Category Archives: Social Web

Gravatar : a Globally Recognized Avatar

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last update : 24 August 2010

My Gravatar

My Gravatar

Gravatars are images that follows users from site to site appearing beside their name when they do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify their posts on blogs and web forums.

I created today my Gravatar using the  picture appearing at the left of this text.

To display the gravatar for Leslie’s Artgallery, the following link can be used:

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/a679fe148cc868a002e1669b9b788379?s=120

The pixelsize of the displayed square gravatar can is defined by the parameter s.

For SSL connections, the link is the following:

https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/a679fe148cc868a002e1669b9b788379?s=400

Google Wave : an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration

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last update : 21 August 2011

In August 2010, Google announced that Wave would no longer be developed as a standalone product, but that the Wave technology would survive in other products. The following informations refer to the initial plans.

The Google Wave product is currently available as a developer preview. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop. Google Wave can also be considered as a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. A wave is shared. A wave is live.

The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, Google intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

Users can request an invitation to Google Wave Preview and developers can request an Wave sandbox account.

Google Product Search & Merchant Center

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Google Base is a place where users can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which will be made searchable on Google. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches. Google Base is is free and is currently available with English and German interfaces. Iinformations about all types of online and offline content are submitted to Google Base via a data feed or Google Base API.

Google Merchant Center is another way to manage Product-type items.  It’s a new service that makes it easy to upload and manage the Product listings you want to appear in Google Product Search, AdWords, and other Google properties.

Compared to Google Base, the Google Merchant Center provides a better, optimized experience specifically for merchants. Google will continue adding features and improving the tools for uploading and managing product listings. Accounts using Google Base for Product listings have already been transferred to the Merchant Center.

The Google Product Search application is currently still in a beta version.

ROR : Resources of a Resource

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ROR (Resources of a Resource) is an independant XML format for describing any object (products, services, reviews, discounts, images, events, schedule, podcasts, …)  in a generic fashion, so that any search engine can better understand that content. rorweb.com is the official ROR website.

ROR promotes the concept of structured feeds (which is related to the concept of structured blogging) enabling search engines to complement text search with structured information to better understand meaning. ROR information is typically stored in a ROR feed called ror.xml placed in a website’s main directory.

The specifications of ROR have been updated last in march 2005. The ROR website provides FAQ’s, sample ROR feeds, a Developer’s corner, a blog,  free tools and lists of ROR providers and terms. It seems however that there are currently no new activities going on at the ROR website.

Google & Open Directory: the organized web

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Last update : July 2, 2013
The Google Web Directory integrates Google’s sophisticated search technology with Open Directory pages to create the most useful tool for finding information on the web. Key improvements include the following:

  • Importance ranking
  • Smarter search within directory categories
  • Web search integration
  • Clean, uncluttered user interface
Open Directory Banner

Open Directory

The Open Directory Project (ODP) is a large public directory managed by Netscape. The ODP is maintained by a group of volunteer editors from around the world who evaluate sites for inclusion in the directory. The web pages selected by these editors are organized into a number of broad categories under which are many more specific subcategories. Google uses this hierarchy as the basis for its directory.

Wikipedia : the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit

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Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based mostly on anonymous contributions and was started in 2001. Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by an international group of volunteers. Anyone with internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles. There are no requirements to provide one’s real name when contributing; rather, each writer’s privacy is protected unless they choose to reveal their identity themselves.

There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 14,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages. About 65 million visitors are counted monthly as of 2009.

Wikipedia’s intent is to have articles that cover existing knowledge. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which has created an entire family of free-content projects. On all of these projects, the contributor is welcome to be bold and to edit articles, contributing knowledge in a collaborative way.

Over 2,000 articles have been designated by the Wikipedia community as featured articles, exemplifying the best articles in the encyclopedia. Another 7,000 articles are designated as good articles. Some information on Wikipedia is organized into lists; the best of these are designated as featured lists. Wikipedia also has portals, which organize content around topic areas; the best portals are selected as featured portals. Wikipedia articles are all linked, or cross-referenceTd.

The ideal Wikipedia article is well-written, balanced, neutral, and encyclopedic, containing comprehensive, notable, verifiable knowledge. The following help tools are available to begin contribution to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia uses a simple yet powerful page layout to allow editors to concentrate on adding material rather than page design. Wikipedia uses the open-source MediaWiki software.

Within Wikipedia, notability determines whether a topic merits its own article. Article topics are required to be notable, or “worthy of notice.”

Update your Twitter picture with Snapatar

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Snapatar lets you update your Twitter profile picture using your webcam. Simply snap a picture, fill out your Twitter details and send the new image to Twitter. You can do this as often as you like. Your creativity is the limit.

Snapatar was designed by Roy Tanck, a free lance webdesigner, geek, entrepreneur and WordPress enthusiast from the Netherlands. He is the co-author of  the book  Byte-size Flash MX which deals with optimizing Flash files. He is also the developer of the FlickR and Photo widgets.

ShareThis makes sharing easy!

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ShareThis is a free one-step sharing tool that saves you time and makes sharing online hassle free. You can share anything on the web to your choice of social bookmarking options, post-to-profile and blog choices, Email, AIM, or even as a text message to a mobile phone.
The ShareBox is a place where registered ShareThis users’ shared content is stored. If you want to retrieve something you have shared in the past, share it again or would like to tag and organize your shares, this can all be done within the ShareBox. In addition, users can save and tag content directly to their ShareBox from within the widget for easy searching later.

I created today a ShareThis account to include the ShareThis widget to my WordPress websites.

Translations and Transliterations

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Making a website available in multiple languages is important, especially if the target audience is international. Google offers two types of solutions to the Translation challenge. One is by straight online translation via a handy translation widget. The second solution is the Google AJAX Language API.

With the AJAX Language API, it’s possible to translate and detect the language of blocks of text within a webpage using only Javascript. With the AJAX Language API for Transliteration, it’s possible to enable transliteration on any textfield or textarea in a webpage. Transliteration is the process of phonetically converting a word written in one script into another. Transliteration should not be confused with translation, which involves a change in language while preserving meaning. With transliteration, it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other.

Code examples are available at the Google AJAX API’s Playground. A useful tutorial how to add inline language translation to a website with Google AJAX API has been written by Amit Agarwal.