Notes, links and conversation

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…)

Aaron Wall,  a reputed SEO, and Text-link-ads.com, an ad broker, have teamed up in Reviewme.com, a place to connect companies with bloggers that want to review their products for a fee.  Bubble 2.0 overspending?  Corruption of bloggers’ ethics?  Let’s see: (more…)

Here are the scores (on a max of 6) I came up with, after my evaluation of online video sharing services:

• 4.5: Revver and Blip.tv
• 4: Vimeo and Veoh
• 3: Dailymotion, Youtube, Soapbox
• 2.5: Google Video and Myspace
• 2: Gofish and Clipshack
• 1 and 0: Eefoof, Yahoo Video and Grouper

(more…)

A screencast (a video capture of your screen) is a powerful way of explaining how to use an application, or perform a task – just by showing it. Apart from the difficulty of recording a screencast (and editing it into something presentable), there’s the issue of hosting the files. Over the past month, I’ve been experimenting with my del.icio.us mp3 screencast on several video sharing sites. In a following post, I’ll list all of the services I tried I and their evaluation. I found two services to be great, two almost OK, and 10 others not fit for the task… Here’s how I proceeded: (more…)

The newspapers that asked and obtained in court their removal from Google Cache and Google News  respectively, have been erased from the Google result pages alltogether (Le Soir, La Libre…).  That is… on the Belgian version: (more…)

A court in Brussels has ordered on September 5th that Google remove all news stories from the French and German-language Belgian publishers*.  “Removing” means: both from Google News, as well as from the Google cache of the regular search Google.be/.com search engine.  The verdict is confusing because it mixes up aspects of the regular search engine and the news.google.be portal, both in its analysis and its ruling.  And it is a dangerous precedent, because it assumes search engines should explicitly ask permission to to index and cache content. (more…)

Is it fair use to extract images and their captions from an online newspaper and republish it? Some considerations that come into play: (more…)

Cartoon RSS feeds help to keep up to date with current affairs – and let you smile at the same time.
I’m a fan of the Dutch Fokke and Sukke, a daily cartoon in NRC Handelsblad. They don’t have a feed but somebody called Jarno Peschier at caesar.nl scripted this unofficial feed. It has 290 Bloglines subscribers, I assume that the total number of subscribers (Bloglines having about 1/3d of the market) hovers around one thousand. So I decided to screenscrape De Standaard and script an RSS feed for their daily Zaza cartoon* (more…)

If you want to follow the top links on Digg via RSS, you’ll notice that the RSS feeds do not contain these top links, but point to pages on Digg itself. Which is fine if “Digging” (= one-click tagging*) and commenting is your priority before reading the linked stories. (more…)

If you’re fed up with comment spam, have a look at Akismet… (more…)

I upgraded.  You have to install a phone-home program first that checks whether you  have a legal copy, but the end result is very nice.  Remarkable: the pluggable search and tabs.  Almost feels like the original ;-).