All major browsers have a habit of maintaining a recent history of your web site visits. And by using the right tools this information can be made available to any webmaster to exploit.

Mike on Ads blog has coded a tool using this privacy shortcoming (http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/) that tries to predict whether the visitor is male or female. It uses a small piece of Javascript, that exploits a browser’s URL history and then analyzes the sites visited to guess whether the user is a guy or gal.

It’s not clear how accurate the tool is at guessing a visitor’s gender, although it did pronounce there was a 74 percent chance your reporter was male. More importantly, the tool is a reminder of just how easy it is for webmasters to track the browsing history of their visitors. Even when you turn off Javascript, they have other tricks up their sleeves.

We’re waiting for a tool that combines history with other metrics, such as a user’s IP address, geographic location, the operating system and browser model being used. But on another thought may be that is being captured and stored somewhere right this very minute and we are not even aware of it.

Its not far when we will be wishing safe net surfing to our friends just like safe travel and safe driving.

Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Knol is made available to everyone by search and advertising world’s supreme power - GOOGLE .

knol.google.com

Knol will encourage people having good knowledge on a particular topic to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion.

With Knol, Google is introducing a new method for authors to work together that Google calls “moderated collaboration.” With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content.

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from Google’s AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.

Here is the URL in case you want to give this a try - knol.google.com

In what might be a glimpse of things to come in Windows 7, Microsoft is asking customers whether they would be interested in a new ‘Instant-on’ version of Windows. ‘We would like your feedback on a new concept,‘ the Microsoft survey states.

This survey sent out to select users has us wondering what on Earth the mega-corp is planning to do next, and judging by the looks of things, it has everything to do with Instant On. We’ve seen a number of these lightning-fast boot applications, with the most recent being ASUS’ Splashtop OS and the iteration loaded onto Dell’s freshest Latitudes.

The survey makes mention that the “Instant On experience is different from ‘Full Windows’ because it limits what activities you can do and what applications you have access to.” The survey also asks about which applications would be most important to have quick access to, and it very plainly states that in this “scenario,” your PC would “be usable in eight seconds.” So, is Instant On coming to Windows?

Who knows, but it’s clear someone at Redmond is giving it some thought.

Instant ON OS concept survey questions.

What does Microsoft survey suggest - WIll Instant On OS concept be part of Windows 7 (or Windows Vienna)?

Facebook is known for playing safe and not being much of an open source supporter. But in recent months, the company has been quite vocal about its commitment to open source and rightly so on Friday, Facebook announced that a piece of internally created software, called “Scribe,” would be released back to the open source community.

So what is Scribe? Well, per a post on Facebook’s blog, it’s been instrumental in helping Facebook handle the enormous amounts of data that come through its servers. As the page for Scribe says, “If you use the site, you’ve used Scribe.” More specifically, it’s a “server for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers…designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine,” which means that the average Facebook user won’t have much use for the newly open-sourced product.

According to Facebook - they were collecting a few billion messages a day (which seemed like a lot at the time) for everything from access logs to performance statistics to actions that went to News Feed. Facebook used a variety of different technologies for the different use cases, and all of them were bursting at the seams. So they decided to build a unified system (called Scribe) to handle all of these cases.

The Scribe servers are arranged in a directed graph, but each server only knows about the next server in the graph. This flexible topology allows for things like adding an extra layer of fan-in if the system grows too large, and batching messages before sending them between datacenters, but without having any code that explicitly needs to understand datacenter topology, only a simple configuration.

When you’re building something that looks like a logging system there are a lot of things people expect: logging levels and rules about when they get sent, timestamping and ordering of messages, schemas for common messages, etc. Facebook decided that this was a can of worms that shouldn’t be mixed up with the asynchronous and mostly reliable delivery of data, so they made the data model very simple. A message is two strings: a category and the actual message. The category is the description of what the message is about, and the expectation is that messages of the same category end up in the same place. The message is the actual data to be logged. Facebook also don’t have any a priori list of categories that must be maintained. If you create a new category it shows up at a new file. This is following the Unix philosophy of doing exactly one thing and doing it well, and it has definitely paid off in ease of use and development. They started with four or five use cases in mind and now they have hundreds, but they didn’t have to modify the Scribe source for any of them.

What’s particularly interesting to me about Scribe is the fact that it was built using another open source tool developed by Facebook called Thrift.  According to Facebook, Thrift is its a software framework for scalable cross-language services development.

The release of Scribe is also, in a sense, a message to some of the critics who’ve been skeptical of Facebook’s ability to keep its infrastructure humming along at a reasonable cost now that it has more than 100 million active users sending messages and uploading photos around the clock. By releasing Scribe as open source, Facebook is effectively saying, “Not only can we come up with something to run our site efficiently, we’ll let you see it, too.”

I am not really sure how helpful it will be for us developers. Hopefully Facebook will have more open source releases in the coming months.