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OLE for the Web: oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly. Table Of Contents Quick Example Full Spec Security considerations Discovery More examples Authors Implementations

What does Facebook publish about you and your friends? This Website reveals what Facebook publishes about you! Any information you see below is visible to anyone on the Internet through normal use of the Facebook Graph API. Facebook apps used by you or your friends might see more.

See also the NIEM coverage map at http://www.niem.gov/organizationsMap.php Progress on government information sharing in the U.S. 

1)  What's the Best Android Phone for Verizon Right Now? Droid X. This was one of two reviews to break into the top 10, both of them on Android. It hit as the Android frenzy was reaching a crescendo and highlighted how a bigger screen could work on smartphones. This review and the number two post also hit the top mobile posts of the year. 2)  Android Sales Overtake iPhone. This has been a theme that has generated a lot of traffic all year. With Android ascendant, we saw the first quarter where recent sales surged past the iPhone. While the iPhone appears to still have a larger overall installed base, the reports of Android's rise touched off a lot of debate about where the two platforms will end up. 3)  Nexus One: The Best Android Phone Yet. This post went up in January and foreshadowed a big year for Android. While praising the device, Om said it still didn't match the experience of the iPhone, but it showed Google was ready to compete. 4)  4chan Decides to Do Something Nice for a Change. This was a nice change-up and showed that 4chan, despite its reputation for sophomoric humor and sexual imagery, could be used for good. The online community banded together to wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday. 5)  Your Mom's Guide to Those Facebook Changes and How to Block Them. Where would we be without a Facebook post in our top 10? This post looked at the expansion of the "like" button to outside websites and instant personalization and explained how users can sidestep the features. This fit into a larger story about privacy on Facebook, which never seems to get old. 6)  Is Apple About to Cut Out the Carriers? This post stirred a lot of conversation after we reported that Apple was looking at putting its own SIM card in iPhones to sell devices directly to consumers. The move would have allowed Apple to cut out European carriers. It looks like the plan didn't come to pass, but it illustrated the power of Apple and its am

BEIJING-International Business Machines Corp. agreed to cooperate with Chinese network services provider Range Technology Development Co. on the construction of a cloud computing data center in China, which IBM said will be Asia's largest in terms of floor space. Construction of the center is likely to generate about $200 million worth of contracts for IBM over the next five years, a person familiar with the situation said. IBM said Tuesday it expects the data center in Langfang, Hebei province, to be completed in 2016 and to have a floor space of more than 620,000 square meters. IBM and Range Technology signed an agreement on the data center last week in Chicago during Chinese President Hu Jintao's state visit to the U.S., IBM said. The data center will offer services such as data backup, disaster recovery and leasing of servers, said Li Tao, senior manager of IBM China's public sector division. Enterprises such as software developers and government departments are likely to use services provided by the data center, IBM said. No one at Range Technology was immediately able to comment Tuesday, but a statement dated Jan. 11 on the company's website said it formed a strategic partnership with IBM, and the companies would cooperate in areas including data center construction.

The EU's cyber security agency ENISA (www.enisa.europa.eu) announced this week it has released a new report on governmental cloud computing. The report, which can be downloaded now on the ENISA website, is targeted at senior managers of public bodies who have to make a security and resilience decision about migrating to the cloud, if at all. The main goal of the report is to support governmental bodies in taking informed risk based decisions relating to the security of data, resilience of service and legal compliance on moving to the cloud. ENISA concludes that private and community clouds appear to be the solutions that offer the best solution to meet the needs of public administrations if they need to achieve the highest level of data governance.The report makes several recommendations to governments and public bodies, including national governments and the EU institutions should investigate the concept of an EU governmental cloud.The report also argues that cloud computing will soon serve a significant portion of EU citizens, SMEs and public administrations, and therefore national governments should prepare a cloud computing strategy and study the role that cloud computing will play for critical information infrastructure protection.Finally, the report states that a national cloud computing strategy should address the effects of national/supra-national interoperability and interdependencies, cascading failures, and include cloud providers into the reporting schemes of articles 4 and 13 of the new Telecom Framework Directive. Download report:  http://www.enisa.europa.eu/act/rm/emerging-and-future-risk/deliverables/security-and-resilience-in-governmental-clouds/

Cloud Computing White Papers   The Open Group Cloud Work Group exists to create a common understanding among buyers and suppliers of how enterprises of all sizes and scales of operation can include Cloud Computing technology in a safe and secure way in their architectures to realize its significant cost, scalability, and agility benefits. It includes some of the industry's leading cloud providers and end-user organizations, collaborating on standard models and frameworks aimed at eliminating vendor lock-in for enterprises looking to benefit from Cloud products and services. The White Papers on this website form the current output of the Work Group. They are also available in PDF form from The Open Group bookstore for download and printing. Further papers will be added as the Work Group progresses. The initial focus of the Work Group is on business drivers for Cloud Computing, and this is reflected in the first items to appear: The Business Scenario Workshop Report White Paper: Building Return on Investment from Cloud Computing White Paper: Strengthening your Business Case for Using Cloud White Paper: Cloud Buyers' Decision Tree White Paper: Cloud Buyers' Requirements Questionnaire Further White Papers will address other key Work Group topics, including Architecture, Infrastructure, and Security.

another excellent tutorial from InfoWorld.

Amir's Website for open source BitCoin:  Jason Calcanis "This Week in Startups". Bitcoin is a new digital currency offering many advantages over traditional and other electronic currencies. Nobody owns the bitcoin economy, and nobody controls it. Utilising an ingenious decentralized structure, bitcoin relies on cryptography and mathematics to ensure security and reliability. It is secure and reliable. It eliminates virtually all the overhead seen in traditional banking. Currently bitcoin lingers in the underworld of the internet and lacks the outside polish that can take this cryptocurrency from the garage to commerce. Our wiki contains a short introduction to this digital currency.

This white paper will give you a small planning toolset and a few tips to help get you oriented. I'd like you to get a Drupal 7 website planned and online today, and the fastest way to get there is Drupal Gardens (drupalgardens.com). It saves you from the technical overhead and lets you dive into how Drupal works, exploring the administrative interface and learning how to organize content. Download - 10 pages.  How to set up Drupal 7, May 2011.  Acquia

Oliver has a short post concerning Google Wave and the new world the Wave will have wrought. Once section in particular caught my eye:
Two behemoths going after each others markets
..."Google apps, while a very popular tool for students, has never caught on in the enterprise due to security concerns, with a few exceptions - Microsoft Office is the default in cubicle land. Google search meanwhile is currently the global market leader, and is a popular enterprise solution in the form of internal appliances behind the firewall, while Microsoft's search and associated electronically stored information taxonomy and tagging has been famously weak."
"While these two giants slug it out for the others coveted market the playing field may well change significantly as the third big internet revolution unfolds. We've gone from Web 1.0, the read only static html website world to Web 2.0, the read-write, 'user generated content' web. The explosion in interconnectedness is at the expense of information fragmentation: the third web generation (Web 3.0?) is all about the meaning and context of data and information.
"Behaviorally suggested content; the personalized experience of a web that seems to know you and anticipates what you want is just around the corner...."

PhantomJS gives you command-line access to the features of WebKit. According to its website: "Literally it acts like any other WebKit-based web browser, except that nothing gets displayed to the screen (thus, the term headless)." It has native support for DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, SVG, and JavaScript.

Making cloud-based file transfer service easier.  Improved FTP alternative for small and medium sized business. A ShareFile user's customers can access files on a company-branded Web portal, one of the business-friendly features that helps set the service apart from the likes of Dropbox, according to Steve Chiles, chief marketing officer at ShareFile. Users can also allow their customers to log in to the service and upload files from their own website. ShareFile comes with reporting features that allow users to see who has uploaded and downloaded files, and when they were transferred. The addition of Sync will help automate the process of uploading files, instead of having to do a lot of the upload work manually. The feature allows for both one-way and two-way synchronization of files.  The user just has to drag and drop the file they want to synchronize into a designated folder. A folder can also be configured to send content to many recipients.

Move over FlipBoard and QWiki and meet Needle.  The emerging market space for automating the process of collecting Web information to analyse, re-purpose and re-publish is getting crowded.   Needle is designed to: acquire data from multiple sources:  A simple tagging process quickly imports structured data from complex websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets into a unified database of your design.merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needle uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needle uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. build and publish custom data views: Use Needle's visual UI and powerful query language to configure exactly your desired view of the data, whether as a list, table, grid, or map.  Then, with one click, publish the data for others to see, or export a feed of the clean data to your own local database. Flipboard is famous for the slick republishing / packaging process focused on iOS devices.  Allows end users to choose sources. QWiki takes republishing to the extreme, blending voice over (from wikipedia text) with a slide show of multimedia information.  Edn user does not yet have control and selection of information sources with QWiki. The iOS Sports Illustrated app seems to be the starting point for "immersive webzines", with the NY Times close behind.  Very very slick packaging of basic Web information. Flipboard followed the iOS re-publishing wave with an end-user facing immersive webzine packaging design.  And now we have Needle. Still looking for a business document FlipBoard, where a "project" is packaged in a FlipBoard immersive container.  The iPack would be similar to an iPUB book with the added featur

Note: On April 12th, 2011 Needle was acquired by Google.

 What is the best state to incorporate an LLC?  I have a plan for a website in which the only source of revenue will be from ads, so the revenue stream won't be coming from a particular state. I've heard Nevada, based on their tax laws, is the best state in terms of starting a small business. Although Nevada does not levy personal, business or corporate income taxes, that doesn't automatically make it the right choice. When deciding which state to incorporate in, there are a number of things you should look at. Included among those are: State Laws regarding corporate governance......... .... Corporate costs of doing business .......... ...... Cost of doing business as a foreign company ..... .......... Creditors rights laws ........... ............ True relationship between your company and the state ... .............. Tax issues ...............

Pokki Web-to-Native App Framework.....  excerpt: So what exactly is Pokki? It's a framework built on Chromium that allows developers to build basic applications using standard web technologies, but with a few key additions. First, these applications support nice notification tags in the menu bar (similar to iOS's badge system). They're also handy by design - click one, and it will pop up in a small window that you can use to access your Facebook wall, Gmail inbox, or whatever other application you've installed. Click outside of the Pokki, and it disappears. It's very lightweight. Pokki is initially offering a set of eight applications to users, including apps for Gmail, Facebook, Groupon, eBay, the WSJ, Living Social, and Twitter. That's a solid start, but today's launch is primarily about introducing developers to the Pokki SDK, which isavailable beginning today, and will let developers turn whatever website they like (provided it has an API) into a Pokki. Note that most of the Pokkis launching today were built in-house by SweetLabs. To use Pokki, users have to install the basic framework first, but this will come bundled with all Pokki apps - the company expects users will download a Pokki from one of their favorite sites, and then continue to add more using the integrated Pokki app browser. The apps are launching with support for Windows today, with Mac and Linux support coming down the line.

HTML5 development company appMobi is releasing a new browser today called MobiUs that will give mobile Web apps the same type of functionality that now is currently only enjoyed by native apps for platforms like iOS and Android. AppMobi thinks of MobiUs as the replacement for Flash in mobile - it renders mobile websites like a Flash extension would and gives developers device access in ways previously unavailable to in HTML5. MobiUs is technically a mobile browser. That is not the way appMobi thinks it will be used though. The company expects it to be function more like a browser extension. Like Flash, users will be prompted to download it once and from then it will just run in on the device.

What a giggle, public spying on NSA and its contractors using Big Data. The interactive network graph with its sidebar display of relevant data derived from LinkedIn profiles is just too delightful. 

A new resource site for whistle-blowers. somewhat in the tradition of Wikileaks, but designed for encrypted communications between whistleblowers and journalists.  This one has an impressive board of advisors that includes several names I know and tend to trust, among them former whistle-blowers Daniel Ellsberg, Ray McGovern, Thomas Drake, William Binney, and Ann Wright. Leaked records can only be dropped from a web browser running the Tor anonymizer software and uses the SecureDrop system originally developed by Aaron Schwartz. They strongly recommend using the Tails secure operating system that can be installed to a thumb drive and leaves no tracks on the host machine. https://tails.boum.org/index.en.html Curious, I downloaded Tails and installed it to a virtual machine. It's a heavily customized version of Debian. It has a very nice Gnome desktop and blocks any attempt to connect to an external network by means other than installed software that demands encrypted communications. For example, web sites can only be viewed via the Tor anonymizing proxy network. It does take longer for web pages to load because they are moving over a chain of proxies, but even so it's faster than pages loaded in the dial-up modem days, even for web pages that are loaded with graphics, javascript, and other cruft. E.g., about 2 seconds for New York Times pages. All cookies are treated by default as session cookies so disappear when you close the page or the browser. I love my Linux Mint desktop, but I am thinking hard about switching that box to Tails. I've been looking for methods to send a lot more encrypted stuff down the pipe for NSA to store. Tails looks to make that not only easy, but unavoidable. From what I've gathered so far, if you want to install more software on Tails, it takes about an hour to create a customized version and then update your Tails installation from a new ISO file. Tails has a wonderful odor of having been designed for secure computing. Current