A similar controversial business is being run by Trademarkpublisher.info, sending out invoices to trademark owners.  I received an invoice of €795 (for a  Benelux trademark that I no longer own).

If you read the terms and conditions (pdf), you’ll notice that the actual service they sell for this hefty price is the “publication” of your trademark.  Which is kind of… unnecessary, since your trademark is already published by the Trademark registration office itself.

The blog posts I found about Trademarkpublisher.info all seem to be Australian.  Apparently they have now expanded their “market” and bought an old (it’s already 5 years since I transferred ownership) database of Benelux trademark owners…  The letter (pdf page 1, 2 and envelope) looks like a (perfectly bilingual) Belgian invoice, and they have a Belgian Bank acount (while registered in Vienna, Austria).  If you or your company received one of these, just be aware that this is not an invoice for renewing your trademark registration…

1 Register at Youtube and subscribe to video channels

2 Go to the "YouTube 2 iTunes" Yahoo Pipe and fill out your Youtube username

3 Run the pipe, and click the "Get as RSS button"

4 Copy that link, go to iTunes, "Advanced", "Subscribe to podcast" and paste

5 You’re done!

Aroundme

An easy one to introduce the idea of location-based searching (really useful in the last-minute Christmas present hunting before the shops close down): go through the menu to find services nearby or type in what you’re looking for (such as “toys” or rather the Dutch equivalent “speelgoed” as in the screenshot) and find how to get to that shop from where you are standing.  The app is nothing but a layer around Google maps but provides a more gentle, step-by-step interface.

Google

Why type? Fire the Google app, bring the phone to your ear and say “pizza“. Then have a look at the screen again and decide which pizzeria you want to call or get directions with the next tap of your finger.  Note: “pizza” is a very safe choice, not only because there are pizzas for everybody’s taste (yes, really useful in last-minute cooking stress) but also because this app is in fact an exercise in imitating American English.  That kind of limits your options, so make sure your guests do not have any outrageous culinary desires.

Snaptell

Want to know more about  that present you just unwrapped?  Take a snapshot with Snaptell and get online prices and background info – see it in action on the first screenshots on the left.  If you’re a bit underwhelmed (“hey, haven’t we been OCR-ing pictures to text for ages?“), consider the example in third screenshot: Snaptell came up with a photographer’s biography when I tried to test it with an anonymous background pic decorating some printwork.  Next time I come across some artwork that looks vaguely familiar but impossible to pinpoint to a name or artist, I know who I can ask…

Midomi

When the Iphone was released, the Shazam app (screenshots left) got a lot of attention: just let it record a sample of music, it ‘ll recognize the track and point you to Youtube versions, discography and biography of the performers, etc…

I found the competitor Midomi (screenshots on the right side) is a lot more fun however…

Apart from having actual music analysed, you can sing/hum the songs or recite some lyrics.  Surprisingly flexible with different (linguistic/cultural) variants of e.g. children’s songs: the screenshot shows the results for a sung/hummed “Flemish” “Broeder Jacob” with the “Dutch” and English-language versions. (In other tests with friends it did perform badly on Czech folk songs though!)

Facemelter

Another source of endless finger-photo fun with children is FaceMelter… need I say more?

(Features animation as well!)

As a bonus: The Internet

How about this Christmas dinner scenario: your brother in law gets fed up with your geekery and throws you a pile of napkins (“Make yourself useful for once!“). Google video search on “napkin fold” will save the day: gather around the iPhone with the entire family and follow as shown…

Your favourite apps?

So how do you convince your tech-sceptical relatives and friends?  Leave your own experience in the comments…

The IE8 extension does something similar as the Firefox Operator plugin, but all of it is implemented in Javascript (using the Jquery library).  In fact, all the extension does, is make the browser insert 2 lines of javascript into the source code of any page it visits to perform the magic.  Jon Udell made a demo page with the javascript already included so you can check its effect with any browser without installing anything (more at Jon’s posting on Oomph).

Inserting lines of javascript automatically in any page?  That sounds like a Greasemonkey job, doesn’t it?  Strangely enough, a search for Oomph and Greasemonkey didn’t result in anything useful.  So that’s why I put this simple Greasemonkey userscript online² that does for Firefox what the IE extension does: alerting you for hCalendar and hCard microformats and making it easy to download or export them.  Install it and head over to Jon Udell’s second version of his demo page that doesn’t have the script yet, to check whether the effect is identical.

Note: as mentioned on the userscript’s page, Microsoft can theoretically follow your clickstream if you install the script (by logging http referer headers on load requests for the script). If you are not comfortable with that, host the Javascript libraries on your own server and replace the path “http://visitmix.com/labs/oomph/1.0/client/” by the new location.

1. although several people have argued that the webslices that came with IE8, are in fact a somewhat different implementation of the hAtom microformat
2. it is in fact based on a similar del.icio.us script I discussed in a posting 2 years ago

Replies tab

You’ll find all of the @replies to you at your replies tab when logged in. All of your replies, meaning: also from people you do not follow – they don’t even have to follow you. That’s different from the @replies in your twitterstream on the front page where you only see tweets (including @-replies) from people you follow¹.

Potentially, the @replies tab is a source for spam, but I haven’t seen any so far – and blocking the account solves the problem. Especially if you want to limit the number of people you follow, but still want to track replies from your followers, the replies tab is your friend.

But: there should be better ways than to check it regularly on the web, not?

Clients that integrate the @replies nicely

As Kris Hoet wrote:

• The client people use can tell you more about how much conversation people are willing to get into. [...]
• The client people use can tell you how fast (or not) people will see your replies, [...].

Like Kris, I really like Twhirl, because it integrates all of the @replies (and direct messages) in a nice and visually distinctive way in your timeline. Switch the display to the last 20 @replies just to check for those that may have dropped from your timeline already. (Next to that, Twhirl is a really modest client, fading in the background automatically and just popping up discretely for a few seconds in your peripheral vision when new tweets arrive.)

However: this will probably work if you’re behind your own computer regularly, not for people on the road or on computers they don’t control.

Authenticated @replies feed

For a more asynchronous way of tracking your @replies, there’s the corresponding feed at http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.rss. However: you’ll need a desktop feed reader, since not a single (as far as I know) web-based feed reader supports http-authentication (Update: Netvibes does – of course you need to trust them).

If you have your own web space, you could de-authenticate the feed with a php script I wrote and host that on a “secret” place². That is in fact how most services who publish personalised, private feeds, do it: they provide you with some “secret, non-guessable url”.

The risk then is that these feeds pop up in other people’s searches if you use them with a web-based feedreader, so the script features an access/privacy restriction. Introduced by Bloglines, it seems to be supported by other web-based feedreaders as well (on the feed-publishing side, only a few services include the element though!).

Still: not a solution for the non-technical and/or web-based user.

Using the Twitter “tracking” feature

Twitters tracking feature is a great way to get notifications when a word or phrase is mentioned, so you could as well use it to track “@your_username”. If you’re brand- or ego-aware than you will probably want to have a lot more words tracked, on top of the ego- and brandname-search feeds you already have running on Technorati and other blog search engines…

As an extra advantage, you also get the name-dropping tweets where “@your_username” is in the middle of the sentence – those are not captured by the @replies feed. Try “track twitter” to test the feature and experience the self-referential nature of the service :-). If you understand Dutch, check out the excellent screencast by Pierre Gorissen).

Two huge disadvantages:

• only works on Instant Messaging or on your phone (make sure notifications are ON), there’s no web-based way to use the tracking feature (you can have them archived in Google Talk/Gmail’s chat folder as a workaround)
• only works for public tweets. People who have their account protected aren’t tracked, not even when you follow them.

Twitter search services

When twitter doesn’t provide a feature, third parties jump in – both:

• Tweetscan: example (feed)
• TerraMinds: example (feed)

seem to provided excellent searches and searchfeeds. Tweetscan doesn’t distinguish between @username and username though, Terraminds does and has a longer history.

But again: only for public tweets!

Sidenote on silos…

If you have a closer look at the above list, there’s a multitude of ways (3d party services) to scan public Tweets for replies, or phrases and keywords in general. It’s a lot harder have that done for private accounts you follow – and you need username and password for it³ – something you shouldn’t trust a 3d party with. In fact, when it comes to non-public information, all content platforms and social networks still are closed silos.

But there’s change in the air: Twitter is one of the services pioneering with OAuth, a generic open specification on how to give access to your private stuff to 3d parties without giving username and password (you give them a unique “access token” you can revoke at any moment).

OAuth doesn’t solve “that other problem” Twitter has though: the constant polling for new updates (via the API and via feeds: 20 times more than “normal” web usage!) tears the service down regularly.

An exciting effort that is going on right now is: moving from polling (or pull) to secure and authenticated push between services, with Jabber, OpenID and Oauth as building blocks. On this side of the Atlantic, it’s Mediamatic in Amsterdam that is bringing people together: check out the project blog on Federating Social Networks – a meeting is planned this very weekend.

More Twitter musings

1. You could ask yourself: why do people use Twitter, that’s supposed to be all about non-critical information, for direct remarks or questions? Isn’t email or private instant messaging more reliable? I tend to think⁴ we use it as a form of social blackmail. By taking your followers as witness, you kind of force the addressee to reply because – “hey, people might think I don’t know the answer or can’t come up with a witty riposte“.

2. In a previous post on Twitter usage, I kind of speculated that after the quick uptake by “IM-Bobs” (the heavy digerati, users that are behind their computer most of the time) a broader, slower uptake would follow by “Sms-Alices” who use it for what Twitter was probably meant for: keeping friends and close relatives up to date on your whereabouts with text messages. This funny New-York Times column seems to contradict that:

“The people who I see using it are [...] people in marketing or P.R. or advertising, who use it for work, to present themselves as particular types of people. They’ll twitter, ‘I’m traveling,’ or ‘I’m going to interesting restaurants.’ They’re using it to do identity work.”

So it’s all marketeers and egomaniacs after all :-) … Whether you feel you fit in either category (or both of them) or not, you nog longer haven an excuse for missing your @replies!

1. you can still fine-tune: either following no conversations at all, or just between them and people you follow as well (the default), or listen to their conversations with “strangers” – the latter is a good way to get to know new people
2. since you do not want to expose tweets from people who keep their tweets protected, right?
3. Update: Twittermail provides this service
4. in fact it was Ine who pointed it out to me :-)

Since you give up privacy to people with whom you share the same physical space in real life anyway, the default option of having your profile visible to members of the same network seems logical. This however goes awfully wrong with regional networks – maybe even more so with the non-US regional networks where they lumped together entire countries or parts of the world where Facebook membership is still scarce.

Regional networks and privacy settings

Joining your regional network is the default step after filling out your location:

Joining a regional network is also a natural thing to do: as soon as people join a global community, the first thing they long for is affirming their local identity. So joining a regional network is for most people just a statement about themselves, just like joining one or more of the gazillion groups on Facebook, whose purpose is nothing but expressing an opinion or idea in the group title.

Facebook however takes its mission of “modeling the social graph” seriously, and joining a network isn’t just a light-hearted expression of a passing emotion: not only is it made hard to switch regional networks…

… joining a network has drastic consequences: it makes your profile, and the applications your install, by default viewable to all of your networks, including your regional network:

In countries like Sweden and Norway (resp. 1 in 9 and 1 in 5 on Facebook!) where the entire 15-35 demographic is on Facebook, joining the “regional network” amounts to making your profile public… Two weeks ago, I spent some time browsing through profiles of members of the network “Belgium” (127.000 members back then, 148.000 at the time of writing) and I am pretty sure a lot of the profile information was definitely not meant for total strangers to see.

What to do?

If you take Facebook seriously (i.e. really consider it a safe environment to communicate and connect with people you care about), you might do the following:

• set profile and (most of your) applications‘ visibility to “friends only” or just allow networks you really have an idea who the members are
• be extra thoughtful with applications where you interact with other people: do you think they want their comments, postings, preferences to be visible via your profile/newsfeed?
• determine for yourself what your “boundary of trust” will be and refuse friend requests from people who don’t fall within these lines
• ask yourself whether you want to be found on Facebook by people searching your name (because you might lack the courage to refuse them)
• weed out decaying relationships systematically

Don’t think you have the guts and/or discipline to stick to those rules? Don’t worry, most people haven’t (if any). Which is the reason why quite a few smart people think Facebook, like its predecessors, is doomed to fail its grand ambition.

So here’s another approach:

• determine for yourself what your “public membrane” is – you should feel comfortable with all information outside the membrane potentially being known to everyone (including parents, colleagues and neighbours) – it doesn’t mean you want them to know, it means you accept the risk of them getting to know
• if you have a weblog, you already have defined that membrane for yourself…
• as long as you play outside the membrane, go and lead a carelessly info-promiscuous Facebook (and other social network) life

(Inspired by a conversation with Clo, and this one with Peter Vandenabeele. You might want to post this to Facebook?)

The answer: like everybody else – Google Adsense. Still you probably have never seen a single ad on their pages… Here’s how they do it:

Cherish regular readers – they are your writers-to-be

If you’re a regular reader (let alone poster) on WordPress.com, cookies will prevent you from seeing ads. Regular readers don’t click ads anyway, they’re there for the content. Ads would be off-putting and keep readers from becoming contributors.

The small loss in revenue on regular readers is by far offset by the growth in “content inventory” if you can turn readers into writers. First build the community, then monetize. (I thought I remember Matt linking to a similar argument by the founder of Metafilter, but I can’t find the referring post anymore.)

Only show ads to searchers

Chances are you never visited Kris Hoet’s blog* – Kris is EMEA Marcom man for Msn/Windows Live. Although he has it mapped on his own domain crossthebreeze.com, the blog is hosted by wordpress.com. Yet if I refer you to his holiday report, you won’t see any ads either, even as a first time visitor, even if you delete your crossthebreeze.wordpress.com or crossthebreeze.com cookies (this cookie-killing Firefox extension will save you time).

You might not be a regular reader (yet), but you didn’t go there to see ads, you went there because I referred you to what you expect to be a holiday report. WordPress.com doesn’t want to spoil your first impression of Kris’s blog.

However, if you land there by accident after a Google search, things are different.

You’re quite likely not to be interested by his blog, but more by bars in Kota Kinabalu… The served ads (fitting your search terms even more than the content of the post) offer a convenient click away. (Notice how the “Ads by Google” caption is even more inconspicuous here, probably because of some preferred partnership?)

Exploit the masses, spare the geeks

Still don’t see the ads when you click through from the search page (after some cookie-crumbling)? Aha, but you’re using Firefox, right? (Or Flock, or another minority browser…)

Geeks like you are probably advertising-resistant, and notoriously loud and outspoken. Rather than facing criticism from troublemakers that don’t click ads anyway, WordPress prefers not to show them at all… Unless you fake your User Agent and do the same cookie-cleaning and search procedure over again…

Now that’s really all for the hoops you have to jump through, in order to enjoy the privilege of being served ads on WordPress.com!

Cash in on derived content: tag pages

Another stroke of brilliance are the WordPress.com tag pages. Tag pages aggregate (excerpts of) postings with a particular category or tag (see their explanation) across the WordPress.com network (whereas tag pages on self-hosted wordpress blogs are internal links in your blog).

See the tag page for “Emergent Church” as (arbitrary, I swear!) example . They’re a searchengine’ s Gefundenes Fressen: tags are typically the keywords you use in search queries as well, and here you have pages optimised for such a keyword, with lots of inlinks from relevant posts using that keyword as anchor text, on a high-authority domain. What’s more, since tag pages are the result of coincidental co-production, no community member will dispute the site’s owner’s right to exploit this no-man’s-land.

I used to see a lot of these pages in search results (especially for non-English queries) and I guess this has been a gold mine for a while. Google however is seriously pushing back tag pages nowadays (or maybe on over-optimised pages as well…). Tag pages can be considered search result pages by themselves… and who wants to see search results in search results? (See a similar argument on Technorati tag pages.) Still, they do show up, although you might need to fiddle a bit to get a first-page result:

Paid accounts profitable?

A lot of other community sites are using the same techniques, yet none pushing it as far as WP.com… Apparently the strategy is successful to that extent that I’m wondering it will ever be worth their time to offer completely ad-free blogging accounts. Would people be willing to pay the equivalent or more of the advertising income their blog generates – after all, they never see an ad on their pages themselves?

I guess people like Kris Hoet might well be interested for reputation reasons, but maybe this market is not big enough to offer paid, large-scale, low-cost blog hosting?

* I’m using Kris as my guinea pig here as a late follow-up to a discussion we had at a bloggers’ meeting a long time ago.

More often than not, the extension is compatible, but the developer hasn’t tested it yet, or at least not updated the version information in the .xpi install file. But that one, you can do for yourself.

How to change browser version information for a .xpi file?

Firefox extension install files are in fact just zip files with another extension. So here’s how to proceed (on Windows, but probably analogously for other systems):

1. Right-click the link to the .xpi install file and “Save As”
2. Rename the xpi file to .zip
3. Extract the zip file
4. Edit install.rdf with your favourite text editor

Typically, you’ll either need to:

Update the em:maxVersion element in the em:targetApplication description for your browser (change e.g. 0.8 to 1 in the example):

<!-- Flock -->
<em:targetApplication>
  <Description>
    <em:id>{a463f10c-3994-11da-9945-000d60ca027b}</em:id>
    <em:minVersion>0.4</em:minVersion>
    <em:maxVersion>0.8</em:maxVersion>
  </Description>
</em:targetApplication>

Or insert the missing “em:targetApplication” browser description if your browser is not listed:

1. Copy the lines above from<em:targetApplication> to </em:targetApplication>
2. Paste them after the last </em:targetApplication> in the file
3. Change “Flock” in the example to your browser name and the long (“guid“) em.id element to one of these:
   

   Firefox	{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}
   Mozilla Suite	{86c18b42-e466-45a9-ae7a-9b95ba6f5640}
   SeaMonkey	{92650c4d-4b8e-4d2a-b7eb-24ecf4f6b63a}
   Netscape Browser	{3db10fab-e461-4c80-8b97-957ad5f8ea47}
   Flock Browser	{a463f10c-3994-11da-9945-000d60ca027b}

4. Update the the em:maxVersion number again to at least your current browser version

That’s it! All you have to do now is zip up those files again with the changed install.rdf, rename the .zip file to .xpi and just drag and drop the .xpi file in a browser window…

And what if the extension does make my browser crash?

If your browser crashes before you can even uninstall (via Tools… Add-ons), have a look the extensions folder for your user account. That should be something like:

C:\Documents and Settings\[your-username]\Application Data\[Flock/Browser,Mozilla/Firefox]\Profiles\[somehash.default]\extensions

Find out the folder for the misbehaving extension (by checking name, modified date or contents), and simply delete it. Your browser will start up again normally next time.

How IMBob and SmsAlice got connected via Twitter

On the left you see IMBob. IMBob likes to be online all day. SmsAlice, on the right, is an outdoors girl: she’s always on the road.

Now IMBob would like to text-message SmsAlice. But he doesn’t like those tiny little phone buttons. So he fires up Google Talk(*) and adds twitter@twitter.com to his buddy list.

See how the conversation goes on the screenshot:

And here’s what Alice gets on her phone:

IMBob invited you to Twitter.com! Reply with your name, so we can get you set up! Standard text rates apply!

Her answer(***): “Sms Alice”

Awesome! Please reply with your preferred username!

Her anwser: “SmsAlice”

Welcome SmsAlice! Have your friends send “Follow SmsAlice” to 40404(****) to get your updates. Send Help to learn more.

Alice happens to know already about Twitter, so she sends the only thing necessary to actually get the messages: “ON”.

Notifications are on. Turn them off by sending OFF.

Now every time Bob IMs to twitter@twitter.com, Alice gets his message on her phone. And everytime she texts an answer, Bob gets to read it in his IM window.

All that without doing anything else then sending IM and text messages: no signup, nothing!

How IMBob and SmsAlice grew apart

Now Bob starts surfing around on Twitter.com and gets himself a lot of friends (yes, Yet Another Social Network for Bob!). Because he is on his laptop, reading and posting Tweets (that’s what these micro-postings are called) is really easy and quick. So he often replies on Tweets (fortunately he soon discovered how to use the “@” properly!). Bob likes to see his friends’ stream of consciousness pass by when he’s on the laptop. Sometimes he just thinks out loud himself on Twitter…

For Alice though, things are different. It’s not that she doesn’t like Twitter. In fact, she likes the fact she can subscribe to (and unsubscribe from!) all kinds of news updates and alerts without giving away her phone number to yet another company. Her phone and her phone number are something intimate to her, you know.

And yes, she wants to be updated on the whereabouts of some close friends and relatives. But getting the stream of links and ideas IMBob posts for his online Twitter friends doesn’t make sense via SMS… Even when receiving text messages is free (like with her and almost all mobile operators in Europe), it’s just too much time and hassle cleaning out her inbox on the phone. She’d rather limit herself to other people using text messages and doing that as sparingly as she herself does. So she sees no other option than unsubscribing (leaving!) IMBob on Twitter…

How IMBob and SmsAlice found a compromise

But hey, Twitter has direct messages! So even when she “leaves” IMBob, they still are friends, and Bob can send an occasional direct message to her.

At least that is: in theory. If you send a direct message to someone who only uses Twitter via IM or the phone, you get the Abominable Twitter Kitten (and it has been like that for more than a month or so, I wonder whether the Twitter people really want to repair it):

So if IMBob wants to gets past the Abominable Twitter Kitten, Alice first needs to go to the web to complete her registration and get a web account as well. That’s all there is to! Now she gets Bob’s direct messages as she’s supposed to!

Oh and BTW, Twitter has these Phone & IM Settings where you can limit your notifications to “Direct Messages”:

That’s not what SmsAlice wants (because she wouldn’t be able to get the BBC Breaking News, remember) – but it could be a good idea for Bob if ever he was to leave his laptop behind for a while (if ever!).

How SmsAlice and IMBob happily Twittered along

So that’s how it went… IMBob kept sharing his thoughts behind the laptop and SmsAlice kept limiting her thumbs and attention to urgent and intimate tweets… and to a totally differenty circle of contacts than she would have had online. With the exception of IMBob’s occasional free computer-to sms direct messages, like we all used to do at the end of the nineties :-) *****.

Moral of the story

Although the Twitter idea is to blend phone and online, that is probably not true for most of us. We do have different contacts online and on the phone, different friends, different kinds of interaction, different social network.

Most of the Twitterers are IMBobs. Not because most people are more likely to be an IMBob than an SmsAlice (I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around) but because trends spread faster over the web – so the number of IMBobs grows faster. (And SmsAlices are less visible because they would probably want to hide their tweets from search engines!) .

But there probably is an IMBob and SmsAlice in each of us. So if you feel frustrated with your Twitter phone/IM dichotomy, just get a second account. After all you are a different person on the phone and online.

* Pictures from fictitious Bob and Alice: Striatic and Moriza via Creative-Commons searchengine Flickr-Storm.
** Could be any Jabber client. Or use TwitterIm when you’re on AIM
*** that would be 40404 in the US or +44 7781 488126 in Europe or most of the rest of the world
**** Yep, they forgot to internationalise that message :-)
***** There are still free web-to-sms services nowadays. Haven’t used them, do not know how they treat phone numbers…

Mon.itor.us

• mon.itor.us has a bafflingly beautiful self-updating dashboard with response time graphs and reports…
• notification via (one or more) e-mail addresses and rss
• they also have web and desktop dashboard widgets, and offer visitor tracking (you need to embed a snippet of javascript code) as an extra
• build your dashboard by adding your collection of modules – in the same ajaxy way as a lot of personal startpages (Netvibes, Google/ig…) do nowadays. Have a look at the demo
• the paying version of mon.itor.us is at monitis.com

Montastic.com

• Montastic really is as easy as you see in the screenshot… you add websites … sites are checked every 10 (!) minutes, you get an email when they’re down
• widgets for desktop notifications here as well
• on the other hand: the information provided is really basic: nothing more than “Website status: unreachable“. Slow page loads (+ a few seconds) trigger a notification – so I get a lot of notifications due to the often slow database connections at Dreamhost …
• ironically, Montastic.com was down itself at the time I wanted to take screenshots last weekend :-) – but that was the first time as far as I know!
• Montastic is completely free – there’s no upgrade plan. It’s built by a bunch of enthousiasts

Internetvista.com

• Internetvista has been around for some time and is the oldest of the 3 services
• the free version is limited to website monitoring with email notification
• main advantage: check for a specific phrase in (the first 4 kb of) your output. This makes sure you get notified when your website performance is ok – but the pages produce nothing but error messages instead of the expected content.

[tags]hosting, performance, monitoring, analytics, statistics, tracking, testing, ping, http, website, server, montastic, internetvista, mon.itor.us, uptime[/tags]