QoTD: Simon Johnson

"Have we really reached the situation where the Senate as a body and individual Senators – accomplished men and women, who stand on the shoulders of giants – must bow down before financial markets and high-ranking executives who are really just talking their book?" — Simon Johnson

Syndicated 2010-01-30 16:48:14 from Don Marti

MLP: web this and that.

Meagan Fisher: "a website’s design should begin where it’s going to live: in the browser."

Good look at a network of comment spam crews: Internet Crime Gangs Manipulate Public Opinion (via John Robb). These aren't just going for traffic, they're actually disparaging a business with privacy complaints.

How to plot a point on a Hilbert Curve.

Go Lego A/V Guy!

Playing with Web Storage. Try Pedro Ladaria's text editor demo, and see the HTML5 compatibility table to see where it works.

And the "apt-get install" of the week: sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf. That's a simple shell utility to convert html to pdf using the webkit rendering engine, and qt. Fully scriptable and make-friendly, and you can feed it a user stylesheet to tweak the format for print without changing the original HTML. Just what I needed.

Syndicated 2010-01-04 23:15:31 from Don Marti

Webspam feeds?

So here's the basic idea. You have a web site with a bunch of user-generated links that may or may not be spam. These links can come from anywhere: comments, wiki edits, trackbacks, referers. Meanwhile, on some other site, a page on your site could be the target of a spam link. (For example, somebody makes an account, and puts a bunch of crap in his or her profile page.)

So you want to find the spammy links on your site, and you want the rest of the webmasters in the world to clean up the spammy pages on their sites.

So what do you do? Well, when you clean up, you post the URIs that you don't like to a link reputation clearinghouse. (You can also post the good URIs that appear on your site as good, to help the clearinghouse decide that you're a legit user, and to help prevent them from showing up as spam.) You might report to more than one clearinghouse, since they all accept basically the same HTTP POSTs. All easy to automate as part of the moderation process in your CMS if you want.

The clearinghouse does some digestion (naturally, spammers are going to try to clobber the clearinghouse with bogus reports, and naturally, some links are going to be reported the wrong way by mistake.) Each clearinghouse does its own digestion and reputation magick internally.

Then the clearinghouse generates RSS feeds by domain. You subscribe to one or more feeds from one or more clearinghouse services, and when you see a possibly bad page on your domain, you check it out. You can pick and choose among clearinghouses, since some will end up doing better digestion than others.

Big web sites that host a lot of user-generated content might want to run their own clearinghouses. Another logical place to put a clearinghouse is at a site that does link sharing or URL shortening. Individual webmasters might subscribe to just one clearinghouse, and clearinghouses might subscribe to each other.

Here's a simple, easy-to-use clearinghouse: Aloodo. Right now it's seeded with good and bad links from this site, along with a few other public sources. There's also a simple way to query the good and bad lists, so, for example, you can check out a new user's profile page and forum postings before deciding whether to make them public. If you have a webspam problem, let's talk about how this could be useful to you—either as a customized subscription or as an in-house install.

Syndicated 2009-12-24 18:06:50 from Don Marti

QoTD: John Gruber

"Why would I publish content using a technology that I personally block by default? I truly hope to see Flash fade as the de facto standard for embedded web video, and I’m willing to put my markup where my mouth is." -- John Gruber

Syndicated 2009-12-22 17:14:45 from Don Marti

MLP: Open access, or fat and stupid?

I know, some of you are probably still wondering why we need open access for scientific research. Here's a good example. Without open access, you get what the people who to tell you about science want to tell you. For example, here's SweetSurprise.com. File under you-know-what. Now throw in every marketing site, taxpayer-funded crop promotion program, wannabe food guru, Mainstream Media nutrition trends piece, and quack diet. Worthless.

Open access gets you the straight-up Science. How about Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans, from the Journal of Clinical Investigation. So knock off the HFCS if you haven't already, and support open access science.

Regex for URLs:

    \b(([\w-]+://?|www[.])[^\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^[:punct:]\s]|/)))

I have the "distinction" of contributing a couple of items on the "list of dumb things to check" by Tom Limoncelli et al.

Red Hat open-sources SPICE: a remote desktop protocol fast enough to be practical for video conferencing.

Danny Sullivan runs into Google's spam blog problem. Great technology company, but hosting people's original content (or not-so-original content, which is the problem here ) requires staffing up an abuse team.

Syndicated 2009-12-22 02:55:46 from Don Marti