So, first, export your bookmarks. It seems there is no limit to the number of bookmarks you can save, all of them are there. Delicious uses a modified Netscape bookmark file format with meaningful use of HTML tags. In clear: this file can easily be parsed and stored in another format, in a database, in another tool.

Now what if someone finally decides to shut down Delicious? Or what is the future of your data if Delicious outside Yahoo! is transformed into a paid web service (like Historious for example)? What is the competition? What are the alternatives?

I will not blindly list them all. You can find them via a simple web search. Instead I’ll list the features I liked in Delicious and also add some improvements I would have liked to see. If I go for something new (or an improved Delicious), it would be nice if it’s better than the actual one, isn’t it?

What I like in Delicious (in no particular order):

• simple: a link, some tags, a description and you are done
• tags suggestions based on other users’ tags
• private tags
• simple “social” link, suggestions between users and trends about what’s currently bookmarked
• web-based (accessible from everywhere), quite fast
• simple API, extensions for most popular browsers, widgets and badges for inclusion in websites
• free, accounts not necessarily linked to Yahoo! (at least in the beginning)

And now what can be added to make it better?

• free license (e.g. Affero)
• free access to dataset (the whole dataset, not just your dataset ; so compliance with OSSD))
• decentralised system while maintaining interoperability (à la Jabber)

And for the rest of your digital life, what if the service provider decides “that there is not a strategic fit” for it at the parent company? Self-hosting seems to be the only viable alternative.

I understand that enhancing the user’s experience while surfing the web is something that can be interesting. Hardware acceleration opens the door to unseen compositions, to new types of animations, to new kind of applications. Directly in your favourite browser.

Comment if I’m wrong but hardware acceleration will not lead to fragmentation of the web landscape. HTML5 seems to be the standard behind which browsers developers are adding their acceleration engines.

However, an issue (from the user’s point-of-view) will probably be that hardware acceleration will still help the emergence of a consumer-only web. A lot of your applications will be in your browser, with your data in someone else’s data center. You want your data safe? You need to trust your provider’s security measures. You simply want your data on your hard drive? I think you’ll have a problem here. But I agree it’s not the technical implementation that will be responsible for that.

There is another issue I see with browser hardware acceleration. And it’s very down-to-earth. As you often encounter in presentation with videos, the presentation is displayed via a beamer but not the video (a black rectangle is displayed instead). You can easily disable hardware acceleration in most presentation software (if it’s not disabled by default). But, with hardware acceleration fully integrated in the browser, what will be displayed with the beamer if we have to do a demo of a website or simply when the presentation software is the browser? A page with patches of black rectangles? I hope not.

Why do I blog this? I enjoy reading about the (technical) details of (browser) hardware acceleration. I am very interested in general in all the new developments in IT regarding the use of GPUs and graphics card computational power to solve current issue or allow future developments. But I’m also using these (new) technologies everyday. So I don’t want that technological improvements on one hand turn to cause trouble on the other hand.

• there is a first Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License: you can use the library for your non-profit website (see details on the licensing page) ;
• there is a commercial license for any other website.

Now what if we only need the end-product, i.e. the resulting chart, in a commercial environment? What is covered by the license is just the re-use of the javascript library in a website, not the resulting chart. If a company choose to use Highcharts internally to render some beautiful charts and just publish (*) the resulting image, I guess they can just download the library and use it (* by “publishing”, I mean: publish a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal, not publishing on its website). On the other hand, no one ever questioned the fact commercial companies have licenses for all the proprietary software they use to produce anything else, from charts to statistical data, just because they publish results with these software as tools. So the “trick” here would be that, by changing the medium on which you display end-results (from website to paper, even if it’s in PDF on the journal website), you can use the free-to-download license, even in a commercial environment, for an article from a commercial company. I’m not sure this was the original intention of Highslide Software.

So, if you didn’t know OCAL or didn’t have a look at it since a long time, it’s worth visiting their new website now!

• 20040 views for my Gemvid presentation at FOSDEM 2009
• 100451 views for my random field presentation
• 200418 views for my OpenOffice.org Impress presentation

It’s good to be considered as a presentation rockstar (even if it’s an April fools joke).

Before Thursday, every programmer wanting to develop a software for social networks had to learn an API, how to write code and sometimes a new language for each of these networks (when these ones exposed a public API!). Now, OpenSocial gives access to the most common functions of all the participating networks. Currently, the API gives access to:

• the users profile information
• the networks and friends information
• events in the network

One advantage of OpenSocial is that it’s based on existing languages (Javascript, HTML and Flash) where other APIs (the Facebook one, to be clear) impose a new language like FBML. Source code for examples is under a free license as well as all the documentation. OpenSocial promises to open the API source code soon (see the FAQ).

Finally, one slowly achieves a true social networks society (federation) where, whatever website/network you are registered, you’ll be able to use the same applications (who spoke of standardization?). Web 2.0, software are coming!

Now, some questions remain unanswered …

• One day, one can be registered in a network and access other networks without being registered with them (a bit like gateways allow people using one type of IM can chat with friends using another type of IM).
• What about security, access to data (from outside) and the public perception about this? (see Bruce Schneier’s opinion on Facebook and data control)
• …

I initially wrote this news in French for LinuxFr (see here).

Well, I don’t give up easily. I tried to send an e-mail to the portal contact address: portal@minfin.fed.be (to ask for the info and tell them about the “user firendliness” of their website). Of course, this address is not usefull at all since I immediately got an anwser: “Delivery Notification: Delivery has failed”. What is more interesting is when you look for the reason (e-mail servers always include some details about errors) … “Diagnostic code: lmtp;522 5.2.0 Delivery failed: Over quota” (emphasis is mine). Two options: 1. they read e-mail citizens are sending but they are temporarily overwhelmed by e-mails -or- 2. they don’t care about citizens and don’t bother to read their e-mails. I think they don’t care about us: I guess no one is actually reading these e-mails and they are accumulating since a long time.

On some webpages, there is a “website coordinator” name: Françoise Gerckens. Of course, there is no e-mail, no form, nothing. It’s also interesting to read their disclaimer: they are not responsible for anything and people cannot complain about what’s there.

Finally, against my will, the old clichés about public administration came back into my mind. They simply are not technologically advanced, is it possible? So I tried a low-tech approach: phone. Of course, I couldn’t find the phone number of the service I want to reach but just a general number in Bruxelles: 02.572.57.57. After dealing with a robot for 2 minutes, I was finally put on hold for at least 20 minutes. After that, without a warning, they hanged up. I phoned again and I met their robot one more time, I waited at least 20 more minutes and they hanged up. A third try? Same results. Now, I’m fed up. They can go to hell, there are no means to contact them!

P.S. I was in the lab so don’t tell me I just have to look at my papers. Anyway, since I already sent my tax papers, I don’t have the contact address anymore.

I recently read some articles (1, 2, 3) and blog posts about privacy and a new service from Google: Street view. I was then wondering if they are rules or regulations regarding online privacy for non-publishers (for online media).

If you have the opportunity to post your own photo and you don’t want to be online, you may just not publish it. Here I’m talking about people whose picture is being taken in public places and published online without their explicit consent.

A recent post from Slashdot discusses an article on the privacy implications of online photo-tagging (pdf). The issue here is a bit different since they are mainly talking about photos tagged with names of people on the picture (I didn’t go that far). But a stakeholder posted excerpts of the EU Data Protection Directive (already adopted in the Belgian law). You can find the text and some explanations on the EC data protection website. Other explanations and a good summary of differences regarding privacy between Europe and USA is in the Wikipedia article. Since Flickr is a US website/company, it’s not a surprise there are no references to nor guidelines regarding privacy of people on the pictures. But if I strictly follow the Belgian law, I should perhaps remove those photos. A lot of my contacts on Flickr do not take/publish pictures of unknown people. Is it on purpose?

I didn’t decided yet what to do, where is the right equilibrium between privacy concerns, hobby and knowledge/information sharing. Any insight is welcome.