History of the browser user-agent string "and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded"
The complex history of the user string: now I understand why IE calls itself Mozilla and Chrome calls itself Safari...
Better Merlin Mann cutting down everyday distractions:
"What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks — empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen."
I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You "Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”"
Quote from an essay on "ambient awareness", the demise of privacy and identity experimentation en the return of social control... and other social media trends by Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com
17 powerful bookmarklets for your iPhone such as "find on this page" and "open links in new window"
You can skip the rest of the list, rather have a look at Shaun Inman's shortwaveapp.com.
BTW: select a browser on your pc you don't use anyway (Safari probably ;-) ) to manage and sync your bookmark(let)s.
[Dutch] Zakelijk steekspel om sociale data Good writeup in Dutch on dataportability:
"‘Een sociaal experiment met radicale transparantie’, zo noemt Chris Saad zijn Data Portability Project, dat gebruikers van sociale netwerken meer controle wil geven over hun data. Facebook, MySpace, Google en Microsoft praten mee, maar niet met dezelfde agenda. Stiekem gaat deze strijd om openheid vooral over zakelijke invloed."
List of Firebug Extensions "quite surprised how many Firebug extensions already exists out there:
* YSlow
* Firecookie
* FirePHP
* RainbowForFirebug
* Jiffy
* Firequark
* LiveCoder
* PixelPerfect
* FirebugCodeCoverage
* Firebug Net Panel History Overlay
* Fireclipse
* Chromebug"
FireGPG "interface to encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any web page using GnuPG.
Adds some features to the Gmail1 interface, to let you use GPG's features directly in your webmail.
More webmails will probably be supported in the future."
Musings on Chrome, the rebirth of the location bar and privacy in the cloud "there’s something else behind all this that I think is super important to realize… and that’s that our fundamental notions and expectations of privacy on the web have to change or will be changed for us. Either we do without tools that augment our cognitive faculties or we embrace them, and in so doing, shim open a window on our behaviors and our habits so that computers, computing environments and web service agents can become more predictive and responsive to them, and in so doing, serve us better. So it goes [...] Each of us will eventually need to choose a data brokers or two in the future and agree to similar terms and conditions, just like we’ve done with banks and credit card providers; and if we haven’t already, just as we have as we’ve done in embracing webmail."
How to start a multilingual site Official Google Webmaster Central Blog on ever recurring issues: "site structure, geographic as well as language targeting, and content organization."
Specifically advises country-specific domains (TLDs) over language-specific subdomains and directories.
""Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users. Keep navigation and content in the same language on each page.