MyBlogLog releases JustForYou – Personalizes Your WordPress Blog

marco 5 Comments

Today I installed a new WordPress plugin from MyBlogLog called JusrForYou.
You see an example set of recommendations to the left (taken from the quoted blog post below).

Here is the blog post explaining a little more about it “Just for You Personalizes Your WordPress Blog“:

Yet, none of these add-ons look at the stated interests of the individual reader, mostly because this data is closed off, hidden inside social networks and closed off to the open internet.

Just for You, released today as a WordPress plug-in, builds a list of headlines based on the expressed interests of the reader. The plug-in looks at each visitor to your blog and, if they are a cookied MyBlogLog member, looks up the tags attached to that user’s profile. Using these tags, Just for You looks into the blog’s archive for posts with matching tags or categories and shows a list of matching headlines in a sidebar widget.

A very interesting way of making suggestions for your blog visitors. In the comments you wil find some people complaining about some missing php extensions:

It seems your host is not supporting json data format. Please ask your hosting provider to enable json extension for php.

So, it remains to be seen if this plugin will work here on my blog or not. What do you think about this idea to provide recommendations to site visitors?

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Web Programming: Data Portability – Gnip & OpenSocial

marco 1 Comment

Data portability is a topic which is becoming more and more important, prominent example is OpenSocial from Google. OpenSocial allows you to build apps/widgets for many big social networks out there, based on one API (OpenSocial). This helps the developer of an app to make it available for all supported platforms without the need to re-write it for every social network/online community out there.

A different approach is the one from Gnip. They want to act as a data stream coverter, providing you with data from many services in the format most appropriate for your app. Below you find the services offered by them (or what they will offer soon):

Gnip Notifications Data Consumers: Poll for new data the moment it exists. Avoid throttling & decrease latency from hours to seconds.
Data Providers: Reduce API traffic by an order of magnitude while increasing distribution through aggregators.
Gnip Polling (soon) Offload API and RSS polling to Gnip and receive full content updates via your preferred protocol (REST, XMPP, ATOM, etc).
Gnip Transformation (soon) Receive standardized cross-service XML markup and turn integrating with new APIs into a plug-and-play experience.
Gnip Identification (soon) Let Gnip offer suggestions for your users’ profiles through a variety of identity discovery mechanisms.

This is an basic overview of their service (from Gnip’s site):

They support many well known services, in which data streams you can hook into as an application developer, among them are e.g. MyBlogLog, Flickr, Identi.ca, Twitter, etc.

Chem them out at gnipcentral. Do you have some experience with this service or are you thinking about using it? Let us know and leave a comment.

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Amazon.com unbox – watch now: Instant video streaming is coming to PC and Mac

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watch nowAmazon.com has opened up the second round of the beta phase for its unbox instand video streaming service called “watch now”. The unbox service enables you to rent and buy movies and TV shows from amazon through a download to your PC without the need to get the DVD shipped to you, or going to a DVD rental store. The amazon-unbox watch now feature is an additional way from amazon-unbox to make the service more attractive, allowing you to start watching instantly (the video gets streamed to your computer). You will need at least a 0.5Mbps DSL (down stream) connection to be able to use the service.

As of this morning they are still alowing new sign ups, but space is limited. Just go to the Amazon.com unbox page and on the upper, right hand side you’ll find the link (picture to the left) to sign up for the test.

I’ll be testing the service and will post an update on my findings.I am very curious to see how it will work on PC AND (!) Mac, as it was PC, Tivo, Xbox only before. You need the latest Flash version (v9) for your computer to be able to use the new watch now feature. The good news is that you also be able to continue to download movies (e.g. after buying them, not only renting them for a day…) and store them locally on your harddrive (this remains a PC & Tivo only feature).

Check out the new amazon unbox service and watch now!

Have you been using the Amazon unbox service before, in the incarnation of a video download service?

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iPhone: Refurbished Device Reveals Customer Data

marco Leave a comment

You always wonder what will happen with your device if you have to return it.

Even more so if the device is an iPhone with a lot of your personal data on it (contacts, documents, web browser data still left in its cache, etc.).

Just found an older post about what the owner of a refurbished iPhone discovered and the data he was able to reconstruct, on zdziarski.com titled

“May 16, 2008: Refurbished iPhone Reveals Customer Data“:

[Photo from Wikipedia. This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License.]

A few days ago, I posted a discovery in that personal data remains intact (in deleted portions of the file system) following a full iPhone restore. As it turns out, Apple themselves may not have been aware of this. Thank goodness, otherwise identity theft might actually be, like, hard. A detective from the Oregon State Police, whom I’ve verified, notified me this afterrnoon that an out-of-the-box refurbished iPhone he purchased directly from Apple contained recoverable personal data. This included email, personal photos, and even financial information that he was able to recover using my forensic toolkit. Needless to say, the original owner was quite surprised. He informed me that the device had been returned to Apple under a warranty exchange only a few months ago, suggesting that Apple has been using an insecure refurbishing process for the past year.

This shows that you have to treat your iPhone like a desktop computer in case you sell or return it, as the mobile phone more and more gets part of your (digital) lifestyle and holds a lot of valuable data!

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TV: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on Hulu.com or iTunes

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I have been missing out on this completely, so for everyone who is in the same boat, check out http://drhorrible.com:

Aspiring super-villain Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) wants to join the Evil League of Evil and win the girl of his dreams, but his nemesis, Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion), stops him at every turn in this three-part musical.

I have also embedded the full episode below (it might be geo-restricted, and for US IPs only):
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.hulu.com/embed/Z4kt7M5Uta51JuIDJV6HeQ" width="520" height="300" wmode="transparent" /]
I had some problems embedding the episode using the Hulu embed code. Hope you are able to see it here on my blog. If not, head over to Hulu or get the episodes via iTunes. Check ’em out and enjoy!

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Twitter: Do you have a Twitter counter on your website?

marco Leave a comment

Everybody knows the famous counter from feedburner.com to show (off) how many people are (approximately) reading your blog. Based on the idea of counter and stats is a new tool called “twittercounter”, doing the same kind of counter for the advanced micro-blogger, or twitterer. The service is providing not only an embeddable counter for your homepage, but also some stats. Here are their current stats, about their own account on twitter.com:

We now track 277,753 unique Twitter accounts.

Yesterday we generated 284,821 counters.

In total we generated 16,524,230 counters since we started tracking.

And below you’ll see the counter preview (several display options exist) of the embadable counter for your webpage or maybe your Online community page:

And a little history of their followers of the last time:

Are you already the proude owner of a Twitter counter for your homepage? I am working on mine, mostly I still need 100000 of people following me to make it worth displaying on my site:)

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Software development: Sooo many methodologies

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Dev Process
Dev Process, from Chet Haase's Blog

A friend just pointed me to this older blog post by Chet Haase (his blog), titled Crystal Methodology. He is describing different methodologies of how to develop software and has some interesting twists added to every single one.

One example excerpt:

Scum

In the Scrum development model, the focus is on short iterations and constant communication. The Scum model, however, focuses on the individual. In particular, each engineer works completely on his or her own, producing code at an alarming rate. Changes are integrated and merged willy-nilly, causing untold breakage due to the complete lack of communication. At each fault, the offending code, putback, and engineer are indentified as scum and are tossed out of the project (this step is called “Hack-n-rack”). The resulting code and team are thereby better over time, having weaned out the weak members through natural selection. As it’s inventor, Dr. Feen Bookle, PhD, Mrs, QED, JRE, said at its unveiling at the Conference On Terribly Important Academic Philosophies and Theories on Software Process Methodology Discoveries (CTEAPTSPMD), “Scum will always float to the top. Skim it off and you’ve got just the juicy bits left. Plus the bottom-feeders.”

If you spent hours, days, week or years in the field of software development, so basically spent your life with developing software, you will really enjoy this read! 🙂

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Nintendo Introduces Wii MotionPlus

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Nintendo Wii MotionPlusSweeeeeeet! 🙂

Here is a picture of the MotionPlus, and what Nintendo says about it:

Nintendo’s upcoming Wii MotionPlus accessory for the revolutionary Wii Remote controller again redefines game control, by more quickly and accurately reflecting motions in a 3-D space. The Wii MotionPlus accessory attaches to the end of the Wii Remote and, combined with the accelerometer and the sensor bar, allows for more comprehensive tracking of a player’s arm position and orientation, providing players with an unmatched level of precision and immersion.

I really love Nintendo for innovating in the field of interface design in gaming and technology. Looking forward to checking this out and all the new possibilities this is opening up, to further spur game design.

Games publishers: Bring ’em on!

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MacFUSE: Mount remote server dirs over SSH protocol on MacOS X

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MacFUSE Banner

I just installed a program and kernel extension which allows me to mount a remote server over SSH as a “normal drive” under MacOS X. Nothing brand new, but I did some research and thought I share what I found out to speed up other people who might need this.

Here is a description of the project and what you can do with it from the project’s page:

MacFUSE implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X (10.4 and above). It aims to be API-compliant with the FUSE (File-system in USErspace) mechanism that originated on Linux. Therefore, many existing FUSE file systems become readily usable on Mac OS X. That said, MacFUSE has numerous user- and developer-visible interfaces that are specific to Mac OS X. The core of MacFUSE is in a dynamically loadable kernel extension.

Although MacFUSE has a completely different kernel-level implementation from Linux FUSE, it supports the FUSE specification well enough that many popular FUSE file systems can be easily compiled and made to work on Mac OS X–often out of the box. Examples of file systems that are known to work and were once tested (to varying degrees) include sshfs, ntfs-3g (read/write NTFS), ftpfs (read/write FTP), wdfs (WebDAV), cryptofs, encfs, bindfs, unionfs, beaglefs (yes, including the entire Beagle paraphernalia), and so on.

Do get you going you need to get three things: MacFUSE, SSHfs (to mount an external server over SSH) and the GUI for MacFUSE called MacFusion.

What is MacFusion?

MacFusion brings all sorts of information to your Mac in the form of files and folders displayed as just another “Volume” on your Mac desktop. Right now you can use this software to show a Secure Shell or Secure FTP share from another computer on your macs desktop, letting you manipulate the files on it as if they were on your own computer. MacFusion can also do the same for any File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server, giving read/write FTP in the finder for the first time!

First you have to grab the installer and the SSHfs from from the Googe code page at: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ , actually this page.

After installing MacFUSE and SSHfs all you need is the GUI called MacFusion from here and you are all set.

There is a newer version of MacFusion under development (at the time of the publication of this post still beta!):

Some other resources are:

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Recession advertising: Is your startup on the right track?

marco Leave a comment

 Are you a startup in the Online advertising business? The econnomy is in a very shaky state and many companies think about their future.

This is what the Google Trends graph looks like for the search term “recession”:

Google Trends - Recession
Google Trends: term “recession” in searches and news.

I found a great article on “Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen” called Online advertising during a recession: 5 key trends for ad-based startups

Ultimately, the dynamics here are complex and uncertain, but here some of the key trends worth watching if you’re an advertising-based startup:

  1. Accelerating movement of offline to online ad spend
  2. Brand areas weak, direct response will be less affected
  3. Weak areas to watch: Video, social networks, communication, etc.
  4. Rise of direct-to-consumer revenues?
  5. Timing is everything

A very interesting read, lots of good facts and links to other articles in there. Another good source with tips and advices is the article on folio called Selling Advertising in a Recession – How to convince marketers now is a good time to buy.

There could be a recession coming—or not—but some advertisers are behaving as if one has already started. Responding to media buyers looking to cut ad budgets has become a priority.

Let me know what your strategy is and if you have other great articles covering this topic.

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