Top E-Tailers Profiting From Scams -- Vertrue, Webloyalty, and Affinion generated more than $1.4 billion by "misleading" Web shoppers, said members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. [...] The government says the investigation shows that [the companies] "trick" consumers into entering their e-mail address just before they complete purchases at sites such as Orbitz, Priceline.com, Buy.com, 1-800 Flowers, Continental Airlines, Fandango, and Classmates.com. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
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From Bruce D'Arcus' Darcusblog comes a pointer on a U.S. Library of Congress initiative for a better date format Extended Date Time Format (EDTF). ISO 8601's problem is that almost anything is a date: if my memory serves me, some date values are ambiguous so you need to make a subset or add some attribute to say which kind of date you mean.
Continuing my effort to spare newcomers to Drupal from falling into this powerful content management system's most common traps, this time I look at a frequent cause of white screens - the sudden and scary devolution of a previously healthy Drupal site into a blank browser window. This can be caused by coding mistakes, such as neglecting to conclude a line of custom PHP with a semicolon.
A few months ago, the team my husband works on was hiring a new developer, and I overheard my husband talking to a friend he was considering recommending for the position. I surprised myself by my gut reaction which was, "I don't care how good Steve thinks this guy's resume is, he's way too nice to be any good as a coder." Now, part of that reaction was probably the fact that I was working in a shop where nice people don't usually make it past the two-week trial period, but there's a part of me that can't quite get past my feeling that people who are too nice don't make good coders.
When Twitter decided to slowly roll out a new, official retweeting feature, people waited in anticipation. When it actually became available, people almost universally disliked it. But my post is about why I love the new Twitter retweet feature, without ever having to think about it. The reason is that official retweeting represents the new-new arms race for authority among power users.
While I'm very positive about the openSUSE team I must say that I am a lot less sanguine about some in their community. Some fans (or really fanatics) came out in force ready to attack the reviewer (me), to question my skills and even my sanity, to attack Ladislav Bodnar for posting the review, to blame the hardware, anything at all but the distro code which is, according to some, "the best release ever".
I'm on the board of CommonCrawl.Org, a nonprofit corporation that is attempting to provide a web crawl for use by all. An interesting report just got sent to us about the use of robots.txt files within the .Gov Top Level Domain, a standard known as the Robots Exclusion Standard. In examining about 32,000 subdomains in .gov, it turns at least 1,188 of these have a robots.txt file with a "global disallow," meaning robots are excluded from indexing this content. Even more curious, on 175 of these sites, while there is a global disallow, there is a specific bypass that allows the Googlebot to index the data.
With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company's strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of active users from Asia grew by 2% (to 13.5% of all users), and roughly 1 in 7 users now come from the region. With a market penetration under 2%, Facebook is poised to add many more users in Asia (and Africa).
Introducing the Open Web Foundation Agreement -- Applying the open source approach to better standards. The Open Web Foundation Agreement itself establishes the copyright and patent rights for a specification, ensuring that downstream consumers may freely implement and reuse the licensed specification without seeking further permission. In addition to the agreement itself, we also created an easy-to-read "Deed" that provides a high level overview of the agreement. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Healthcare in the near future will be quite different than it is today. Web enabled technology is already changing the way medicine is practiced. As the digital nation comes of age we will see new opportunities, and new challenges, bringing healthcare in America into the 21st century. Health consumers will come to expect they will have control over their own health data. Having secure, interoperable access to clinical data will allow patients to partner with their care providers in new ways incorporating Web 2.0 principles.
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