On Monday Adam and I released PalRelay. It is a solution to finding information without having to navigate the rats nest of irrelevant information often found in search results.
It is not a replacement for searching, its an enhancement that will reduce the number of irrelevant pages found by with the leverage of opinion from friends and colleagues.
It also solves issues that have been headlining recently. Taking control of your privacy and retaining ownership of your social graph. PalRelay allows you to decide who gets to know you and how they use that data. It allows you to remain completely anonymous yet should a website request personalization privileges you can choose whether to allow it or not.
The impression that personalization is universally a bad thing is a decision each individual has to decide. I like the idea that Amazon tailors its website to my likes and dislikes.
PalRelay acts as a gatekeeper to your personal information and can be used to stop commercial organisations from surreptitiously recording personal information. Equally it solves the privacy issue by allowing you, the owner of the private data to decide who gets to see it and use it.
PalRelay goes everywhere with me except secure pages (SSL addresses beginning with https such as online banking pages). Its useful while blogging too, see the following short video for an example:
Are you still surprised when you discover a friend on a new social network? The number of useful social media sites is growing. Specialist sites for our interests help keep us focused as opposed to facebook and twitter.
You have to be specific to be terrific, as my mentor used to say. Facebook and Twitter are great just so long as you have a good tool to agrregate the data (sly reference to PalRelay).
I recently joined SoundCloud and managed to get martynwalker as a username. A couple of days later I was contacted by an old school buddy.
How valuable is that? A school friend not spoken to since 1974 contacted me and we enjoyed a 36 year catchup that we couldn’t hoped to have done without social media.
He found me as I favourited a musician we both like and my username rang a bell (or should that be a triangle?).
Kty is beginning a new website and wanted a PDF handout to demonstrate her work. Still in its infancy stages I have helped her assemble a few of the features of her WordPress website, these include.
Have I done something wrong? I tried in FF, IE and Chrome but this is what I get now when I try change to https:-
It flips right back ignoring my search preferences and even typing it manually makes no difference.
I was using it to debug a local proxy handling SSL requests and it took a while to realise why I could see nothing on 443.
I think I can live with out it but those folks performing searches they do not want their ISP or any of the node-holders in between to see might be upset at this silent change. While we freely give (and trust) Google with our search string the thought our ISP can store it and pass it on to third parties can be a disturbing.
If BT see a lot of people searching for a new broadband provider in a particular area that information could be used to decide on the viability of investing in better equipment. Is that fair?
I don’t know what fair use is but they could use the data in other ways. What if they detect people are not happy with a local supplier, your ISP could use that to bring in a new supplier. The locals then get more options, so that has to be good right?
Sometimes it’s good to stop and think about things we take for granted.
Just spent a few minutes playing with Wordle and created a few “Word Clouds”. Grab any text or website and throw it into the Wordle generator for endless moments of word funart!
It remains a wiki without the extensive features of the growing groupware solutions such as tikiwiki which are amazing feats of engineering, but only serve to complicate something that is supposed to be easy.
wikkawiki produces excellent documentation, fast. Setup accounts for your editors then disable login and you remain in control of who gets to edit.
Styling the wiki can be done through CSS plus a header.php and footer.php file. Click here for an example of one with a modified design.
It includes Geshi by default (for colourised code snippets) and you can wirte PHP directly into a page and it will be evaluated at read time.
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