News and views on domain names, the Internet and life in general
From the category archives:
Internet thinker and political operator David Weinberger has posed an interesting question: how do we design a question-and-answer format for politicians that is truly democratic?
Weinberger’s blog post was noted by Andrew McLaughlin on his Facebook page – Andrew is the White House Deputy CTO and the man more than any other that could make a [...]
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I think Apple really needs to rethink about how it launches products. The Steve Jobs super-secret wham-bam thing is all well and good when something really new comes out – like the iPod with video or the iPhone – but in between the super-hype is just tedious.
I recall a number of jazzed-up keynotes that simply [...]
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Four online giants have warned the UK government against a provision in the Digital Economy Bill, currently going through Parliament. In particular, clause 17 gives a government minister the right to restructure copyright law without having to go through Parliament.
The government says this helps it to “future proof” the legislation; Google, eBay, Facebook and [...]
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Delighted to wake up this morning to find out that people acted on appalling press gagging regarding Trafigura and had used their collective voices to flip things over.
Much of the credit is going to Twitter so it is fitting that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger twittered himself about the “victory” when Carter-Ruck solicitors backed down [...]
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I’ve got a Google Voice number. It’s +1 415 937 1451.
Although that appears to be a San Francisco telephone number, what happens is that I am able to cause that number to redirect to whatever other numbers I want – which means that I am now longer wedded to a telephone number and I don’t [...]
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If you don’t use Twitter, that headline will look like gibberish, but basically one company that produces very short URLs has given up and publicly conceded defeat to a more popular service.
What’s annoying is that I have been happily using the loser – tr.im – and been enjoying the stats it produces. No more – [...]
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Purely by accident I just came across a “technobile” column piece that I wrote for the Guardian a few years ago. I have to say I amused myself. Posted below but grabbed from the Guardian site:
Technobile
Concerns grow about internet users who are dangerously addicted to Google. Quick, read it now!
I can’t believe Google gives no [...]
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So everyone and their dog knows about Twitter. Now the problem is they have started using it – and you can see it through the pretty drastic impact on third-parties the past two weeks or so.
Services you use to make Twitter more manageable keep getting knocked offline. A few months ago Twitter itself was suffering [...]
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I love my Kindle. It really is a great machine. The Kindle 2 made all the right changes to the original Kindle, which is why I forked out a hefty $359 for it. It contains literally thousands of books – which has completely changed my reading habits (more reading, less lugging around of books). It is glorious and if you are a serious book reader you should invest in it.
Now so sure at the moment though about a new Kindle that Amazon just announced – the Kindle DX. It’s the same as the Kindle 2 but with a much bigger screen – just a little smaller than a magazine. I get the logic straight away – a bigger screen is much, much better for reading on. Particularly if you are reading PDF documents or magazines. It doesn’t matter with books – you want something you can shove in your bag and pull out.
But clearly Amazon has found out that alot of people are using their Kindle to read documents – probably work documents – on a device that doesn’t have a backlit screen and which doesn’t require you booting up a computer. I can see the logic, although I’ve not go into this habit yet.
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Twitter has just hit a crucial milestone for becoming a long-term viability rather than an Internet flash-in-the-plan: it has started generating its own sub-market.
Part of Twitter’s beauty is the fact that it restricts posts to 140 characters, forcing you to have to be economic with your words and making it easier to quickly digest others posts. The problem with the domain name system is that it produces long Web addresses (URLs) so if you want to point people to a certain webpage, you lose almost all the room you have just posting the URL, leaving little or no room for an explanation of why people should click on the link.
URL shortening applications have been around for years but they tended to be used only for ridiculously long web addresses that could often break in emails and IM messages. Twitter has given them a new lease of life.
And this was made clear this morning when the usual URL shortening site that I use – Tiny URL at http://www.tiny.cc – stopped working properly due to demand. The website wouldn’t load. More crucially someone Twittered me to tell me that an earlier link I had posted was now pointing somewhere completely different.
So I had a look about and found a new service: Trim, found at http://tr.im/. This has several advantages over Tiny URL. For one, it produces shorter URLs – the name of the game. But also it lets you lets you create an account, plus post directly into Twitter, and it provides stats on how many times the link has been clicked on.
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