What follows is what I consider to be best practice for my personal sites and a guide for those who wish to do the same. Months ago I dropped the www. prefix from my domain in part because I think it’s redundant and also because I wanted to experiment with how Google treated valid HTTP redirect codes.

Elisabeth Mahoney The Guardian, Wednesday 16 December 2009 Edward Stourton, presenting Defining the Decade (Radio 4), confidently spoke on behalf of his audience. There wasn't anything new in this account of the rise of the internet in the noughties, but the tale was told in comforting, familiar terms for a Radio 4 audience who will have been aware of technological developments, but also maybe terrified by them. You could hear it in the selection of material. We heard Martha Lane Fox describing the first years of the new millennium as "a pretty bonkers time" and then recalling her father's feedback on her first business plan. "Why," he asked, "are there so many split infinitives in this document?" Stourton also challenged jargon – "What's a metajoke?" he asked ­ someone at Google after they casually used the term – and pricked what might easily be taken by his listeners as rampant online silliness. I loved his comment on a film of a man on the toilet setting off hundreds of beer bottles around his house like dominoes. "This is quite a sad person, isn't it?" he mooted. And it was telling that the programme was edited to end with a reminder, from an online enthusiast no less, that "it's very important to know where the off button is". In another decade's time, that may well sound like quite the quaintest notion.

A picture tells you a thousand words about a total stranger
By Jeremy Laurance

The Independent Newspaper
Clipped on Monday, December 14, 2009, 07:19 PM

An internet service launched last week by Google to help cameraphone users to identify strangers in the street has been blocked because of alarm over its threat to personal privacy. The new service, called Goggles, is a picture search which uses images rather than words to trawl the web. By taking a picture of an object and clicking "search", owners of smartphones can recognise landmarks, identify a species of plant or animal, or obtain tasting notes for a bottle of wine. Users focus their phone's camera on the object, and Google compares elements of that picture against its database of images. When it finds a match, it provides the name of the object pictured and a list of results linking through to the relevant web pages and news stories.

Goggles is claimed to be able to recognise tens of millions of objects and places and is growing all the time. But the most controversial aspect of the new visual-search tool is its capacity to allow users to take a photo of a stranger to find out more about them. With millions of people having an online presence, complete with photos, on websites such as Facebook, it is possible to use the search tool to identify people, obtain contact information, and learn about their tastes in music, their friends and their background. Google has now confirmed that it is blocking this use of Goggles until the implications have been fully explored.

Marissa Mayer, the vice-president of Google's search product and user experience, said: "We are blocking out people's faces if people try to use Google Goggles to search for information about them. Until we understand the implications of the facial-recognition tool, we have decided to make sure we block out people's faces. We need to really understand how this tool affects people's privacy and we cannot change that decision until we do." Angela Sasse, professor of computer science at University College London, who is researching public perceptions of privacy, said Goggles created unease because it left people with fewer hiding places. "People manage their relationships by selective disclosure," she said. "Only people with certain mental-health conditions disclose everything all the time.

These systems [such as Goggles] lose that. You might go somewhere on the assumption that you won't be recognised. But if people find out who you are, they can see where you have been. We have seen this problem on Facebook, where people have uploaded pictures from a party, forgetting that their bosses can see them too." She added that people were prepared to accept risks attached to new technology, including a loss of privacy, provided they could see the benefits. But some developments got the thumbs-down. When Facebook started broadcasting what people were buying, there was a backlash, as the public judged the intrusion as a step too far.

Professor Sasse said Goggles could potentially be used as a marketing tool. When surveillance cameras identified the face of someone who regularly passed by, the business might send them details of a special offer. "People tend to have a strong reaction to that," she said. "But you could have an opt-out so people could choose whether the system would be allowed to recognise them or blocked from doing so." Google has said it has the technology to recognise faces as well as millions of other objects, but admitted the service is limited. Sceptics say existing face-recognition programmes are still basic and the capacity to discriminate different faces restricted. Professor Sasse added: "There does seem to be a certain threshold of accuracy for face recognition that has not yet been reached. At present, you need a full-face shot. The scary thing is that the next generation [of software] will be able to use a large number of images snapped from different angles, so this technology is going to get more accurate." If Goggles proves successful, it would mark a breakthrough in the use of the mobile internet.

It has a database of more than one billion images and can recognise landmarks, CD covers, logos, barcodes, books, shop fronts and business cards. It is less good at identifying the natural world, but that is expected to improve with time. It is available on phones run by Google's mobile-operating system Android, and later introduced to other smartphones. * Google has been criticised before for ignoring privacy concerns. The human rights watchdog, Privacy International, rated the company "hostile to privacy", the lowest rating awarded out of 20 companies assessed.

It said every corporate announcement from Google had "some new practice involving surveillance". It also said Google was leading a "race to the bottom" among internet firms, many of which did little to protect their users. Google's Streetview, which provides a panoramic view of every street, has been criticised on similar grounds. Privacy advocates say Streetview has shown men leaving strip clubs, protesters at an abortion clinic and sunbathers in bikinis. Google allows users to flag inappropriate or sensitive imagery for the company to review and remove.

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/november-wrap-up-3

November 2009

* 509,048 blogs were created.

* 6,380,052 posts were published.

* 483,127 new users joined.

* 7,245,509 file uploads.

* 4,728 gigabytes of new files.

* 865 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.

* 1,720,604 comments.

* 7,516,584 logins.

http://crossbrowsertesting.com Cross Browser Testing. Pick an OS, Pick a Browser, Test website
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Living Websites help you to take advantage of the how people research and shop for products and services. A suite of Internet marketing tools for the small or medium sized business, including tools for search engine optimization, business blogging, website content publishing, lead tracking and intelligence, marketing analytics, and competitor analysis. Everything your website needs. In a jar.

Product manager Greg, a.k.a. Dr. Wave, gives an introduction to Google Wave and points out parts of the user interface. This is meant to be viewed inside Google Wave.

There are extreme people in every pursuit, including tiddly winks We'd never thought about what that might look like with yoga would look like. It looks beautiful.

Ana Forrest is recognized worldwide as a pioneer in yoga and emotional healing. Born crippled, her own life trauma and experiences, including physical abuse, drug addiction, epilepsy, and bulimia, compelled her to create Forrest Yoga

 

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication has been around for quite a while and because of that fact alone, it's a become a powerful, free, open source technology which can make your life easier.

How many times have you done something and then emailed someone to tell them that you've done it? What if when you were finished, it became part of an RSS feed? Then the person at the other end can see the moment you've done it because it shows up in their RSS reader.

What the hell is an RSS Reader anyway?

RSS and Atom files provide news updates from a website in a simple form for your computer. You read these files in a program called an aggregator, which collects news from various websites and provides it to you in a simple form.

But what reader is best?

There are many different ways to consume RSS, and you'll want to pick one that suits you. If you happen to use google.com/ig as your home page like I do, then your reader right in the middle of that screen and make sure the 'mark all as read' button is easily clickable.