TidBITS: The Incredible Shrinking URL

Good URLs are all the rage at the moment – very ‘web 2.0’! The requirements are that they’re clear, logical, hackable, persistent, don’t expose either the identifiers or the underlying technology etc (see – I was listening yesterday 🙂 ).

Anyway, apropo none of the above, this article on TidBits is a timely roundup of the URL-reduction services available to tame those dotted-domain+long-URL+session-keys+embedded-query+platform-specific URLs…

Normally, I use tinyurl but I’ve just been intro’d to LookLeap – looks neat. Not just a bland tinyurl domain, but a preservation of the destination address. Nice. Absolute shortness isn’t needed (provided the URL fits on a line) but the information “payload” is increased.

Early in January Vicky and I headed off to Venice for a long weekend, thanks to Elke for looking after the girls. It was lovely to have some time to ourselves to wander the streets (!), drink in the sights, drink up the prosecco and discover some new and remembered restaurants.

You can see the photos – a limited 30! – at the gallery. Do a slideshow so you can crack through them.

Photographically I was trying out an Xpan that I’d recently picked up as a rather trashed second-hand “bargain” from the Procentre. I was in a B&W mood (the weather was going to be overcast and rainy – just the thing for some grainy Tri-X). The ‘ManInTheShop’ suggested some Fuji NeoPan 1600 (a very fast B&W film) so I stuffed the bag with Tri-X and a couple of Neopans to try and we headed off. I’ll give some feedback once I’ve scanned in the panoramas…

We stayed at the Bauer and really liked it. We also found some great fooderies. Details shared after the jump…

The Future of Web Apps – Carson Systems conference

So, here I am at the lovely Kensington Town Hall. Lovely building – suprisingly well hidden, especially considering its bulk. A veritable Vogon Constructor Ship nestled in the midst of posh shopping.

This event has grown, grown, grown. From initial expectations of 1-200 people, we find 800 people in this fine hall, with an air of expectancy approaching that of a religious healing convention at the Latter Day Church of Web 2.0.

Some initial impressions:

1) 792 men, 8 women.
2) geek chic: pony tails out, shaved heads in. Less facial hair than in the late 90s. Some ‘glare’ issues from the back of the hall: combination of balding heads and gelled hair.
3) everyone has a laptop on their, ahem, lap. Ergonomics? What’s this doing for our posture? Our attention deficity disorders?
4) Given the power consumption on laptops, can this be a Carbon Neutral conference?
5) Mac laptops comprise over 50% of those in evidence.
6) the quality of presentations are stunning: no ‘Powerpoint Business Template #3’ in evidence. Is it all of the Macs, or have geeks discovered “design”? 🙂

Presentations were good: interesting people who’d done cool things.

Good format to the day: a series of 45m slots with 15 mins to stretch legs, chat, get coffee (aka “queue for 15 mins”). Kept things fresh.

I’ll link to the proceedings later, or you could just visit the conference site and look yourself 🙂

Publishing 2.0 � Bubble 2.0 Is a Bubble in Media

Thanks to Ian Worley for this link. Overly long but some interesting points. Seems a rehash of the ‘too much info so we need a [trusted] gatekeeper’ theme. This has been batted around in publishing for aeons: intermediation (“value-added services”, “peer reviewing”) or disintermediation; aggregation versus imprimatur…

Scott Karp implies that in a world of too much info there’ll be a single point (“portal”??) that becomes the gatekeeper: the trusted pointer. This is analagous to saying that in the Kelkoo age the new retailers are Kelkoo, Pricerunner et al, and that retailers are pushed into the position of ‘wholesalers’ to these new mediators.

While there’s some truth in this perspective it rather ignores people’s desire to graze (for serendipitous discovery, to get a feel for the size/shape of a topic) and their serene, ad-proof ability to ignore and filter.

Think of a typical middle-of-the-road department store or high street. Humanoids exhibit in turns a wandering/browsing behaviour, and sharp-elbowed, “I’m on a mission” hunting of items.

Why would this behavioural flexibility cease in the face of too much information (as opposed to too much choice in shoes, colas or undifferentiated consumer non-durables)?

There are a number of scenarios which are predictable:
* people get bored of lots of search returns. They either go with the top returns (zipf’s law), use a new search engine or get better at searching.
* google loses its lustre. It’s already had a good run at being the good guy on the interwebnet… China, privacy, Freedom and Wall Street are all clouds on the horizon
* recommendation networks become more important as a source of information.

Same old, same old.

Last weekend Vicky and I spent a romantic (aka eating, sleeping, wandering) weekend in Venice. Further details to follow with some obligatory gondola photies.

Anyway, two topics of conversation needed some further research: 1) what was happening about Venice’s “sinking” (apart from Pizza Express donating 5p/pizza to some fund or other); 2) what were the sewage arrangements.

Interesting Thing of the Day: The Sinking City of Venice fortunately came to my aid, gorblessit.

Good answer on the “sinking city” + “rising sea level” combo. Plus a one-liner on the sewage (just rolls out to sea).

Can’t find any succinct arguments on the environmental concerns, so any links/hints appreciated.

Oh, here’s the latest on the costs/implementation dates from the beeb.

EUobserver.com covers Chirac’s pledge “to compete with Google”.

Dubbed “Quaero” (“I seek” in Latin) so as not to upset Germans (since when have they loved Latin? German wasn’t a Romance language last time I looked… Maybe Chirac has other plans?).

While it’s tempting just to lay into French cultural imperialism, and generally have a go at Chirac (behave…) we shouldn’t forget our gratitude to the French for the support they give their film industry. Where would the world be without French film?

That said, we also have French protectionism in industry and business which isn’t doing either France or Europe any good…

What most rankles with me is the separatist, competitive and exclusive approach. In a world of contributive effort, open source software and eroding barriers, why Monsieur Le President couldn’t have dedicated money to supporting online content – paying for good articles on Wikipedia; enhancing material for google.fr to find…

Bah non – time for some imperialistic hullabaloo, as well as a chance to feed some more state support (oops, I mean funding) to Thomson.

How better to end that with Chirac’s apocalyptic statement of the obvious:

Today the new geography of knowledge and cultures is being drawn. Tomorrow, that which is not available online runs the risk of being invisible to the world.
So now we know.