ce2f45e?show=notes_only
and
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.wfs.org/foresight/

On OpenSocial, Dataportability, microformats, XFN and SEO, security risks and concerns regarding all of these publicly revealed social networks, activity streams, "influence", "social targeting", Google Friend connect etc…
Transcript at http://www.theme-zoom.com/196/audio-google-developer-kevin-marks-talks-to-theme-zoom/

This plugin lets you create and edit sidebar widgets on a page-by-page and post-by-post basis.
The widgets are created and you can position them in your normal Widget drag-and-drop interface under "Presentation".
As long as the content is not filled in for a specific post or page (it actually stores the widget content in custom fields), they do not show up.

an 8kb script you can upload to your server, which will present you with an install form, and then perform the entire WordPress install for you, usually in under 30 seconds. It removes the hassle of downloading the latest WordPress version, unzipping and configuring it.

WLW plugin that lets you backup blog settings, draft and recent posts… and other plugins

interactive walkthrough with customizable inputs: change method, encryption, data etc… and see the values change throughout the process

3d part in this series, on security:
"As an authorization delegation protocol, OAuth must be secure and allow the Service Provider to trust the Consumer and validate the credential provided to gain access. To accomplish that, OAuth defines a method for validating the authenticity of HTTP requests. This method is called Signing Requests and in order to understand it, we must first explore the security features and architecture of the protocol, which will be the focus of this part of the Beginner's Guide."

Vidoop has released an experimental browser plugin for a unified OpenID signon experience. Does require the webmaster to add autodiscovery information (xrds item or header info)

"Everyone is currently trying to solve these problems from the standpoint of every individual site’s different implementation, of which no one seems to agree on a standard. We’ve got buttons, IDselectors, URL as Identifiers, email addresses as Identifiers, Google is proposing to do it one way, Yahoo another, etc…

For everyday users to really understand online Identity, we need to solve the problem from the browser level. We need to let the browser act on behalf of the Identity Providers. One quick advantage is that it only requires a handful of project owners to agree on a standardized user experience, rather than every site on the entire Web. Not only that, but discover-ability and education of OpenID can be standardized in the same handful of places."

Nicholas Carr on the narrowing of internet use to Google and Wikipedia, and how the web has changed (in "old" terms: media concentration)

"they do 3rd party constituent validation. The plan right now is to issue OpenID’s that can be used on different services. Because they get third party validation the idea is that legislators will listen to electronic communication more because they know it is from actual constituents."
(via http://www.identitywoman.net/?p=790 )

"Online whiteboard for drawing & team collaboration"
Draw freehand shapes that will be recognized by the software and converted into proper ellipses, squares, etc…
Still find it unusable with a mouse only, need to remember to try it again when I have my drawing tablet installed

Umbrella organisation for European Digital rights groups
"European Digital Rights was founded in June 2002. Currently 28 privacy and civil rights organisations have EDRI membership. They are based or have offices in 17 different countries in Europe."

"Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug."
A Wired advice that assumes everyone wants to blog about the same mainstream issues… written by a Valleywag author.

Tips by Amit Agarwal after redesigning his site:

"Google probably assigns some fixed weight to your URLs which gets distributed across different words used in that URL. Now the weight per keyword will obviously dilute when you have long URLs.
Therefore, it will help if you can manually create URLs with lesser number of keywords but they should also be relevant to the context of your content. It requires a little extra effort at the time of writing your blog post but the may reap good benefits in the long run."

php script + service to convert the headlines of an RSS feed into a png image.
(useful for syndication in places where people can only include an image tag)