Before: One agenda that contains both work and personnal information hosted in Outlook at work. I synched it with mobile device over USB or bluetooth. Pros: one agenda with all my appointements and todo in one place, can take it with me on my phone, nothing in the cloud (no “corporate” securiy issue). Cons: Mixing both professional and private appointments, I can not share it, no access control (my management could see my personal appointment ?).

Problem when moving in the cloud: With Google Calendar my agenda will be hosted in the cloud, in the Google cloud… It is my call to decide to host my agenda on their datacenter but I can not do the same with my work agenda. Legitimately the company I am working for is not so keen of the idea of pushing sensitive information on an external service.

After: The better solution seems to be handling two calendars separately:

• Personal calendar hosted in Google Calendar: it is now accessible from anywhere and on any device through the web based interface and I can share it with my relatives. Also Google provides a Exchange server wich makes it easy to integrate this calendar into tools.
• Work agenda remains on Outlook at work and I synch it over USB/bluetooth with my phone. Nothing in the cloud.

How to:

1. Google provides a tool to synch your Outlook with Calendar (synch 1 way or 2-ways). I used it to push all my agenda to Google Calendar.

Side note: Yes, I am PC user by default, but I have no technology religion and could move to another platform anytime if needed. Actually having most of my datas in the cloud is just easing this process.

RSS Cloud

RSS Cloud takes advantage of the “cloud” element in the RSS 2.0 specification. Actually “cloud” has been there since RSS 0.92, but no one paid much attention until the rising interest of real-time web. RSS Cloud effectively allows any client (like feed reader) to register to get notifications for stuff they have subscribed for beforehand.

How does it work ?

1. The >cloud< element in your RSS2 feed tells the clients where and how to sign up for notifications requests.
2. The publisher sends out notifications updates to the cloud when a new post is published
3. The cloud sends out notifications to all client that have subscribed to the publisher updates

The result is that new posts from your favorite blogs arrive much faster using the RSS Cloud method than the polling method. But RSS Cloud is not alone and there are competing specifications like… PubSubHubbub.

Google’s PubSubHubbub

PubSubHubbub is a simple server-to-serve publish/subscribe protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS. The servers speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications when a feed URL is updated. The subscriber gets not only the notification of the update but also the new/changed content.

ReadWriteWeb: Speed in the Feed: Google Reader and PubSubHubbub

Note that the Real-time Web is the main theme of LeWeb 09 conference in Paris in December.

[...] Vivek Kundra, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, has decided to switch the District’s 38,000 employees from the installed Microsoft Office suite to the Web-based Google suite [...]

This news comes only a few weeks after Richard Stallman (GNU founder) warned about Cloud Computing… Guardian: Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman:

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control, it’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

Well an US government agency is using US company infrastructure… so far so good.

Should “cloud computing” becomes trendy, and it will, I wonder how non-gov companies are going to address that privacy issue and I wonder if Washington state would have done the same choice if Google was not an US company ?

• Create 10 codes for free… then you will have to pay I guess;
• Create campaign and codes within a campaign;
• For every code you get statistics on how many times it has been shot per day/week/month (and export those in csv format);
• You can create codes that are leading to a web page, allowing document download (song, video,…) or displaying some information in plain text;
• In three cases the code generated is an URL that points to a server which in turn is going to redirect you to the target destination;
• When the code generated is a link, your are redirected to the link (well obvious mmh?);
• When the code generated is a document, it is uploaded on Insqribe website and you are redirected to this document when scanning the code. Would be nice maybe to access an intermediate page that give you some information about this document like size and type, would give the end user the choice to cancel the download (especially useful given the current data rate);
• When the code generated is “plain text”, you are redirected to a web page on Insrqibe website that displays the text you have entered when generating the code;

The service seems to be using Qode (from NeoMedia) service (probably though an API). When shooting a code the browser is first redirected to a qode.com address and then to Insqribe service (2 redirections then).
(UPDATE: no they are not, see comment below, my bad!)

It seems they are going to introduce some social network features… looking forward to it!

By the way… 2d codes on iPhone sucks! I have not found a good reader yet. None of them seems to be “scanning” in real time the code. They all requires to “manually” take a picture and it renders the whole process much less appealing.

Via 2d-code.co.uk

Chris Borgan: Prologue is More Than We Are Considering, “Install WordPress on a web server inside the firewall and you’ve solved the “private implementation” of Twitter”, yeap!

On a sidenote, I need to change the layout of this blog to make it more micro-blogging friendly… I want to be able to write 160 chars post without title and stop posting on Twitter.

Cool…

With the Nokia Mobile Web Server (website) your mobile becomes an active device on the network and now with SoonR, your desktop becomes a server…
Read also: MobileCrunch, NY Times

On a side note I looked for a RSS feed on SoonR website without much success. I can not believe that in 2008  the PR of a tech startup has not set up one. -1.

Here is what Om Malik thinks about this acquisition, as for myself I could see how to use it for tracking comments I put on weblogs (and comments are useful). Now that I have a Gravatar tied to my email address, checking and parsing Gravatar.com’s webserver logs could tell where I leave comments (assuming the blog has gravatar switched on).

Here is the very few lines of code to make your Wordpress blog also Gravatar-enabled.

Good idea, I had seen it somewhere I think but do not remember where (I thought it was on GetJar but apparently not and I could not find it). Here is a two inputs on my side.

1) Not sure that going directly to the download process is the right way to go. An intermediate page that gives some information to the end user like download size and version might be safer. User might feel a bit more secure as soon as it knows how big is the file he is going to download (and charge for, as long as we do not have true flat rate).

2) Why generating one barcode per device model ? (ie. Share online per N95, Share online per N73,… ) the whole logic should be hidden to the user and put on the server side. The correct version of the software to be downloaded should be determined on the server (thanks to User-agent detection), if it exists.

Moconews: Mobile Barcodes Driving Magazine Traffic. In France mobile barcodes are called Mobile Tag or Flashcode, provided by the same company I think, which are basically datamatrix with numeric code in it. The resolution is therefore done on a server and it is tied to a reader. The built-in reader of my Nokia can not decode those, so for me it is useless.

Nokia plans to replace clicks with “Point&Find”, “Point and Find” identifies objects through image recognition and provides users with associated information. This technology has definitely a lot of promise… (#)

Back to the blogroll issue,… this is not that easy to maintain… it is an ongoing and never finished process but I consider it as a mandatory element within a blog – at least on the main page. It does help to find out who the author is (sort of “what you read is what you are” thing I guess).