What happens if my Pro Account expires?

If your Pro account expires, don’t panic! None of your photos or videos have been deleted!

This means instead of enjoying the super-duper capacity of your Pro account, you’re now subject to the limits of a free account. If you upgrade again, all of your photos will be waiting for you.

Any of your sets that disappeared will magically reappear when you renew or upgrade.

I am really thinking about moving my photos to Google+ and/or Picasa..

Unternehmen, Communities und junge Talente können sich ab sofort für die CH Open Source Awards bewerben, die nach den Erfolgen der letzten Jahren erneut von /ch/open organisiert und von einer renommierten Jury vergeben werden. Anmeldungen sind bis zum 8. August 2011 unter www.ossawards.ch möglich.

Die CH Open Source Awards werden in den folgenden drei Kategorien vergeben:

Business Case Award: Der Business Case Award richtet sich an Unternehmen oder öffentliche Institutionen, die Open Source Software erfolgreich im Rahmen eines Informatikprojektes eingesetzt haben.

Community Award: Der Community Award richtet sich an Communities, Unternehmen oder öffentliche Institutionen, die selber Software entwickelt und unter einer anerkannten Open Source Lizenz veröffentlicht haben.

Youth Award: Der Youth Award wird an für Open Source Aktive unter 25 vergeben, die durch veröffentlichten Quellcode, Texte oder andere Aktionen Talent und Engagement bewiesen haben.

Die Kriterien zu den Kategorien sowie die Teilnahmebedingungen und weitere Informationen sind auf der Award­Website unter www.ossawards.ch zu finden.

Wir freuen uns, wenn Sie den Award unter Ihren KollegInnen bekannt machen und sich selber beteiligen!

Verantwortlicher Organisation CH Open Source Awards
Florian Kammermann, ossawards@ch­open.ch

Ich freue mich auch dieses Jahr wieder als Jury-Mitglied dabei sein zu dürfen. Und ich würde zudem freuen, neue und aktive Schweizer Open Source Teilnehmer zu finden und belohnen. Also nichts wie hin und dein Projekt/dich anmelden. Zu verlieren gibt es nicht und es ist eine tolle Erfahrung.

I recently got my brand new, super fast (and super expensive) new MacBook Pro (15″, Intel i7 Quadcore 2.2GHZ CPU). As a little experiment, I will not install Adobe’s Flash Player on my new baby. Question is, how long does it take, before I give up and install that piece of #!@ software? My goal is to keep it away for several weeks. Webpages, that require Flash will be noted and maybe published.

Of course, the experiment is a little bit difficult, because Google Chrome, my preferred browser, has a Flash player built-in.

Let me know if you have tried something similar or if you want to support me

Below you can see some screenshots from TV.Centerr with all the available details.

Accumulated installs

Operating Systems/Android Versions

Devices

Notes:
The data of this page is scheduled to update once everyday.
Accumulated installs are counted daily as the number of devices with this application in installed state.
Only top 10 values for each attribute are provided in the attributes breakdown table. If less than 10 values are displayed in the table, that means this application install coverage is less than 10 different variations for that attribute.
Attribute values with shares less than 3% are aggregated into “Others” in the pie-chart for visual clarity.
Market reference data is provided as a courtesy. The reference data represents aggregation numbers over all applications in Market. The data of the “Device” attribute is sensitive, thus omitted.
Each attribute breakdown might be inaccurate for various reasons. For example, many user-built Android versions don’t sent checkin message complying with the standard, which causes device attributes unrecognizable.

Now I am happier. Next they have to more regularly update the download/install counter. And fix the comment system (I as a developer want to response to feedback).

Our future CEO should be well connected in the mobile domain and have experience in scaling a start-up from the early phase. A team of creative entrepreneurs is looking forward to meeting you in Zurich soon.

Please send your resume to feedback@appaware.org

AppAware offers a nice new and more professional web interface. Here is an example of the TV.Centerr app or check out the GMail page.

via b-to-v

At the end, you need to define passwords for applications, which do not support 2-step authentication. This includes your Android device (email and Google Account), your Adwords profile, desktop tools (Adium, GTalk). Each password is assigned with a custom, 16 character password.

Let’s see how this all works out in the future.

David Segal contacted me in mid of January about a “dresses” link to the JC Penney website on this blog. At first I was highly skeptical if this is some sort of joke. A little research later and I was ready to talk to David. Over a day or two I explained to him, how that “dresses” link appeared on my website, who put it there, for how long it was there and why somebody would put links like them.

I have a rule: If you get caught, tell everything.. And I am somebody who likes to share my learnings and knowledge. So why not share what I know with David then and with his readers now?

The Who

I use a system called TNX.net. They are like a marketplace for buying backlinks and selling adspace. As a publisher (website owner) I include a little PHP script to my website or WordPress installation. This scripts then connects to the TNX servers and requests links to be included to the current website. Those links are then included as HTML in my blog. What this means, is that it is without knowledge of the PHP code not possible to determine, if the links were added manually or with any kind of system. This makes the links viewable for the Google Indexing Bots. But for this to work, those links are expected to not have the rel=”nofollow” tag defined. The idea of the nofollow-tag is, that if a website owner/editor/writer links to another website, the nofollow-tag tells the indexing bots to ignore and not follow those links. If used, the whole TNX and paid backlinks eco-system would not really work.

The Why

The TNX system trades points for each link added to the publishers website. Some links on cocaman.ch generate 9 points/month, others up to 810 points (see “Google Testing Platypus“, my most successful entry).
This blog currently hosts 307 links. So over 100 links less then in mid January.

These points can be exchanged in two ways:

1. You can either request a payout. Every TNX point is worth $0.95. The money is transferred to your PayPal account.
2. You can exchange your points for own backlinks.

I only did the second option. I am an experimenter. In the past couple of years I played with different things. And for such things to be successful, you need traffic and users. Because most of website users come from search engines, you need to rank very high for a given keyword. So I used the TNX system myself to create backlinks to my site. I exclusively used it for my cooking websites. TNX offers you a small convenient wizard, which sets up your backlink texts including anchor text, the amount of backlinks you want and how many TNX points you want to spend per month.

From here on the system is automatic. It now distributes your backlinks on the sites, which fit your selection (eg. category, Google PageRank, …). After a couple of days you can log in to TNX and check out the results.

A total of 9 backlinks was placed to my site. Not so much. But at its highest, I had a couple of hundred backlinks. And this worked very, very good. In a highly competitive query with over 2 million results, I have managed to grab the positions around #6 on Google and position #2 on Bing. And this over a long period of time.

Google

Bing/Live Search

You see, the “playing Google” system is pretty effective. For me personally this is of course good and bad. Good because I could make a few dollars a month while being a full-time student. On the other hand, as a Google user (and fan) this is worrying me. Very often it happened that I did not get the results I was actually looking for. And I really hope Google can fix the whole “black hat SEO game”. Including those eHow, HuffPo, Demand Media guys, who do this kind of search engine optimization on a much, much larger scale.

As promised, I will remove all those links from my websites and blogs. I knew it was wrong. I knew I can get caught. But as so often, you tell yourself “nobody will notice” and “oh that ain’t so bad, others do the same”. But I got caught and burned. Of course Matt Cutts is right, I violated Google’s guidelines. Of course they can and possible will drop me from their index. But differently than others, this is not my business, it is only a hobby and a learning experience for me. I am just a small fish.

JC Penney got burned to. And their agency SearchDex got burned. Have you checked out their website? Last news was from 2007, were they talk about signing up JC Penney for four years. Funny, the contract is up next month. Hey, I am just saying ;-).

Final words. Congratulations to David Segal of the New York Times on this great article. I have never expected it to be such a long article, with so many interview partners and technical details. And it is good to see that Google tries to fight shady black hat SEO. It is of course pretty hard, but I believe in the smart people at Google to solve or dramatically reduce the problem.

Lesson Learned

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate and add your comments and input.

The JC Penny link for “dresses” has been removed from my blog, without my doing. I can only speculate why this is the case and who could have influenced this.

Help information isn’t available in English yet. To access the Help Center, you’ll need to change your language preference:

• Log in to PayPal.
• Click Profile at the top of the page.
• Click Language Preferences under the Account Information column.
• Select a language from the drop-down list and click Save.
• Go back to the Help Center by clicking the Help link at the top of the page.

To change your language preference back to English, repeat the steps above and select U.S. English.

The new feature promises easy access to all your uploaded videos from everywhere.

Files that you can play

Uploaded video files can be up to 1 GB. These are the most common video formats that you can upload and play:

• WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
• .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files – (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
• .AVI (many cameras use this format – typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)
• .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
• .WMV
• .FLV (Adobe – FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

Uploading works the same way as uploading any document. After you have uploaded your video, it gets converted in the background. It is very well possible that Google uses their excellent YouTube background system for converting the videos.

After converting you can watch your video on your computer or mobile device.

Here is a direct link to the video’s detail page.

You can have different revisions of your movie or directly download it in its default format again.

Question is, is it really needed to have yet another video uploading site? Of course, the audience for Google Docs is a different one than YouTube.

Let us go down to business. Time to announce the winner of my Android “Andy” robot competition. A total of 39 people participated and 16 (41%) of you entered the correct answer. The most watched channel on TV.Centerr has been SFzwei. Over 12’600 people have watched SFzwei between September 1st and December 15th 2010 with TV.Centerr. Runner up is Pro Sieben with over 10’600 viewers. Funny, the entered results represent the same stats.

Congratulations to Mike for getting drawn as the lucky winner.

As we come to the end of this year’s fundraising campaign, I asked the organizers to let me write you to tell you about an extraordinary birthday present that Creative Commons received on its 8th birthday last Thursday.

You probably know that for the past two years, Creative Commons has been incredibly fortunate to have the pro bono leadership of our CEO, Joi Ito. Joi is a successful internet investor. He has been at the birth of companies such as Moveable Type, Technorati and Twitter. For the past 7 years, he’s also been a key leader on our board. But by far his most important contribution began two years ago when my own commitments made it necessary for me to step down as CEO. With the organization in a pinch, he volunteered to take the lead, again, as a volunteer.

Everyone recognized at the time that this sort of sacrifice could only be temporary. Yet from the time he stepped up, my biggest fear was that when he could no longer make this sacrifice, we would have no one comparable to tap. Last Thursday, I was proven wrong.

One of the most important moments in the history of Creative Commons happened on the day the Supreme Court upheld (incorrectly, in my view, but let’s leave that alone) the Copyright Term Extension Act in Eldred v. Ashcroft. After reading the decision, I had my head in my hands, buried in sadness, when my assistant reminded me that I had a 10am meeting with two people from the Hewlett Foundation. This was exactly one month after we had launched Creative Commons. I was surprised a foundation as prominent as Hewlett even knew about us, let alone had an interest in talking to us. So I put aside my sadness, and walked down to the conference room at Stanford Law School, to meet with Cathy Casserly and Mike Smith.

Cathy and Mike had heard about the Supreme Court’s decision. They recognized I wouldn’t be in much of a mood to chat. So they launched right into the reason for the meeting: The Hewlett Foundation had decided to help launch Creative Commons with a grant of $1 million dollars.

I won’t say that after I heard that news, I forgot about the Supreme Court. But from that moment on, it was much more important to me to prove Hewlett’s faith right than to worry about what the Supreme Court had gotten wrong. And I was especially keen to get to know these two people who understood our mission long before most had even recognized the problem that CC was meant to solve.

Now eight years later, after completing her term at Hewlett and a stint at the Carnegie Foundation as well, I am enormously happy to announce that Cathy Casserly has accepted our offer to become the CEO of Creative Commons.

Cathy has an extraordinary reputation among foundations and the Open Educational Resources community. She has had extensive experience coaxing creators and educators into a more sensible and flexible manner for creating and sharing their work. That was her job at Carnegie and Hewlett. Before Hewlett, she was a program officer at the Walter S. Johnson Foundation. Before that, a teacher of mathematics in Jamaica. She has a PhD in the economics of education from Stanford, and a BA in mathematics from Boston College.

Joi will stay in the hot seat as Chair of the Board. But early in the new year, he will pass his CEO responsibilities to Cathy. Between him and Cathy, we will then have the very best leadership Creative Commons has known.

So then here’s my ask: Creative Commons has been enormously fortunate to have had Joi as an interim CEO, and extremely fortunate now to have found Cathy to fill that role permanently.

Let’s show them how happy we are about both.

We are in the last laps of a very difficult fundraising year, with just two weeks to go and still about $200,000 to raise. Please reach deep in your pocket, and click here to pledge whatever you can find. We have never needed the support of our community more than we do this year. And though I am happy beyond measure about our future, I am extremely concerned about the cuts we will have to make if we don’t meet our goals.

You have supported us throughout these 8 years. We need your support this year especially. Please thank Joi and welcome Cathy in every way, including a pledge to support Creative Commons again.

Even that I have already donated for the 2010 fundraising campaign (and proudly wearing my CC t-shirt), I have decided to donate again. I ask you to do the same and donate as much as you can (or want) to the Creative Commons cause.

Murmeli – Das unersättliche 3D Tier für die Hosentasche. 

Schenke Murmeli ein schönes Zuhause für die kalte Jahreszeit und halte es mit Füttern, Streicheln und viel Bewegung bei Laune. Gelingt es dir bis zum 31.01.2011 500 Punkte zu sammeln, winken dir viele tolle Preise. Schaffst du es, dein Murmeli rundum glücklich zu machen, oder zieht es schon bald wieder bei dir aus?

Grossartige 3D-Grafik trifft auf langen Spielspass: 

• Unglaublich fotorealistische 3D-Grafik
• Murmeli reagiert auf Berührungen und liebt Streicheleinheiten
• Rufe seinen Namen und es wacht auf
• Füttere Murmeli mit Beeren, Nüssen, köstlichen Jogurts, Milch oder Käse
• Murmeli schlägt auf Kommando Saltos und hat eine Vorliebe für ausgefallene Tänze.
   

Aber Vorsicht! Der kleine Nager kann verdammt zornig werden.  

Emmi Murmeli App kostenlos downloaden –http://itunes.apple.com/ch/app/id406490144?mt=8&uo=4

Hier der Link als QR-Code:

Facebook Emmi Murmeli – http://www.facebook.com/Emmi.Murmeli

Emmi AG Support – http://www.emmi.ch/murmeli

That is right, I will be giving away one cute Andy to a lucky winner. All you need to do is answer the following question and you might have the chance to win the robot.
Oh, and you have to be located in Switzerland. You ask why? TV.Centerr audience is based in Switzerland

Your email address will only be used for this competition and the database is deleted after the competition. I promise!

The competition runs until end of this year (31. 12. 2010) and the winner will be notified as soon as possible.