I hear mefeedia is doing great, numbers continue to grow fast. It's very satisfying to see that the people I sold it to are continuing to build it out in the original spirit.

Here's an interesting seminar title (via Jon Udell): How to Read 100 Million Blogs (and How to Classify Deaths without Physicians)

The web globalization report card 2007: "Among the many trends we noticed: The average number of languages supported by the 200 sites has increased to 18, up from 15 last year.
And the average number of languages supported by the top 20 Web sites
was 45. It used to be you could support 10 languages and pretty much
stand apart from the pack. Not any more."

mm, I upgraded my wordpress but comments still don't work. Any tips?

Wow - shooting victim on youtube. Reporting really has changed. For better and for worse, at the same time.

Lots of great links about the architecture of conversation.

And I'm still doing good for the search terms how to make a documentary.

Hey I'm nr8 in Google for Peter - just below Peter Gabriel :)

Rails flash in php

A friend told me about Rail's flash concept which makes it very easy to provide "success" messages and such after submitting a form.

This is some quick code that does something like that (assuming you have a session running) in PHP: (really just a test of posting code)

/**
* This class lets you set variables that are kept for 1 session pageload, then destroyed (hence the "Flash"), which on the next pageload get reflected in a template (for example).
* For use with submitting forms and returning an error message, for example.
*/
class sessionFlashBucket
{
/**
* write a new variable to FlashBucket with a value
*/
function write($var, $val)
{
// put this var in the users _SESSION
$_SESSION[$var] = $val;
return TRUE;
}
/**
* read and empty variable from FlashBucket ('message' by default)
*/
function read($var = "message")
{
// get variable from session
$result = $_SESSION[$var];

// delete variable from FlashBucket
unset($_SESSION[$var]);
return $result;
}
}

Kiva lets you loan money (200, 500$) to a specific entrepreneur in a developing country with a specific plan. 100% of the loan goes to the entrepreneur.

As for, "will I get my money back?":

"Your Kiva.org loan is a low-risk loan.  Microfinance loans
worldwide are generating repayment rates of 97%.
To date, Kiva.org’s repayment rate is 100%."

You can access my blog on your mobile more easily here.

I just realized, the web/internet is becoming varied enough for it to become diverse. In the beginning, we all went to the same websites (Yahoo) and used the same services (email). Now, certain groups may use blogs and feedreaders, others may use Myspace and IM, and they never have to meet. And the functionality on the next will probably become more and more varied, so that there will be more space for different groups of people using different types of services.

I was trying to find good, free (and legal) music on jamendo but no such luck. Any other tips on where to look? The free music movement should be far enough along by now that I can go somewhere and find some good stuff without having to be a 16 year old geek?

Hey, CalHenderson (from Flickr scalability fame) has all kinds of php code bits on his site!

Google talk on how to design a good api (pdf): "API is a little language".

Here's an idea: if conferences are all about the people, shouldn't conference sites be more like social network sites?

Another nice feature of 11870.com: the list of comments on a place is filtered by your contacts. Nacho explained it to me: "we don't believe in karma systems or recommendations, "2132 persons says that you should go here" makes no sense, we want "peter says
you must go" it's more important."

Smart!

Stephen Arnold's list of international search engines.

Fuzzy categories

http://11870.com/maripili

11870 is a social yellow pages (kinda). Their friend screen (in Spanish) lets you indicate what kind of friend this is. In English, these usually say "Friend" or "Family" or something. This one says "es de confianza" (ie. "a trusted person") or "no lo conozco tanto" ("I don't know him that well"), which is an interesting fuzzy categorization.

NYT article: good article about the 'cumulative advantage'.

"The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like,
differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative
advantage,â€? or the “rich get richerâ€? effect. This means that if one
object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the
right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result,
even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially
enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors
— a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly
effect� from chaos theory."

"Vista itself works fine. But not much else seems to work with Vista. It's like Rosanne Barr that way."

Damn that boxes and arrows is a pretty site. As far as I can tell, the prettiest site on the web right now.

Tim Bray: "In the big picture, Twitter did
exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and
focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and
it’s really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that."

Sounds about right.

If you're an IA geek and want to deconstruct a site, I always recommended Amazon or epinions, but now I can add buzzillions to the list. An IA's dream. Not that it's perfect, but it's got LOTS of IA :)

Nice: an example of folksonomy combined with faceted navigation.

argument: Rails does 80% right and you can fairly easily hack it for special cases like the twitter scaling case.

I am mirroring the RSS 2.0 spec at petervandijck.net/rssspec/, for the only reason that to futureproof something, the best solution is to have many copies. David Winer made the spec available as a download.

Automatically deploy to live with svn

To get i18n working properly in php and mysql, you have to:

- make sure your mysql database AND tables AND fields are in collation utf8_unicode_ci
- have your html pages in utf-8 character set: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
- force the server to send utf-8 encoding: before every page output, do this: header("Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8");
- It's not enough to just have the mysql server in utf-8, you have to force the mysql client to use utf-8 encoding too, which means on every database connection, first do this: $res = mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf-8'");

And that seems to work pretty well. Of course, you can have all this set in your various config files too of your http server, your mysql server, your php.ini and such, but these things above you can just do them all in the code.

Twitter is growing much faster than I would have thought. According to my urls, 26,757,341 messages have been sent so far. And everyone I know is on there.

26,757,341 messages - that means they must be working hard scaling those database hits.

Google's acquisition chief: ``The crazy ones mean they ignore the usual restraints of investment levels required or design parameters or `Gee I need more servers than anyone ever thought was possible','' Ullah said. ``When you free yourselves from these constraints, you create crazy, cool things.''

Google wants companies that can build revenue streams from their users, instead of buying firms with a lot of users that don't bring in much in sales, Ullah said.

``We don't do traffic for traffic's sake,'' he said. ``It has to be highly monetizable.''

Scaling Rails: "By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework."

Turns out Rails *does* have some scaling issues. Nothing you can't work around I'm sure, but still. And that wouldn't stop me from using it, either.

MySpace, founded by rather ruthless marketeers and now owned by Murdoch, never had much ethics. Now they're blocking Photobucket, a company that embeds a LOT of pictures and videos on Myspace pages. Is this when MySpace will finally become uncool?

Some handy utf-8 testing strings.

I had another look at some of the popular PHP frameworks, and my short conclusion is: (disclaimer: these weren't in depth investigations and my opinions are just that)

Symfony: Too "enterprise" focused. Nono: when I create a table I then have to create a YAML representation of that data so symofony can do its thing. Don't like that.

Code igniter: this was a promising one, but they force you to use their wacky url scheme. Don't like that.

CakePHP: also looks promising, but it still seems like a lot of framework learning to get started.

If I was making lots of websites for clients with lots of forms and stuff, I'd definitely use one of these. But for a startup, I'm not sure. Too much abstraction, it feels like.

Why do kids do drugs? Coz they're fun and forbidden, of course.

Looks like a great lentil dish. I love lentil dishes. In Belgium, some supermarkets don't even carry lentils, they're not very popular.

De Belgica!: "No hace falta que os diga que pitufais un gran peligro. Los negros son contagiosos!"

I never knew a simple SELECT in mysql is case insensitive!

For once I agree with Mike Arrington: this "code of conduct" thing is nothing but a (typical American?) knee-jerk reaction not much different than the reaction to 9-11 back in the day, and we all know where that got us.

"We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person" or "We connect privately before we respond publicly" - that's just plain silly.

And "We do not allow anonymous comments" is WAY over the line. Police state online, is that what we want?

twitter spam?

I like Vimeo: it tries to make video personal, and there's no top10 list anywhere on the site. But like blip.tv (although they've gottn better), I don't think they sell themselves well enough on their homepage. Now it says: "Everyone can upload 250mb of video every week. Free." and "Vimeo is a free and easy service for sharing your videos with friends and family or people you meet here. Join Vimeo now and share your first video today."

Let's edit some copy.

First, "Everyone can upload 250mb of video every week. Free." is not a value proposition if by now everyone knows you can upload video easily for free to the internets. Two years ago not, but now they do. Huge amounts of Youtube press have taken care of that. So you need a different value proposition and especially, a different way to distinguish yourself from youtube. I know you've just raised your upload limits but new visitors don't care too much I'd think.

Second, "Vimeo is a free and easy service for sharing your videos with friends
and family or people you meet here. Join Vimeo now and share your first
video today."

The important part is "with friends
and family or people you meet here". Vimeo is all about sharing personal videos, you won't find SouthPark on there. I think they need to say that clearer.

Something like: "Share videos with friends, family and the Vimeo community. It's free and easy. Join now." You get the idea.

Then, redo the homepage to show us more about this community and the type of videos you can find here. You might also want to work in some messaging about how this is NOT like YouTube, although I'm not sure about the best way to do that.

Just some thoughts :)

btw, the new Boxes and Arrows design is very very pretty.

Trying out Axure

More axure pain.

The little preview windows when hovering over pages are just way annoying.

Also, I am getting desperate trying to use masters as backgrounds. When I put a master that has the 'background' property on a page, it seems I can't edit it, but when I click it twice then I can? And there's something going on with green and red borders, indicating something. Sorry guys, but this is WAY confusing and bad UI. Be better than Visio, I want you to!

The way I'd like it to work, is:

• If I click on a page or master in the nav, that is shown in the middle main screen.
• If a master is set to 'background', it shows in the left nav (little icon perhaps), and I can NOT move it around or edit it when editing a page, even not after double click, and just get rid of that red/green border coz I have no idea of what it means.
• The previews are no fun.
• And: why can't I make more stencils myself? Or do the 'masters' provide that functionality.

Final verdict: not great, not because of any inherent problem with the concept, but I can't figure out the functionality to do what I need to do.

Now tell me it's my fault.

I'm playing around with Axure and it's nice but I can't seem to use backgrounds like I do in Visio. The masters don't seem to work like backgrounds, or else I just haven't figured out yet how to do it.

I do love the ability to add annotations and specific fields for annotations to various things.

http://continuouspartialattention.jot.com/WikiHome: "I believe attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit.   We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals.   In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool."

Attention is definitely underappreciated in the theory of IA, although it is there.

I am working on some startup ideas that I want to develop while in Belgium, and I'm looking for people to work with. So if you're in Belgium (or somewhere else, that can work too), and you can hack code, and you want to talk, get in touch :)

Another link to Maria's static site, to get the Google juice flowing.

So again, this is a great talk. "You grew up with Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame; they're growing up
with being famous amongst 15. They're collecting friends as a way of
demarcating audience in a world without meaningful signals about who's
watching. If you're not in their list of friends or aren't like the
people in their list of friends, you are not the intended audience."

Perhaps the breakdown of privacy is creating the biggest cultural shock since the 50s/60s when rock&roll and all that happened.
 A lot of people really don't understand what teenagers do on Myspace (as an example).

Incantations for muggles, a great talk transcript about different age groups and what their priorities are and how that affects the tech we build.