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Today I have seen this interesting post from TechCrunch about Google with the title Achtung! Google Analytics is illegal, say German Government officials. The article summarises what the German news portal "Die Zeit Online" (online version of the famous newspaper "Die Zeit") has written in its article.

Of course did I read the original article on "Die Zeit Online" with the title Datenschützer wollen Einsatz von Google verhindern (in good old English: Privacy advocates want to prohibit Google Analytics).

Well this is an old discussion in good old Germany, which is overcautious regarding the data privacy regulation. I would say (and this a friend of mine has confirmed recently) that it is the country with the hardest regulations concerning data privacy in the web (e.g. for online shops, forums, blogs and whatever else there is on the web). So far this article was not surprising.

What was surprising indeed, was the fact, that the original article from "Die Zeit Online" was not accurate and really bad researched.

As I was reading a little bit on the web this morning I found this article here from The Next Web.

And as you may think, I had to watch the video on Youtube... The answers are really shocking, but watch it for yourself:

Today I stumbled over the report from Techcrunch and had a quick look on the new search engines mentioned there.

Whereas Bing is running a big ad-campaign to promote itself, Wolframalpha is just there and provides a nice knowledge database.

I think both portals are well done, but have a slightly different focus. There is just so much rumor going on about Bing, that Wolframalpha can profit form the press coverage (as I do promote both sites here as well).

Boks is a visual grid editor for CSS and is based on the Blueprint CSS Framework. I recently stumbled over this tiny, nice tool, when I have browsed in the web and found a page, that looks really good (look at the page here). Well there are some other technologies used as well in this page, but never the less, I like the layout. And as I had a quick look into the Meta-Tags of this page I could see, that the Generator was indicated with Boks.

I will try out this tool for sure, next time when I have to create a layout for a website. And I am wondering how this will integrate with Typo3 or other CMS. Or have you any experiences with that tool, then please drop a short comment.

Francis Pisani has alread written on his blog about ''The Brain, respectively he has done an interview with Hugh Harlan, the founder of the company behind the software. And as it seems it Mr. Pisani a great fan of this tool. I had the honor of having a few lectures from him at the University of St. Gallen. One task we students had to fulfill, was to provide discussion material and maybe some answers to a question with the software. And so did I use The Brain. You can see on the screenshot of how my tiny brain looked after a week.

As I have tried, I would say extensively, the software I can tell you some things about it.

There have been recently a few posts about new tools for learning online, with videos or just with some books. As it seems, the learning goes Open-Source and I have to say that I really appreciate this.

The most recent example of E-Learning is Academic Earth. An initiative coming from the United States as many innovative things come from there. The site is reachable under Academicearth.org. The student or interested person will find there whole lectures and courses on video in good quality, as the example down below shows. There must have been also some effort to cut all these videos, in a way, that the slideshows of the lecturer are shown in the right moment.

What I think is really remarkable about Academic Earth, is the fact that the founders Richard Ludlow (graduated at Yale) and Chris Bruner (graduated at Stanford) have built in from the beginning the networking tools a modern student uses today. You can embed the videos easily (as you see above), can share them on different platforms such as Facebook, Del.icio.us... There are many things more, like downloading a movie, mail a link, rate it and so on. This is really something great.

The management of a database is most of the time, just a routine task. The responsible has to monitor most of the time the database, its transactions, the backups and the server capacity. Sometimes one needs to correct something or just look up a query and ... There are many exceptional scenarios. My focus in this small report is on the beginning and the end of the life cycle of a database: Designing the tables (and testing it) as well as migrating a database (to a new release for example).

Coming from the web design/development the tools I want to use should fulfill some requirements:

• Support MySQL and SQL (at least)
• Support remote connections (ideally with SSH)
• Run on Mac OS X
• Cost nothing (at least if I do not use the tool on a regular basis)

On the basis of this selection criteria I have found two free tools. One of the do I use now on a regular basis, the other one is not that great (yet) and I do not use it any more.

Pipl.com a new search engine for "People Search" has gained some attention in a few blogs (e.g. styropor.ch). Not because they are specialised in searching information related to people in the web, this is well known from other People Search Engines like Yasni.com or Spock.

But the really new thing about Pipl is, that it searches also sources from the deep web. For example can you search for an ICQ-Nickname and you will probably find your own old identity, that you nearly had forgotten about. And there are some other nice features I like about this search engine. It has fields to search for email-addresses, username and also for phone number (but only for the US now).
A short test has shown, that the results are really good. And i therefore like it more than Spock or Yasni.

The new year brings a new version of the internet telephony software Skype to the users of Macs. The version has brand new features, only available so far for Mac. As soon as I did hear from this, I had to download the new version, which is now available as Public Beta.

The new features are actually two, but I could have tested only one for now. To name it, the first innovation is called "Skype Access" and enables the users of Skype to access WiFi spots around the world. So far this should be over 100'000. I do not have to say, that you can pay the access via your Skype Credit.

The second innovation, now exclusive for Mac users, is the new built in Screen Sharing, which is actually only a desktop presentation. Anyway a great thing for us, since we to use until now plugins for screen sharing, such as the Yugma Team Collaboration.

At the beginning of this term at the university I have subscribed to a project about the Semantic Web and Service Sciences. A really interesting topic, indeed. But this is not the main topic of this article, even though this course led me to think about how to crawl the web with a Java application (because the project leader, in other words the professor, has already had some code written in Java).

So then, I started with my basic skills of Java coding, to look around. Fortunately I already knew a little bit about crawling and that regular expressions are key in this area from my experience with PHP and libcurl.

Looking around in the web I (or should I say Google has) have found a good point to start with from Osborne (a unit of McGraw Hill) where the Book "The Art Of Java" from Herbert Schildt and James Holmes has been published. So I started to read the article Crawling The Web With Java.