With Google Buzz introduced by Google Inc. the other day (and without much hype I might say) and Facebook Inc. introducing their new layout around the same time, my thoughts from the last year have been confirmed even more. Well, for me at least. So I decided to share a train of thought with some of my friends on Google Buzz, which turned out to be a bit longer than expected; And so I post it here for all.

Today I have met people from the Google Mail Team in Brussels, Belgium. It was quite interesting and I learned a lot, not to mention met a lot of people.

In a few of my other blog posts I have already used the example of Gmail and https to improve security. But I feel with the recent improvements Google introduced that it is time to emphasize security and email again.

Here is a short reminder and some tips about how to be smart about your JTV account.

Because of a mutual agreement for confidentiality I will not go into the details. But still want to discuss it a little bit. Over the last month I’ve been in discussion with a few parties that showed an interest in the web site I started last September; wetalk.tv

Today I read on vBulletin.com that Google’s PageRank has been updated again. So I bothered to take a look. Let me start by saying that I do care and do not care about page rank. It doesn’t bother me a bit if a site has 1 or 2, or 4 or 6 or 10. But I do like to see my own web sites get a bit of page rank. Inside my head I go ‘yay, others thought it was worth linking to my site’. For me, it was a bit of bad news hehe.

When dealing with data such as a video file, audio file, text document, spreadsheet and such, I have always been told to use a office solution of some kind. Something that ties things together. So when I moved away from Windows to a Mac solution I have purchased additional software solutions to replace for example Microsoft Office. I’ve also tried out a lot of open source solutions. And while there are great programs out there that do the job, I still felt like I was perhaps missing out on something. Leopard provided the solution.

In an earlier blog entry I kind of promised to come back to explaining how I try to be more secure about how I browse using FireFox. So here it is. First of all there are two different ways I do this, one is on my Powerbook (laptop) which I bring with me and therefor has a higher risk being used by others (unauthorized) or worst case scenario: it can get stolen. And my Mac Pro in my computer room which doesn’t get used much by others, and when so, only by those who I trust. Regardless, in both situation, unknown people might try to hack into the system from the outside or steal traffic via sniffing and such. Preventing abuse is impossible, making it harder to do so is possible.

In the last few years I have hosted the vBulletin Fans Chat Network over at irc.vBulletin-Chat.com and we have grown quite a bit. We are still what is to be considered a small chat network, but we are an open network, have a flexible group of staff and have a growing group of supporters and chatters.

Each year I review the situation and decide whether to stop or continue with the chat network. After all, I pay it out of my own pocket or use the few donations we receive. And it could be that we’re paying too much for too many services when we perhaps only need half of the resources. Or, we might have grown so much that we need to double our set up and increase capacity. To just name a few questions I ask myself when the time is there again to make that decision.

Over the last few years I have taken ‘being online’ a lot more serious, especially the security aspect. Trojans, rootkits, viruses, naughty cookies, xss exploits in sites and advertisements, and all that nasty stuff is now a day to day matter. Not to mention fraud, scams, spam and id-theft.

Particularly with being ‘on’ 24/7/365 because of high speed broadband internet. Participating in online communities, social networks, online loans, online banking, online dating and e-commerce, etc. brings risks with it.