Mozilla Labs introduced Weaver, which is supposed to enrich the Firefox experience by allowing more control to the users over personal information and data. The Mozilla Labs team has set a list of principles around which the Weave project is to develop:

• provide a basic set of optional Mozilla-hosted online services
• ensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services with freely available open standards-based tools
• provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
• respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
• leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed
• build a extensible architecture like Firefox

Basically, your browser’s meta data - bookmarks, history and more - is pushed into a data cloud (something that’s been proposed as the future of Internet and application development), and then this data is available anywhere the user is online to people the user allows to have access to this data. The goal is not to build a robust framework with many capabilities built in, but to create a development environment that would allow other developers to extend and build applications using an API.

I don’t think sharing my meta data is something that I would like to get into too easily. There are plenty of ways this data can be misused, although the Mozilla Team have stated this is just a basic prototype, with plenty of development still to come. Encryption is going to be required by default, so security is the first thing that’s going to be addressed.

Weaver is available for download as a basic prototype and works with Firefox 3.0b2pre or greater.

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Bill Slawski (SEO by the Sea), wrote an interesting post about Google filing a new patent on snippets. Basically, there is a rather complex effort behind the way Google shows snippets in search engine results. Ranging from snippet size and keyword relevancy to more complex things like snippet weight adjustment, the patent mentions many things previously unknown about this. The document makes references to another document still not published, which should contain some more detailed information about the methods and technology behind snippets.

I already wrote a bit about Google snippets before. Recently, the video featuring Matt Cutts discussing the anatomy of a Google search result brought a much needed explanation about so many questions asked about what has/can be done to influence what Google shows as the page description in the search results.

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After having announced Internet Explorer 8 a while ago, Microsoft surprises us one more time by having successfully passed the Webstandards Acid 2 Test in standards mode. This is great news since standards compliance is not something that was readily available from any IE so far.

This doesn’t mean the new IE has all the other stuff fixed, such as layout and float peculiarities, but it’s a good start. Since this is just the “internal” vesion of IE, I am hoping there will be plenty more improvement by the time the browser hits the beta stage. Opera recently complained to the European Union about IE not having proper standards support. Having passed the Acid 2 test, IE 8 and Microsoft have fought back. Firefox has also just released its version 3 beta 2. Begin the browser wars … again.

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Google Talk has got a new addition in form of a bot that will help users communicate with others who don’t speak the same language. In order to use the bot you need add it as a friend in Google Talk. This is the form: [from lang]2[to lang]@bot.talk.google.com . “from/to lang” is substituted with a two-letter abbreviation for the desired language (ex. english is “en”, french is “fr”). The system uses standard two-letter abbreviations for languages. Once the bot is active, the user talks to it saying whatever in the “from” language and gets the translation as an answer in the “to” language. Pretty neat!

The languages currently available include French, English, German, French, Russian, Chinese, and a few more. Best of all, developers can use the Google Talk service and XMPP to program their own translation bots. I am not sure this means we can add new languages, since it wasn’t stated explicitly, in which case this means we’ll have to wait for Google to add the corresponding dictionaries.

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There has been a lot of posts about this in the past weeks. The “Here comes another bubble” video, by Richter Scale, has finally been re-released on YouTube, after an initial take down due to legal problems concerning a photo shown in the video, claimed to be the property of a Canadian photographer. Anyway, the video is pretty cool, so here it is … again:

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Google announced the release of Video Sitemaps, an extension of the Sitemap Protocol. It has been developed in order to improve the way Google indexes video content publicly available on the Internet. The idea is to make video content more searchable on Google Video. Apart from the basic information about video files such as title and URL, the video sitemap allows more detailed meta tags such as video player location, thumbnail preview location, the URL of the page showing the video.

In order to use Video Sitemaps, webmasters should log in to Google Webmaster Tools and add Video Sitemap to their account.

If you’ve got some video content lying around on the server, here’s a chance to get it indexed and get some additional exposure for your website. Apart from uploading video files to services like YouTube, this is a good way to extend video visibility and use this growing promotion trend to your advantage.

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… if everything happens according to the predictions made by eMarketer’s latest study on the impact of social networks in the coming years. The study looks at numbers from 2006 and 2007 and makes projections all the way until 2011. If everything goes well we are looking at about $4 billion advertising spending on social networks in 2011, and about 49% of social network users in the US will have logged on to their favorite social network at least once during a period of one month.

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I’ve come across WriteMaps, through Ajaxian. It’s basically a tool for creating site maps visually. It uses jQuery to create a very easy to use interface. There are two modes for working with a site map - branch chart and a standard indented list. Each page is represented with an icon, and additional descriptive information can be stored for each page by clicking the “i” mini-button on the icon.

The tool offers many ways to export the map, for example as an XML file, which is great when you want to use the newly designed site structure in some other application. Every map can be saved on the server, and it’s accessible from anywhere online. Maps can also be shared so collaboration is available for larger scale projects where there are more people involved. Here are some of the features supported in the 1.0 version, released in early November:

• Sharing (Editable and View-Only)
• Print Formatting
• XML Sitemap Export
• New Outline View
• Source Import / Export
• Edit and Presentation Modes
• Contextual Undo / Redo
• Page Url and Notes Fields
• Save / Save As
• Deleting Sitemaps
• Help Content
• Increased Browser Support

They have a FAQ section and a blog for up-to-date information about everything concerning the service. Sign-up is very easy and takes literally a minute, while the tool itself is quite browser and processor intensive, so I’d recommend not opening too many tabs at the same time. While WriteMaps supports collaboration, I’d still use it for smaller projects for now, maybe up to about a hundred pages. It can be a great companion when recording an idea about a site structure on the road. You can later export the map and put it in a mind manager application for more detailed idea development. I would like to see some more advanced features in the future, like the ability to drag pages and rearrange the hierarchy using the mouse (click and drag). Adding features such as these shouldn’t be a problem. Also, maybe a plug-in for graphing interlinking between the pages, and indicators showing a page’s internal incoming/outgoing link ratio. Yes, this may be more SEOish than development, but SEO must be integrated in development if a site is to achieve anything on the search engines.

Anyway, a nice and easy to use tool, and best of all it’s free. Bookmarked!

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I was surfing the Web trying to explore new possibilities for advertising, something not so mainstream, something a bit underground. I came across an interesting UK based street advertising services provider called SAS (yes, like the special forces) which stands for Street Advertising Services. They use pressure cleaners to produce images and text on surfaces like concrete and asphalt by cleaning a pattern on the surface. The result is like a negative on a wall or street floor. It looks pretty good actually, and it’s definitely a different approach. I’ve done some more searching to see if there are others doing this sort of thing, and came up with a couple of references towards artists and the technique, for example this one.

The best thing is that, although a guerilla tactic, it’s not illegal since there is nothing applied to the host surface that damages it in any way. Only pressurized water and steam are used. In fact, left long enough, the “negative graffiti” will blend back into the “dirty” tone of the surrounding surface. The actual work is mostly done during the night, as there are far fewer pedestrians that may get in the way of work. A great way to pass on a simple branded message. Even though this is quite a new thing, there are already brands who have begun to use this newly opened advertising channel.

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Ask.com has launched AskEraser, an application that gives visitors a choice to keep their search behavior private by telling Ask to delete all search behavior from its servers. The application has two states - “on” and “off”. “On” is on by default, and choosing “off” means all search queries throughout the endurance of that state will not be recorded. AskEraser is available for US and UK users, although the change will take effect on other major sites throughout 2008.

Online advertising is ever more reliant on user behavior as the focus on the Internet has moved towards the individual user. Giving users the choice to opt-out of privacy delicate situations is a good step forward. Facebook had this setup for its Beacon, but had to change the system to opt-in after receiving a lot of negative feedback from its user community. I wonder why default states are not “off”, and the users are asked to opt-in to tracking and user behavior based content serving rather than making them/us look for a way to opt-out. Maybe because the core of the whole privacy issue, as is the case with many other situations, is money and profit.

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