2010-10-07
Incompetence, Malice and ereading
I’ve been meaning to write about URLs, text and non-web online publishing for a while, but now I don’t have to, because Craig Mod has, and he did it better than I could have done. (He’s also going to get more attention, which is great, because it’s more likely things will change.)
Some choice quotes (although you should read the whole thing):
Am I reading text? If the text in your ereader isn’t text but is instead an image (.jpeg, .png, etc) then, by golly, your ereader’s incompetent.
Can you copy text? If you can’t, your ereader’s incompetent.
Is there a publicly facing pointer (URL, etc) by which you can reference the content in your ereader?
As Mod notes, it’s amazing that things like the iPad Wired app, which fail all three of these points, have been so highly praised. However, I’m more inclined to put malice (or its close relation, “business reasons”) as the reason for some of these decisions, in some apps. Despite the fact that Twitter, Facebook and email can drive readers to a site, it seems some companies would rather their magazines and newspapers lived in hermetic isolation.
At least the Guardian’s iPhone app, which is far from flawless, has the ability to email a link and post to various services, although (oddly) it fails to have a simple “Open in Browser” option. From what I’ve seen, neither the Wired app, nor any of the Mag+ publications, have such obviously useful features.
At least, as Mod notes, we’re only six months into the life of the iPad (and barely a couple of years into widely-used mobile devices). Perhaps with time will come a realisation that locking things down isn’t the best idea.
¹ Hat tip to dan w for the links.
² In one of his footnotes, Mod approving notes Instapaper, which I agree gets almost everything right. Hopefully at some point I’ll write about the (somewhat weak) social aspects of the app, though.)
On Short Domains
There’s been a fair bit of commentary today after Ben Metcalfe’s post about the removal of vb.ly by its domain registrar.
As others have noted, the potential unreliability of Libya as a host for such domains was noticed a year or so ago. This is probably why bit.ly, probably the leading URL shortening service, now also uses j.mp and bitly.com (and supports the use of IDs from any of those on any of their other domain).
However, there are plenty of companies that rely on shorteners that don’t seem to have a non-.ly alternative domain. For example, National Rail enquiries in the UK use ht.ly from Hootsuite, who also use the ow.ly domain, for their short links on Twitter. There’s a chance that both of those could vanish.
Still, there are a couple of other points Metcalfe makes that I’d like to comment on. For example, when he writes
I would suggest that there is a far more concerning issue here if domain registries can decide on the validity of a domain registration based on the content of the website that uses it. I would argue that the two are extricably decoupled and separate entities.
he’s either being naïve or idealistic. While the .com, .net and .org domains might be effective free-for-alls, that’s not true worldwide. I accept that I’ll never be able to register a .nhs.uk or .police.uk domain, for example, and that .it requires that business have a connection with Italy. Meanwhile, there are some domains that never became available at all. The Perl Mongers tried for a while to get a domain from Saint Pierre and Miquelon before they realised that there was no way it was going to happen.
He also says
we contest that any adult content or offensive imagery exists on the site (vb.ly is a url shortener)
which seems disingenuous. A 301 or 302 redirect effectively serves adult content to the requesting user, even if it’s not hosted on the domain itself.
Still, although it’s a shame that Metcalfe had to learn this the hard way, the attention he’s garnered - including a BBC News story - might mean that others are prepared for the fact that domains aren’t forever.
2009-11-17
The Corruption Of The URL
There’s been a couple of interesting comment piece over the last couple of days on the future of the web: Tim O’Reilly’s The War For The Web and Chris Messina’s The death of the URL, for example. Here’s something I’ve previously ranted about a bit, tangentially related to something Messina mentions, that I wanted to expand on.
Plenty of people have noted that short URLs are fragile, but I’m not sure how many have noticed how much they’re now used for tracking, too. As a random example, here’s a URL I came across on Tumblr, where there’s no reason for shortness, where it contains the giveaway that it’s come via an RSS feed:
http://www.unplggd.com/unplggd/hacks/the-simplest-efficient-iphone-stand-weve-seen-
101515?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&
utm_campaign=Feed%3A+apartmenttherapy%2Funplggd+%28Unplggd%29
Obviously everything after the ? isn’t needed, yet both RSS feeds and generated short URLs carry a bunch of unnecessary (but, for the site owner, desirable) tracking data. There’s even a service, awe.sm, which proudly crufts up TechCrunch links posted to Twitter, so that they’re trackable. Even beyond that, it turns out that, as with many sites (the Daily Mail is a particularly fun example) all that’s needed for the CMS to retrieve the page is the article ID (and a leading dash):
http://www.unplggd.com/unplggd/hacks/-101515
which then redirects to the actual article. In fact, you can put anything you want there:
http://www.unplggd.com/unplggd/hacks/i-love-android-101515
Maybe the URL is already dying, from the inside. Or maybe I should stop caring about what is already something that most people never see. Anyway.
