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LinkTweet

I've just cooked up a little hack to easily send links to Twitter.

It's inspired by the TwitterLink app which is neat but asks for your Twitter name and password, which I think you should only tell to Twitter themselves.

Basically you add a bookmarklet which sends the current page to my server, I ask the handy is.gd service to shorten the link, then I send you on to Twitter where the tweet box is pre-filled with the is.gd link.

I plan to mainly use it from my iPhone, since it is devoid of copy and paste.

SemanticCamp London

The sign-up for SemanticCamp London is open.

If you are near London and interested in using the Web with meaning, then grab a spot before they are all gone. It'll be on the 16th and 17th of February, at the Department of Computing at Imperial College (or 'work' from my point of view).

We also have some good pubs nearby, for refreshments afterwards.

Amazon patent decent URLs for search

A long time ago, I wrote gallery.future-i.com, and I was particularly exercised about using clean URLs (and still am).

One place I feel I did a really nice job was in making the search URLs pretty nice, e.g. a search for 'mary' lives at:

http://gallery.future-i.com/search/mary

I did that in the middle of 2001, and I expect plenty of others did similar things by then, too. For me, the tricky bit is all done by Apache's mod_rewrite, which takes incoming requests to your web site, and let's you rejig it to pass parameters to scripts without exposing all that grunge to the outside world. It isn't the only way to do it, but it is powerful and effective.

My annoyance now is that Amazon have a patent on a very similar technique, covering URLs for search results of the form http://somedomain/flibble, filed in 2004.

I was impressed by Amazon's A9 when it launched, principally for the clean URLs for search.

That doesn't mean they own the idea, which is plainly in play before that. And don't get me started on parallel invention, making it all the sillier.

I hope the patent boils away in a sea of prior art.

[Via Buzz Out Loud #589, Slashdot coverage]

BBC Programme Support

The BBC have a great new Web site – BBC Programme Support (more info from Tom Scott of the BBC). This is especially good for Web nerds like me, but it will help make link-centric television work for Real Human Beings, too.

There are a few quirks in how things are listed right now but I'm sure they'll shake out in due course. What's great about this service is that the Beeb is committing to long-term, stable URIs for their programmes, with a single, clear link for each show, irrespective of how and when it is shown or repeated.

[Via Chris]

More on BBC Programme Support…

Twitter awareness

Wired has an article on Twitter by Clive Thompson which is spot on:

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

I've several friends using Twitter who I'd love to see more often. I'm not going to manage that, but at least when I do see them now the conversation starts in a much more interesting place. We both have a sense of whether things have been fun or crap lately. Since the Twitter messages are so short, they sometimes only just make sense after chatting about it.

Twitter's great, and I expect we'll see more of this ambient presence in other spheres before long.