Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Videos of people explaining why they will vote for Obama, on Youbama. Brilliant.

I wonder why the sharing of OPML has never really taken off? The lack of a good and easy to use service? mmm… there’s an idea :)

Between LinkedIn, Facebook, Crowdvine and others, I now have to spend like 10 or 20 minutes every morning adding friends all over the place.

ps: I was playing with Facebook photo albums the other day: it’s better than Flickr. Truly. Better. It doesn’t look as hip, and it’s not as focused on photographers, but it does much more with your social network than Flickr (an area they have always kinda neglected), and the images load faster (I think they just preload the next image while you’re watching the current one, a simple trick Flickr should copy.) Overall, it’s a much nicer social experience, which in turn encourages you to share your own pictures too.

I still don’t like behemoth social networks though.

The ia summit is using crowdvine to power the social network for the conference. One thing I don’t like about it (I love it overall), is that I want to meet everyone and am a fan of everyone. So then I have to click those things 500 times and spam everyone I know?

Check out Konigi!

Hey, Snap started a blog defending themselves against people who don’t like snap (I don’t like Snap previews, they’re just sooooo annoying and 1996).

The fact they felt the need to start this blog speaks for itself I think. And things like “Peter Van Dijck won’t give it a rest” after a blogpost or 2, 3, … bad taste, I feel kinda intimidated almost, not sure why, maybe it’s because they use my entire name. Oh well.

I started http://snapsucks.org to have an easy link that explains why I dislike snap. Now, I have to admit, I understand where they’re coming from. You’ve got a product, a startup, traffic is going well, you work hard, then someone starts a yousuck.com site, it’s no fun. And the Snap guys have been cool about it, defending their product in blog comments and such. But I’m sorry guys. I dislike snap shots, I think they’re bad, and I don’t feel any urge to not say that to people.

Weird.

Some damn nice recipes here. Simple ones, but I made the humus and it rocks. 5 minutes.

Just a few messages from Facebook the other day:

• “You are now friends with X”.
• “You now have a relationship with Y.” (my wife) (!) (We had a little celebration after this one, it felt like something official.)

Etcetera. Read those messages literally and they start to creep you out. Thank you Facebook, for clarifying my relationships for me. It’s as if I need to confirm my relationships on Facebook, as if they’re not real if I don’t. Anyone else have this feeling?

“Something that Anil Dash once wrote on how to charge: Slap the client
in the face as hard as you can, then tell him your rate. If he’s
shocked that you slapped him, you’re not charging enough.”

A year after I moved on from Mefeedia, the team is still going strong and cranking out features, as evidenced in this new video playlist.

All the “newsfeed”-style implementations (and I include Twitter in that) have it wrong: I want to see 1 item per friend, ordered by the latest active friend first, not all activities of my friends ordered by date (because that means I see 20 updates of my very active friend and none of my not so active one). At least, that’s how it should work in my mind.

Snap preview still really really sucks.

So first Sun buys MySQL (for a billion dollars) and now Yahoo supports OpenID. It’s going well for open source standards and infrastructure.

Sun is acquiring MySQL for a billion dollars. This is a big deal, MySQL is vital infrastructure for most of the web.

• Localization server | drupal.org
  (tags: translation)
• Launchpad Translations in Launchpad
  (tags: translation)

One of the reasons why I like Dreamhost is there style. Here’s an email they sent after messing up:

“Hi Peter!

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attempted
to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY
(it was all due to a fat finger)!

We’re really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing
to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have
received recently; we’ve already removed all those bum future charges on
your account (#154088) and fixed everything up.

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE
this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless
of course you have any other questions at all!

Sincerely,
The Foolish DreamHost Billing Team!”

Gotta love them. Plus, together with mediatemple, they’re the best host I ever used. If you’re looking for a host, try them out.

A brilliant localization client and server for Drupal.

I hate how Google reader has this neverending scrolldown “feature”. It’s like you’re never FINISHED! I WANT to reach the bottom of the page, thank you very much!

If you’re in Phoenix (USA) and interested in videoblogging, check out node101 Phoenix.

Good post by Johan on pagination. That’s pretty much exactly the way I’ve been doing it.

It turns out Belgium is the most globalized country in the world.

The semiotics of video production on Youtube and among videobloggers.

Aphophenia: “I had just finished giving a talk about youth culture to a room full of professionals who worked in the retail industry when a woman raised her hand to tell me a story. It was homecoming season and her daughter Mary was going to go to homecoming for the first time. What fascinated this mother was that her daughter’s approach to shopping was completely different than her own.

Using Google and a variety of online shopping sites, Mary researched dresses online, getting a sense for what styles she liked and reading information about what was considered stylish that year. Next, Mary and her friends went to the local department store as a small group, toting along their digital cameras (even though they’re banned). They tried on the dresses, taking pictures of each other in the ones that fit. Upon returning home, Mary uploaded the photos to her Facebook and asked her broader group of friends to comment on which they liked the best. Based on this feedback, she decided which dress to purchase, but didn’t tell anyone because she wanted her choice to be a surprise. Rather than returning to the store, Mary purchased the same dress online at a cheaper price based on the information on the tag that she had written down when she initially saw the dress. She went for the cheaper option because her mother had given her a set budget for homecoming shopping; this allowed her to spend the rest on accessories.

Mary’s mother was completely flabbergasted by the way in which her daughter moved seamlessly between the digital and physical worlds to consume clothing. More confusing to this mother, a professional in retail, was the way in which her daughter viewed her steps as completely natural.

In the 1980s, Alan Kay declared that, “technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.”

Oh just go read the whole thing.

Just a regular guy, this made me laugh.

Yahoo Mash goes beyond “inviting your friends” to get all viral, it says: “X created a profile for you - claim it!”. So now I have to clean up my profile that someone else created on your service? Sigh.

Will someone give this guy a job?

• Colombia Migration Project - an ethnographic video project about migration
  (tags: videoblog ethnography video colombia migration immigration)

Vloggercamp is four (!) days and NO (!) internet (”so you have to actually talk to people”). Now that sounds like something I’d go to.

An old install of Wordpress of mine got hacked. The site is more of an archive of a past project anyway, so I spent 2 or 3 hours making a static version - much easier to maintain and archive and not so hackable as an out-of-date Wordpress install. http://colombiamigrationproject.net