Notes, links and conversation

One of the nice things about Twitter’s social background noise is that you actually can shut it down - like putting on headphones in a bustling office when you want to concentrate on a task. But you might want to avoid anger and irritation when someone actually wants to talk to you and calls your name… and you seem to ignore them. So far, intelligent headphones haven’t been invented yet (as far as I know). On Twitter however, there are a few ways not to miss the occasional personal address (”address” as in “being spoken to” :-) ) that is the “@username” reply. (more…)

One of the reasons for the runaway success of Facebook compared to blogging is imho the (perceived) privacy users enjoy. Detailed profile data is only visible to confirmed friends and members of the same “network”. Facebook networks (schools, companies and regional networks) are supposed to be mere representations of their equivalents in meatspace: the idea is that you can check out the faces you encounter at campus, in the high-school hallway or in the company canteen. (more…)

Automattic is reaping the rewards for years of hard work. Automattic is the company behind comment spam filter Akismet and Wordpress.com, and of course the magnificent open source blogging software started by Matt Mullenweg. But how do they make money from their free blog hosting service? (more…)

You really want to install this Firefox extension but you can’t? Because it’s not compatible with your browser (screen shot)? Or you have upgraded your browser and some of your favourite add-ons got disabled? Happens a lot with more exotic extensions, or if you’re using a minority browser like Seamonkey, (the old) Mozilla, or (the brand new) Flock. However, you do not need to despair: (more…)

There’s little to add to the many great writeups, presentations and screencasts on OpenID, but I thought it would be fun to have a bookmarklet that checks whether a page URL can be used as an OpenID login, so whether that page already has been “claimed”. (more…)

Do you want more control over which mails end up in your inbox? Then every time you give out your email address at a site, use an alias specific for that url. It helps you to track where (and by whom) mail addresses are being used, and lets you filter or block unnecessary mails. Here’s how: (more…)

There are several screen-scraping services out there, but Dapper is one that’s both versatile and visual. With a bit of trial and error, everyone can transform html web pages (or more precisely: changes in web pages) into email notifications, a startpage widget, RSS or another syndication format. Take this example: (more…)

Twitter is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and at first, it can be difficult to get your head around. So, before I try to make my point on Twitter, let me introduce you to IM-Bob and SMS-Alice: (more…)

There are several online services that warn you when your website is down or too slow. Here are three free services I tried (”free as in “freemium“). Feel free to add your findings or experiences… (more…)

I got an email from Mr. Robert Lo, Foreign Service Manager at Delixi Global Resources, based in Hong Kong. The sender was robertlo@shaw.ca, but the reply-to mail address was delixicompany_agent@yahoo.co.uk, the mail mentioned a website, but no website address was given, and the mail was not sent from Hong Kong, but from Alberta, Canada (ISP location via IP address). The most remarkable about this apparent job scam, was that they got my email address via the blogger community (and former blog statistics service and ad network) at performancing.com. (more…)

You’re a Mybloglog user? Then you probably have had to log in again to have your avatar reappear at the blogs you visit. Some hours ago MyblogLog changed the way they place an identifier cookie at your harddisk. The reason: it was all too obvious how to take over someone else’s identity. More than a month ago, my fellow Belgian eMich (Michaël Uyttersprot) had already posted how to do this (I summarize his French-language post): (more…)