I've made it so my blogposts (which tend to be short anyways) go to twitter too now. I just prefer posting on my blog. It's mine, twitter isn't, it's theirs.

I removed over 11,000 messages from my inbox today and now I'm using the empty inbox system. So far: I'm LOVING it. Somehow it just feels like I'm in control now or something.

I updated my personal website with a consulting, presentations and a writing page.

And I love using petervandijck.com as my openID by the way. OpenID rocks.

Ah, the old days of blog conversations. What happened to that? Are they really all on twitter now?

A jQuery plugin that copies something to the clipboard (like doing CTRL+C). It seems that, to get this to work cross-browser, you need to fallback to a Flash script.

Slideshare is great. From my slideshows, the Social networks going global one (for an upcoming talk) has had almost 300 views, the older the Global Information Architecture workshop one (from the beginning of this year) has had over 3000 views. That's great promotion.

I love sharing slides in this format - I remember when Rashmi told me about the service, and I just thought it was brilliant. And it is.

(via Simon) Google's usability research on federated logins.

Lieve jongens?

My EuroIA slides

Next Saturday from 12:15, I'm giving a presentation on Taking Social Networks Global, at the EuroIA Summit in Amsterdam. I was working on it the past days, and I'm pretty happy with how the talk is turning out. As a preview, here are my slides (so far, they might still change slightly). See you there!

Hey, useful!

"We have a patent!" Cultureshock.

The email feature I always wanted is now in Gmail!

The only IA Summit that is free (I have no idea how they do it, because the organization, space and food are top), the Italian IA summit, is planned for December. They're accepting proposals now.

I have created a really short and quick survey about IA-related workshops. If you could spend a few seconds to fill it in, I would really appreciate it. Click here to fill in the survey. (Only takes a second.)

Fascinating for IA's: "Now Iyengar has published a new study
showing that one way to combat the effects of excessive choice is to
group items into categories. It turns out that even useless categories
make people happier with their choices."

A must-read for anyone interested in the IAI (Information Architecture Institute).

Anthropology of objects

Cellphone polishing services. Jan Chipchase's blog is fascinating.

An example implementation of the MetaWeblog API in PHP.

"The product is late, and the dogs don’t eat the food. After six months,
there are 10,000 users, not one million. The company has scaled up its
expenses but for no reason."

Oh yea.

Here's a question: sure Google appengine will scale, but is it also fast?

Brilliant parent blogging: "At that moment in my head I was dancing around, giving myself a high-five and mooning you."

99designs is a brilliant way to get a logo designed. You write the design brief and the prize, designers compete, you select the best one and pay them. Brilliant and simple.

Today (in about an hour) they will attempt to create antimatter in a huge scientfic complex 100m under the ground in Switzerland. If Europe gets sucked into a black hole in an hour, it was nice knowing you all!

And here's a video explaining it:

I like learning and doing things that are not "My job". I did the "Hello World" of Google's appengine the other day, it was fun. I want to do more things like that.

This is fascinating. Google tests *everything* in their search results page, even minute changes in whitespace, that have statistically measurable effects.

De nieuwe Google Chrome doesn't do RSS - doesn't display feeds in a good way, and doesn't display the little icon in the adress bar. Oh well, back to Firefox for now.

Here's the official Google page for the Google Chrome comic book.

That's funny, Techcrunch is down. 503 error.

Google Chrome comic book all on one page

I was reading a scanned version of the comic book (see and link to this blog post) that is introducing the Google browser - "Google Chrome" - but the site's way slow and seems down now, so I saved the images in my cache and am publishing them here under the same Creative Commons license.

They're all on one page, so it'll be kind of long. Here goes.

"It might be a good rule simply to
avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have
had to make it prestigious."

Nice video of an ajax paper prototype. (via)

Cool. Automatically add filesizes to links (like PDFs) with JQuery and Google Appengine.

Google should let these useful webservices (and others like tinyurl and such) run free on appengine, no limits, sponsored by Google. That would let people build loads of useful little webservices with no worries about monetization, open up a whole new area of innovation.

Malaysians Overwhelmingly Choose Friendster

Yesterday she had her first chocolate and her first mussel, today her first cornflakes with milk.

Yep, I'm a daddyblogger now.

Hey, what happened to sketchcast.com? Loved the idea and the execution, but the site seems down?

That's some good speech writing.

The stock market long term:

I created a new company to do my business with: funkymonkeycorp.

It's the 12$ PC. And strangely enough, it seems viable.

When I was still trying to become Jakob Nielsen, back in 2000: the draw-what-you-saw methodology. Haven't heard of anyone using it?

Hey, someone still enjoyed my themes and metaphors of the semantic web. Ah, them ol' days!

I always hated misguided attempts at visual search engines, but weirdly, searchme.com kind of works. You just browse through results pages, in an Apple-like coverflow UI.

I'll probably never use it again, but I was quite surprised at the effectiveness of just browsing through screenshots of websites, instead of scanning result lists on Google.

Creative Commons and other "free" licenses have been confirmed by an important court decision.

Hacker humor :) "Would like to put self replicating robots on the moon capable of
refining silicon and building photovoltaic cells. Will need experience
with robotics, AI, and Drupal. Ultimate plans trend towards world
domination."

Nice, Amazon now has scalable persistent storage blocks (ie. harddrives) to use with EC2 (to store your database on for example), and they come with backup capability to S3. They're from 1Gig to 1Terra. You only pay what you use, $0.10 per allocated GB per month.

Make Something People Want, the video.

Sometimes really old posts can be helpful years later. Gotta love archives.

FireEagle is one (of the many) reasons why I still think Yahoo is a great company with some damn great products.

Move your social network to the country where it has success

Google moved it's center of Latin American operations to Brazil, where it also develops and manages Orkut.

Here's a wonderful video about Youtube and anthropology:

This means (talking about MySQL servers) upgrading to default configuration to 128GB of memory will
cost you just $9600 (list price). I’ve been able to configure on a web
the system with 8*2.5″ hard drives RAID and 2 CPUs (just as we usually
configure PowerEdge 2950) with 128GB of RAM for about $16000. This
means talking to Dell Sales rep it can purchases within $15000.