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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.

Well now as we have stored our images within the filesystem of the web server and the information in the MySQL database (see part 1 of this series), it is about accessing the files and the information.

Basically the needed steps are quite easy:

1. Prepare SQL statements in your model for data
2. Create Controller and View Template
3. Create a View Helper Plugin to grab the image.

I will not explain in detail how to build the SQL statements respectively the functions in the model and how to set up the Controller and View Template. You will find other posts on this blog about this topic and with links to good tutorials

I am currently designing a website for a company and use the CMS TypoLight. A really nice tool, I like it. It produces clean code and you can easily do Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is by the way still an important aspect in development of websites.

But I have one little problem: The website should handle multiple languages. This is generally possible with TypoLight, as you can have multiple site roots in one installation and discriminate the user according to language settings from his browser. This gives you the right entry point, but not search engine optimised.

There are different ways around to do the language switch and so on. You find them if you browse the extension directory for the tag "language". However this is only considering the switch from one language to another, at least in most cases. But what I want is a way to show on one hand the user, which languages he is using in the URL and on the other hand to the search engine, that it will index all my pages.

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:

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.

Jeff Jarvis explains in his book What Would Google Do?, how new economic principles have evolved and how he has grown into/adapted to this new system. He uses therefore illustrative examples from the new media industry (e.g. blogs such as his own buzzmachine.com and many more) but he also compares to the old world, where control of content and scarcity have been the rule. And he gives many examples of how young, innovative companies have emerged from the classical media market or have taken the chance to gain some momentum in the internet because the classical publishers have been too slow.

This article here should be an extended version, since it is used as a discussion base for the course "Digital Media" at the University of St. Gallen, which will take place next week. So as Jarvis puts it in his book: "Free is a business model" I will provide here a summary of the first, more important part for discussion, so that all of my colleagues can profit from my knowledge.

So as mentioned here, the book is divided into 2 respectively 3 parts: The first part covers the introduction and the "Google Rules" (no not the 10 Things Google has found to be true). This summary will focus on this part. Second part is called "If Google Ruled The World", where it is about different industries and how the principles from the first part would apply there. The final part is called "Generation G".

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.

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.

Building ontologies for the semantic web is from a technological point of view (meaning to put all available data into one ontology) nothing great. But there are a few critical challenges to build a really good, useful ontology. I could gather some experiences in a small project at my university, where we (the students) have tried to build an ontology from scratch by ourselves to gain some insights for the problems and challenges on the business side. The conclusion is, that there are mainly two, interlinked "obstacles" on the way to a successful ontology.

Define a domain

As already mentioned in the abstract, an ontology has to be concrete enough to provide some value for the user, which means essentially that it allows the users to gain on the one side a rough overview of a topic but on the other side to dig deeper into special aspects of a domain.
This then is clearly an optimisation problem, where the designer of an ontology has to decide for his individual case how wide and deep the domain should be outlined. Thanks God, has been thought about this problem when the OWL-Standard has been created. A designer can link to already existing ontologies (which can be found for example with Swoogle).

I would like to illustrate this with a simple example: Think about the domain of "Travel / Travelling". There are a lot of things involved in this domain. When somebody plans a journey, he or she first searches a destination. To get to the desired destination this person needs transportation. Transportation can happen by train, plane, car, bus and so on... Then you need an accomodation, want to make some sightseeing and go out to a restaurant for dinner and many other things more.
This rather incomplete example shows how many concepts can be found in one domain. And all this concepts, if they already exist as ontology, can be used from your own ontology. That is great, isn't it?

The second good news is, that the most information about a domain, is already available on the internet. Some may talk there about the Deep Web and thus discriminate between the "Surface Web" and the underlying databases / data storages. But to put this short: what can be found on the internet can be crawled (Google is maybe the best example for this). So there is already a possibility to gather the data in an automated way. Which saves time and thus costs.

But what you never should forget during your project, is the focus of your domain. How wide should it be and how deep should it go? To answer this question correctly you should always think about your future customer/user of the ontology. And you can maybe test this by yourself.

The first post in this year is about digital identities in the internet and the threats upon the privacy of internet users imposed by changes in the structure of our digital society. It is based on a seminar paper for the course "Digital Technology and Society" at the University of St. Gallen. You will find the paper at the end of this article for the download.

But first of all a little overview on the topic. The IT-magazine iX (german) has had an issue on this social networks and presents on the homepage a rich collection of links to this topic.

First of all, we need to know what digital identities are. Everybody talks about the digital identity management and in connection to this, there is another buzzword: social engineering. Since many internet users have multiple accounts and profiles on different so called social communities, a digital identity is, at least for me, the sum of all available data to one human being available on the internet. Specialised search engines around the topic of persons and/or names have been popping up in the recent years (e.g. Yasni).