Yesterday, I was at the golf course, doing a Google Apps migration. A young boy sat down next to me during a coffee break at the club house.

I asked: “So… Do you have a handicap?”
He replied (without blinking his eyes): “Yes, sir. 11″
I: “And how old are you?”
He: “12, sir”
I wanted to tease him a bit and said: “Well, ok. It’s good you’re still young, so you have lots of time to work on a decent handicap”

He said nothing, just nodded his head.
I finished my café au lait.

Well, there you have it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m off to bed, now. Have to get up early tomorrow. I imagine waking up tomorrow and… the world will be out of IPv4 addresses. That feels weird! Good night.

Hurricane Electric IPv4 Exhaustion Counters

Did you know you can use your Mac to connect to any Windows PC? Microsoft has a client, which even allows you to relay audio. It’s pretty cool!

Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2

Or click here for a nice chart of possibilities

Today I had an interesting challenge. I was working on an english retail Windows Server 2008 x64, that was configured as a Domain Controller, running DNS and DHCP.

It was still running SP1 and I wanted to upgrade it to SP2, which did not work using the separate download, but it worked using Microsoft Update!

SP2 installed successfully and it took a while for me to figure out that some services were not running afterwards. Those services included DNS, DHCP and… Windows Event Log. I tried to start the Windows Event Log service, but it would fail with a strange error about the service account not being the same as it used to be or so. Uninstalling SP2 didn’t solve the problem, nor did Google have a solution for me.

I checked the Services and saw the following line:

C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe -k LocalServiceNetworkRestricted

The options on the Log On tab were all disabled (grayed out), but the radio button was set to Local System account, which was interesting, because the Path to executable referred to the LocalServiceNetworkRestricted account.

I decided to try my luck and I started REGEDIT on the server, looked up the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog

There was an ObjectName which held a REG_SZ value of LocalSystem and I decided to change it to NT AUTHORITY\LocalService

It worked! The Windows Event Log service started without any complaints and so did the DNS and DHCP. My server was safe and I was happy!

Are you using Outlook 2010, just like me and do you have a LinkedIn profile?
Give LinkedIn for Outlook a try!
If you’re still on Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007, don’t forget to get the Outlook Social Connector (which is included in Outlook 2010)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc0On7Wl-0I

I’ve been using ÜberTwitter for some time now and in fact it’s the only serious BlackBerry application for Twitter.

Unfortunately the started using ads a little while ago, which really bugged me, although I understand the wish of the developers to make a living out of it.

I happened to see the possibility to pay $5 and get rid of the ads (the ad supported version remains free of charge), which makes it the perfect app for me. It’s well worth the money! Do you have a BlackBerry? Take yours to the address below and pay those lousy $5. Happy tweeting!

Get ÜberTwitter – The only Twitter Client for your BlackBerry!

Did you see it coming? I wrote on Aardvark earlier and now the time has come. Google acquires Aardvark. In fact this did not come as a surprise to me, but the timing is special. Just now, after Google announced their realtime telephone translation service earlier this week (I’m speaking Dutch in my phone and it comes out in Japanese on the other end of the phone, thanks to realtime voice translation by Google), as well as the launch of Buzz…

We’re facing exciting times and I’m really curious as to how the other parties will respond to these strategic moves… Stay tuned!

Confirmed: Google has Acquired Aardvark

Foursquare (4SQ) is een location based social network. That means you can tell your friends where you are. Or your colleagues. Or your customers. Or your boss. Or the rest of the world.

4SQ contains a game element. You get points every time you tell your network where you are. Every sunday night the leaderboard resets itself, allowing newbies to make it to the top (at least for a short while).

Telling your network where you are is called “checking in”. The best way to do so is by using your cell phone. 4SQ offers applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Palm and for the remaining phones there is a web version. If you want to check in, your phone checks your location and 4SQ tells you where you might want to check in. These are the places that were defined by people who checked in earlier. If your place is not listed, you can add it. Mind correct spelling, addresses, upper/lower case voor cities etc. Your place will be used by future 4SQ users. If you name your place correctly, it will be easier for others to find it.

Anybody can check into public places. The person with the most checkins in a particular place automatically becomes the mayor of that place. There are places in the US that serve free coffee to the local mayor. Think what this may mean for your business in terms of customer experience or marketing!

Hot: It has become possible to mark a place as private. Only your friends can see where you are and the rest of the world can’t. This may be useful if you want to record a phone number with a place. You might even add a Twitter account to a place.

4SQ made me rethink my privacy strategy and my conclusion is that Twitter is for my contact with strangers (and friends of course), where Facebook is strictly for my friends. This means I won’t be publishing location checkins on Twitter, but only on Facebook.

I used to have a Facebook application that automatically updated my Facebook status upon every new tweet on Twitter, but I removed it. Facebook supports a number of native applications. Native applications can update Facebook status in native Facebook format, so Facebook recognizes what they are. This means you’ll find less frequent, but nicer looking status updates no Facebook from now on.

Some applications that offer native Facebookness are (but not limited to): Foursquare, Flickr, Shazam and Youtube.

Click here to get your free Foursquare account

Technical evolution makes hard drives bigger and cheaper. Today, we have bigger files and more pictures and video’s on our computers than ever before.

Are these files safe? Do you have a backup of there beautiful memories? Even today, in 2010 a lot of computer still don’t have a proper backup.

Imaging the following scenario: What happens if your hard drive crashes today? What is safe and what isn’t? After reading this post you have no more excuse for not having a backup of your home computer (corporate servers are a different league).

Today, we have Wuala! Wuala is a free noline service that allows you to store your files. When you open your free account, you get 1 or 2 GB free of charge. You can use Wuala as a web drive, allowing manual storage of your files, but you can also use Wuala as a backup solution. In that case just point to a folder (directory) and tell Wuala to keep a synchronized copy in the cloud.

Wuala keeps all your stored files encrypted. Your files can only be retrieved with your password. Remember: If you lose your Wuala password, there’s no way to recover your files!

Every file Wuala stores is chopped to pieces and kept in (a minimum of 5) different places on the internet. Nerd note: This is done using P2P (Torrent) technology.

Wuala allows you to buy storage, but you can also trade local disk space for online disk space. If your PC has been online for a while Wuala will inform you that you can trade storage. The more you trade, the more you gain.

All files are private files by default. If you have friends or colleagues using Wuala you can share folders with them. If they wish to download a file from one of your shared folders, they don’t only download from your PC (it may not even be switched on), but the file comes from the collective, making downloads a lot faster!

You can use Wuala on more than one computer and it runs on Java, so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux! I keep a Windows Media Center PC at home (powered by Windows 7). It is always on and online. I traded 30 local GB’s for (almost) the same amount of online storage. I’m using this space to keep a backup of my laptop files, while I have easy access to these files from my home computer!

Please note: If you want to use Wuala as a backup solution, you need a Wuala Pro account, which you will get automatically when you buy or trade storage. If you join through a friend you get 1 GB free storage extra (as does your friend). It pays to makes friends on the Wuala network.

If you use the link below, you can become a 2 GB Wuala member as my friend

Wuala – Secure Online Storage – Backup. Store. Share. Access Everywhere.

Last year we saw the announcement and release of Google Wave.

For those who didn’t get it: Google Wave is a Hosted Conversation Service. Google thought: “If email were invented today instead of 40 years ago, what would it look like?”.

Rather than sending endless emails to each other, Wave allows you to start a conversation at one central place and involve other people, yes even entire websites!

If all of this doesn’t ring a bell, have a look at: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html
There is short video (2 minutes) that explains in plain english what Wave is all about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8wXnVRnYdc

You can get a Wave account through an Invite, just like Gmail at its time. I still have tons of invites left, so if you’re not on Wave yet and I made you curious, let me know and I’ll send you your invite. Invites can be received at any random email address, but I discovered that invites to Gmail addresses actually take longer to arrive! Once you have your invite, you can subscribe to Wave using a Google Account (can be a different address than the one your invite was sent to). If you don’t have Google Account yet, you can create one on-the-fly and you’re ready to go. In the end you get a new address within Google Wave, which, funny enough, doesn’t allow you to receive email… Your Wave address ends in @googlewave.com and it allows others to add you to their Wave. I use daepunt everywhere, but unfortunately daepunt@googlewave.com wasn’t available, so if you want to share your Wave with me, add puntdae@googlewave.com instead.

The first thing I came across once I got started with Wave, was the interface. The screen looks like an interesting mix between Gmail and Google Docs (a chaos I never got used to). Wave is still in beta, so try not to use it for life/death stuff. On the other hand: If you’re not using it for serious purposes, how will you ever find out what it can/can’t do?

We’re using Wave in a production environment, which makes us discover interesting stuff on a daily basis. I’d like to share a few of those things.

The first thing I immediately missed was mobile support. I have a BlackBerry and an iPhone and a I perform a significant part of my job on the road. Google Wave runs within a browser and there’s no mobile support yet. There are numerous non-official Wave applications for the iPhone, but I’m always very careful with that. Those Apps require you to save your name and password and after that, you have no idea what happens to them. No, thanks! I’ll wait for the official Google App, although you might wonder if your name, password and data are safer with Google…

Google intends to turn Wave into an open platform, allowing the whole world to develop my mobile BlackBerry/iPhone App. But until that day comes, you’re stuck to a browser on a PC. The smartest thing I found was a FireFox Add-On, allowing you to see your unread Waves at the bottom of your FireFox screen: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/14973

Wave is still work in progress. My browser hangs a lot and today I discovered that it’s impossible to “unshare” someone, after you accidentally added the wrong person to your Wave. This means you have to be very careful when sharing Waves. Fortunately there is a way to copy existing Wave content to a new Wave (so your data doesn’t get lost), allowing you to share your stuff with the right people. You will then discover that there’s no way to permanently delete your old Wave! Emptying it or stuffing it with bogus is the only way to get rid of a Wave you accidentally shared with a wrong contact. Be careful with sharing (especially with the wrong people) because this is also a way to connect people to each other, which may not always be your intention…

Despite these quirks I see huge potential for Wave. There are people who worry about Google’s influence on our daily lives and I think it’s important to worry about privacy. Yet, I think Google is no bigger threat than Microsoft and we need to consider the options here. We should choose between existing possibilities instead of theoretical, non-existing products/services.

All progress is achieved step by step and taking active part in new developments enables you to stay involved and up-to-date. I don’t know if Google Wave will remain to exist in five years, but I see potential for a service like Wave. And Wave being Open Source creates spinoff projects, allowing you to run your own corporate in-house Wave server. That solves the privacy argument against Google and I reckon we might very well be installing local Wave servers in SMB companies, which are currently dominated by Microsoft Exchange only, anywhere between now and five years…

I wish you all a happy 2010 and I hope we will continue to see beautiful developments!

From: BlackBerry Network Administrator
Subject: BlackBerry Messenger Software v5.0.0.57 Update Available
Sent: 23 dec. 2009 20:20

A new version of BlackBerry® Messenger software is now available. If you are currently running version 5.0.0.55 or 5.0.0.56 of BlackBerry Messenger, please upgrade to version 5.0.0.57 as soon as possible. This version addresses issues with versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56.

To download the most current version of BlackBerry Messenger software, please visit www.blackberry.com/blackberrymessenger and follow the on-screen instructions. Please note that the software update is available free of charge, however downloading and using applications over the wireless network may incur data usage charges depending on your service plan. Please check with your airtime service provider for information about service costs. If you have any questions about this update, please visit www.blackberry.com/support/messenger.

Thank you,
Research In Motion Limited

©2009 Research In Motion Limited. All rights reserved. BlackBerry®, RIM®, Research In Motion®, SureType®, SurePress™ and related trademarks, names and logos are the property of Research In Motion Limited and are registered and/or used in the U.S. and countries around the world.

Are you using a BlackBerry? Go to the above URL and get the latest version of BlackBerry Messenger!

If you have a BlackBerry, taking screenshots can be a great help when making manuals.
You can do this by using a tool called loader.exe, which is a part of the BlackBerry Desktop Manager.
This program can be found in folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research in Motion\AppLoader (on 32 bit systems). On 64 bit PC’s it is the C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Research in Motion\AppLoader folder.

Connect the BlackBerry to your PC, open a Command Prompt, go to the directory mentioned above and start:

loader.exe /screenshot filename.bmp

to take a ‘picture’ of your BlackBerry’s active screen.

You can find more information and options in Research in Motion’s KB17215:

Use loader.exe to take screenshots of your BlackBerry

Have you been using Google Analytics to find out who’s been visiting your website? After all: knowing beats guessing, right?
Although the one day delay in Google’s statistics was always bothering me. Well, Woopra does it live! With a world map that could have escaped straight from a James Bond movie, telling you who’s visiting your website right now and even how (s)he got there! You can even start a live chat with your visitors. It’s great! Free beta testing closes today, so make sure you get a free account and sign up your website(s!) for beta testing approval ASAP!

Woopra – Web Statistics 2.0

If you have several weblogs and a username and password for almost every social network available? Collect and combine all data from these networks into one readable timeline with

Yesterday @marcelprins and I visited Amstelveen to meet Mr. Daniel Brunnert, Regional Sales Manager of Syncsort for a live demo of Backup Express BEX, a great new technology that allows not only backup of virtualized servers, but also restore!

The beauty of this technology is the super efficient way (both speed and storage) you can back up (to tape, files, and even files, presenting themselves as tapes) while the restore part of the solution allows you to restore single files, mount live disks or even mount live virtual servers!

I’m confident we’ll hear more of this great solution. At this moment there is support for VMware ESX and the engineers at Syncsort are busy building support for (Microsoft) Hyper-V. Unfortunately Xen is not on their list.

I met Daniel at the CeBIT in Hannover, earlier this year and -accidentally- running into great stuff like this is exactly why you need to get out of the office every now and then to visit a fair or exihition

Syncsort Backup Express (BEX) – How Fast Can you Recover?

Are you looking for a good, reliable and free TFTP Server for upgrading software of your switch, firewall or router?

Try TFTP Server from SolarWinds!

TFTP, Free TFTP Server, TFTP Server: Free Network Monitoring Tools from SolarWinds

Tip: If you want to know if a program is 32-bit of 64-bit, you can use FileVer.exe to find out.

How to use the Filever.exe tool to obtain specific information about a file in Windows

Are you worried about the security of your WordPress blog and do you want to upgrade it to the latest version?

If you’re using WordPress MU, you’ll probably run into an error.

Read the following link and find out how make one tiny change to a file can repair WordPress MU’s auto upgrade feature.

WordPress MU › WordPress MU Forums » Upgrade to WPMU 2.8.2 failed

A while ago I discovered that, despite its fantastic looks, the iPhone is actually a very unsecure device and just the idea that it might be broken, lost or stolen one day is driving me crazy already. Time to act!

I decided to remove my company data, followed by my Gmail and today I’m only using my iPhone for Twitter and a digital shopping list. For me, personally, the features of my BlackBerry BES are the minimum standard of security and apparently it’s lonely at the top…

Even the use of Twitter is dangerous (if Twitter is online), because my favorite Twitter application SimplyTweet doesn’t use secure SSL to send my data to Twitter. Consider this: The whole security community shouts “SSL is insecure, use EV SSL instead”, while there are still companies, services and application who aren’t even using “plain” SSL… Even our Dutch Government and our National Banks barely see the need of SSL and given the demonstrated and obvious security flaws of SSL they don’t see the need to implement EV SSL, so why would you worry about it?

Tweetie, my previous favorite Twitter application has been using SSL for years. I just think that Tweetie was far ahead of its time and that’s probably why we haven’t seen an update of Tweetie ever since.

I think it’s incredible to see that many people don’t seem to care or think about possible loss or theft of their cell phone, what may happen to their data and the possible impact this may have on their position. And if nobody cares about it, why would the manufacturers of the devices? Except, of course, Canadian company Research in Motion…

Imagine the following scenario: You’re an accountant and you’re using email on a daily basis. You have a cell phone. Let’s say: a Nokia. You’ve had it or a while and it accommodates quite a lot of phone numbers. You’ve had your phone linked to your corporate Exchange server, which took some effort (certificate, software update for your device, sometimes it’s not working and WiFi has never really worked properly), but it allows your to read and reply an occasional email.

Now, imagines your phone being broken, lost or stolen.

Phone broken
Which information did you have on your phone? Did you poke around with that data cable or Bluetooth every day to copy your valuable contacts and appointments to your computer? Did that sunday afternoon of deleting double appointments invite you to try again later? No, of course, because it’s too much pain and too much software is involved. This means: what you don’t have elsewhere, you don’t have and that’s a shame.

Phone missing
If your phone is missing and you don’t know where it is, there may be a chance it’s at home, between two pillows on your couch, but it may also have been stolen. The problem is, that you don’t know and you have to assume you’re not going to find it again. First of all: block your SIM card, so the possible thief can’t call on your expense. ALWAYS secure your SIM card with a PIN code (and pick something a bit more difficult than 0000 or 1234), preventing the thief from calling between the moment your phone went missing until the moment you’ve had your SIM card blocked. And then your data. It’s not only gone, but somebody else is sitting on it. Somebody who only has to press hash-menu to gain access to your contacts, phone numbers, appointments, emails, text messages, notes and whatever I may have forgotten.

And this: What if your phone isn’t stolen, but you have a grateful collegue, competitor, “friend” or somebody who checks your phone from time to time to see if there’s any interesting news? I don’t know anybody with National Secrets on their phones, but your stuff is your stuff and everybody should stay away from it. Well, you can’t take care of that with your Nokia.

And what goes for Nokia, goes for the iPhone in a similar way. Linking your iPhone to your company server is easier than with Nokia, but the remaining data you hadn’t copied using the data cable goes missing if your phone does, nevertheless. And then security. Can you imagine Apple making an iPhone 3GS, allowing your data to be encrypted with a key, that is stored on your phone itself?!? You don’t have to be a genius to understand that this level of “protection” is just a thing from the Marketing Division, who wanted to put on the box that the iPhone 3GS supports Encryption…

Some things you can prepare ahead, but when it comes to email, you can only write drafts and keep them until it’s actually time to send them out.

Free service Deferred Sender lets you send your emails now, allowing you to have them actually sent out at the time you decide.

Be careful! Make sure you read the Terms and Conditions very well. As you may know, email crosses the planet in plain text and delivery between sender and receiver always goes through hops, rather than directly. Without special measures anyone can read your incoming and outgoing email (Deferred Sender changes nothing about that).

Do you care about privacy? Then, consider the use of encryption. Contact our office for more information about encryption and email.

Deferred Sender

I really love my BlackBerry and I really love WordPress. Earlier this week, an application was released that brings the two together: WordPress for BlackBerry. Great!

Now, I speak more than just one language and I’m using WPML to make my weblog multilingual. Great!

Problem is: I can’t use WordPress for BlackBerry to post in any other language than the native language of my weblog (which is Dutch). Now, I could post using my BlackBerry and change the language with a browser afterwards, but that’s probably the least interesting option. Besides: I understand it probably doesn’t make sense for WordPress to add built-in support for just WPML. Therefore I think it could be interesting for WordPress to investigate the possibility of supporting plugins within a wider context.
If the owner of a WordPress blog uses and trusts a certain plugin, why wouldn’t the WordPress for BlackBerry (don’t forget the iPhone) app “inherit” additional database fields, post features and offer there through the app?

Amir told me he hasn’t got a BlackBerry (yet) so I posted a few pictures to illustrate:

Thanks for reading this and feel free to comment or contact to me.

(well, actually this is a manually translated post, not posted by WordPress for BlackBerry, since it won’t let me post a translated version of the original post I wrote in Dutch. This is just to keep you English readers up to date)

This is a test post. I noticed that I can add Tags to this post, but no Categories. Of course, I wonder if and how it shows up on my blog.

Let’s not put in a picture just yet, although it is supported…

I can’t tell the app which Language my post is in, so I can only write this in my blog’s native language, which is Dutch… I wonder if the authors of this application will contact the guys from WPML, or maybe they can make it even smarter, by supporting Plugin driven posts…

EDIT: Of course it is possible to indicate a Category. You just have to press the BlackBerry Option button.

The current stable version of WordPress is 2.8

Do you have a weblog that you don’t want to break, but don’t mind if it did? Maybe you like to check out the latest experimental version 2.9, that is being programmed during daytime and which can be downloaded at night. The updates go by the romantic name of “Nightly Builds”, which is exactly what they are… Be careful not to set fire to your blog! We’re talking pre-alpha code here!

WordPress – Download – Nightly Builds

At last there’s a website dedicated to gadgets! It’s called gdgt, which is pronounced as: gadget.

It allows you to make three kinds of lists:

1. Have. This is the list of gadgets you currently have
2. Want. This is what you’d like to have
3. Had. These are the gadgets you had

The cool thing about it is, that you can write reviews about the gadgets you (used to) own, exchange ideas, buy the gadgets you want (smart!) and… If you put a BlackBerry Storm or Bold on your wishlist, you might get one from gdgt, according to this tweet.

Of course it features followers (like Twitter); people keeping up with your gadgets (Facebook is currently transforming itself to the Twitter model). gdgt is a social network of people who care about gadgets. I wonder what the future of social networking has planned for us… Beware: The first gdgt burglary hasn’t been reported yet, but do not fear: I’ll be watching its development closely for you! I can imagine that somebody knowing your gadget list, might increase the chances of theft. Your insurance company may even give you a nice discount if you choose not to join gdgt…

In the meantime you can go to gdgt.com and create your own account free of charge or check out my gadgets at: http://user.gdgt.com/daepunt

It goes without saying, that gdgt can be followed on Twitter: @gdgt

Ha! Nothing beats writing an article on a fire I started myself

As I was browsing through the latest Bright Magazine 28 (July 2009), I noticed their colophon mentioned names of employees (Medewerkers Uitgelicht), email addresses, several web sites, phone numbers, inter-corporate relationships, yes, even a fax number fax number, but no Twitter account! It puzzled me. It’s 2009.

So I did some research. I’ve known for a long time that Bright’s name on Twitter is @BrightSite, which surprised me earlier (the name BrightSite refers to a web site, while an innovative organisation such as Bright obviously has the potential of conquering more media than just the web), and I concluded that the obvious first choice, @Bright, must have already been taken. I investigated this matter and it checks out. @Bright is owned by somebody who opened the account on Twitter, wrote his initial opening tweet on March 7th 2007 and took a sabbatical. He’s probably enjoying a nice cocktail on a small island with a name I can’t pronounce. But nothing has happened with (t)his @Bright account ever since and that’s a pity…

Curious, stubborn and helpful as I am, I couldn’t resist sending Bright a tweet on this matter. The nice thing about Social Networking is that it allows you to link just about anything to everything (TV, print, web whatever the future may have in store for us), so I wanted to know what’s up with Bright and Twitter. Maybe Bright’s presence on Twitter was still “experimental”, which is the case in many organisations . Experimental is a kind of fuzzy status, which is somewhere in between “not present on Twitter” and “present on Twitter with full confidence”. Sometimes there is a Twitter account, but without tweets, which makes you wonder if the company you had in mind is actually the company whose Twitter account you’re viewing. A good example is @WallMart.

My preferable way of informaing Bright was doing it quiet and sneaky, comme it faut, but Twitter only allows you to send a Direct Message (private message) to someone who’s following you (who is a follower of yours) and Bright and I don’t have that kind of relationship. I didn’t see any other way than to send my tweet into the Twitterverse (the wide world) and to sit and wait. I could have traditionally done this by email, but I was afraid of ending up in somebody’s drawer, waiting for monday to happen and besides: we’re talking Twitter here, so I thought: “If they take Twitter seriously, they just can’t but notice my tweet”. I did my homework and discovered that Twitter accounts @BrightTV, @BrightMag and @BrightMagazine were still unused. But for how long? I decided to write a consecutive tweet (sorry, I did this in dutch).

Right. There are organisations sáying the’re interested in innovation, but in reality they don’t seem to *really* care. I was pleasantly surprised that Bright had responded to me, even before I could say Twitterverse! The Twitter accounts @BrightTV (beautiful, even if I say so myself!) and @BrightMagazine are now taken. Nicely dressed with cool logos and, of course, Protected, meaning that the owner has to approve you following him first. I suspect low tweet activity, but the account names have been claimed. By Protecting your Twitter account nobody else can use the names and Bright doesn’t have to do anything with them yet. Showing your empty tweetless account to the Twitterverse isn’t that appealing

Haha. I can imagine what happened. Someone sees something on Twitter and starts calling/mailing/texting/faxing somebody else. The whole Emergency Contact Protocol 2009 unfolds itself and eventually reaches the The Big Boss himself. Somebody is woken up during the weekend: “Is that Farmer’s Son from Schagen right about this? It has to be taken care of NOW and it should have been already. What are we paying you for, anyway?!?”

Which brings me to the following: Should there be a law on squatting for empty Twitter accounts? Due to the ongoing lack of housing in The Netherlands we have a law (as long as we have politicians who care) that describes exactly under which circumstances a building may be taken, if it’s empty and its owner abandons it. How long do you think a Twitter account may be inactive, without actually being used? Will we see Twitter account hijackers, claiming your name, so you have to buy it back from them in exchange for a lot of money, like we saw (and see) with domain names? Should Twitter seize its Protected accounts, so we can see what’s going on?

#ThumbsUp Bright! You’re doing the right thing and next year I’ll ask my company to buy me another subscription on your fantastic magazine for my birthday

Flickr, the photo and video site has a special entry for iPhones. Take your iPhone to http://m.flickr.com and you’ll see a special iPhone optimized version of Flickr. That sounds great, but I don’t think it is. The iPhone version is far less functional than the regular site (http://www.flickr.com): you can’t organize photos in Sets, Groups are inaccessible and the iPhone optimized site won’t let you use the Zoom function on your iPhone! And that bugs me, because I love my iPhone, but the screen is still small… You have to work with the fixed dimensions of the iPhone optimized site. And that’s a bit strange, because at the bottom of flickr.com there’s an option to switch to the regular flickr.com, which brings back all functionality! Except for a tiny thing or two. Like most cell phones, the iPhone still has no support for Flash, which is why videos cannot be displayed (m.flickr.com wraps the video in .mp4, which should be playable by your iPhone).

If you’re not a power user and you just want to click a few pics, then the optimized m.flickr.com will work just fine on your iPhone. If you’re a Flickr member and you post photos and video yourself, you want to do more than just click-a-pic and switching between the regular and the mobile version is a waste of time and doesn’t make any sense…

I’ve been experimenting with an iPhone optimized version of dae’s weblog, but I gave it up for the reasons mentioned above. Losing significant navigation features, as well as functionality wasn’t worth it for me!

More and more sites are offering optimized versions for cell phones and the iPhone in particular, but I’m not using them. Functionality needs to improve first and in the meantime I’ll have the regular site design! It’s funny: On the one side there’s Apple trying to offer its users a true deskop experience and on the other side web sites are being transformed to optimize design and content for mobile display.

Did you know you can share your ideas and suggestions for Flickr at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrideas/

FeedBurner is a service, offered by Google, allowing you to “burn” RSS feeds. But what is an RSS feed and what is FeedBurner’s added value to it? Tip: Print out this crash course, so you can easily reproduce the steps without switching between browsers.

First: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It allows you to “harvest” headlines from web pages. But FeedBurner does a little bit more… Of course you can harvest headlines from other people’s web sites, but if you have your own web site (with RSS support) you can share its content and much more! Go to your site and check the presence of the orange icon:

Good. If you see the orange icon, it means your site supports RSS. If it doesn’t, there are several ways of getting it depending on the system you’re using, but I won’t cover that now. Let’s go on: Click on the icon. You should see the following:

Write down the address from the address bar or copy it by clicking the address bar and press Ctrl-C. Next, go to http://feedburner.com

You need a Google account. Sign in or sign up, if you don’t have any yet. Once you’re signed in, Choose “Burn a feed right this instant” and type (or paste by using Ctrl-V) the address of your RSS feed:

Press Next. Enter a title for your feed and click Next again:

Your feed has been created! Write down the address of your FeedBurner feed (or copy it by using Ctrl-C) and click Next:

Check every option and click Next:

Now, go to Publicize:

Click Awareness API:

Activating the Awareness API allows other services to exchange information with FeedBurner. Click to Activate:

Next, click Email Subscriptions:

And Activate:

FeedBurner reports the service is now active:

Type or paste the address of your FeedBurner feed into the address bar. It shows you the ability to subscribe by Email:

If somebody wants to subscribe to your updates by email, they need to enter their email address:

The Analyze screen shows you the number of subscribers to your feed:

It also shows which systems your subscribers are using:

And of course it shows the origin of your subscribers. Hey, we’re talking Google here!

Conclusion: You’ll understand that FeedBurner can give you a lot of insight on who’s reading your posts. FeedBurner offers them different ways of receiving updates and even if they want to receive updates by email, FeedBurner automatically takes care of it all, so you don’t have to send out thousands of emails after updating your web site. If people choose to unsubscribe from your email updates, FeedBurner handles everything and you don’t need to do anything! It goes without saying, that the result of subscriptions by email appear in the statistics nicely.

Have fun keeping your web site up to date and I hope my crash course has been able to contribute to it!

Right. I just got home after a day out. First I went to the NGN in Bunnik and then I went to Utrecht for an evaluation of the Dutch Joomla!Days 2009. It was great, as usual, guys! I’m surprised every time I realize how cool it is to catch up with people who share the same interests. And @EstherTwitts: we have a lot of coffee to drink together and @GXJansen: your feed is on its way!

I’m about to leave from Schagen to Bunnik, where I will be present at a meeting about Authentication, organised by NGN.
You can read more on this event at LinkIn Events:
http://events.linkedin.com/NGN-2-juli-Authenticatie-goed-geregeld/pub/87621

This is where you could have informed your network about your presence at this event.

I’ve been using WP to Twitter for a while to have my weblog posts tweeted to Twitter automatically. Today I started experimenting with feedburner.com. FeedBurner has been taken over by the allmighty Google, which means we can get lots and lots of statistics…

Here’s the deal: I took the RSS feed of my weblog and fed it to feedburner.com. Next, I went to twitterfeed.com, linking the RSS feed from feedburner.com to my Twitter account (are you still with me?).

The result is that all posts I write on my weblog end up in the RSS feed, after which they’ll be picked up by feedburner.com, passing them on to twitterfeed.com, after which they finally end up being tweeted on Twitter. This may look like a long, long way, but for me it means I can run my weblog with one plugin less… Furthermore, WP to Twitter only lets you shorten your URL’s with cli.gs, which is a bit buggy and has some apparently unsolvable issues. twitterfeed.com has a broad variety of URL shortening services like bit.ly, which offers great statistics about the clicks to your links.

And this is a nice syndication experiment, of course! RSS syndication lets you link just about anything to everything and that’s a nice challenge!