wavelinks

WordPressDOTcom Rolls its Own URL Shortening Service – Webmonkey

In what we’re hoping is the beginning of a trend, WordPress.com has announced a new built-in URL-shortening service for all of its hosted blogs. Now, when you create a post on your WordPress.com blog, you’ll see an option to create a short URLs using the new wp.me domain.

Publishers using the self-hosted version of WordPress will be able to use wp.me short links if they are running the official stats plug-in.

The new wp.me short links are coupled directly to the canonical URL and can be found in the headtags of any blog hosted on WordPress.com. That means, unlike outside URL shortening services, as long as WordPress.com is around, your shortened wp.me links will work. And if WordPress.com goes under? Well, it doesn’t matter because the canonical link will go with it.

As for the actual URL shortener, it’s pretty basic with no real stats tracking or other services like those offered by bit.ly and tr.im. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg does mention in his announcement that if your post’s slug is short enough, it’ll be used for the wp.me URL. Otherwise, a random, unique key is used.

If you’d like to start using wp.me links for your WordPress hosted blog just click the new “Get Shortlink” button. Also note that if you’re logged in to WordPress.com you can get the shortlink for any page, just click the “Blog Info” menu in your admin bar.

Short URLs seem a necessary evil at this particular moment in the web’s history. While we’re not going to lie and say they’re a good idea, if you have to use them we’d suggest looking to your publishing platform rather than an outside service. Hopefully more publishers and publishing tools will follow WordPress.com’s lead and start offering their own URL shortening tools.

via WordPressDOTcom Rolls its Own URL Shortening Service – Webmonkey.

Tags: blog, short URLs, URL, Webmonkey, WordPress, wp.me

Epeus’ epigone: How Twitter works in theory

It is said that an economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders whether it works in theory. Twitter clearly works in practice – and if you want practical advice, watch Laura Fitton’s Tech talk at Google, or read her Twitter for Dummies. I’ve learned a lot from talking to her and others about this phenomenon, and I wanted to write about some theories that help me understand it.

via Epeus’ epigone: How Twitter works in theory.

Tags: Epeus' epigone, faces, flow, Kevin Marks, phatic, Twitter

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Docs: now with translation

To make sharing content easier, Google just added the ability to translate documents into Google Docs

via Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Docs: now with translation.

Tags: Google, Google Docs, languages, localize, sharing, translation

Basecamp

“For years project management software was about charts, graphs, and stats. And you know what? It didn’t work. Pictures and numbers don’t get projects done. Basecamp tackles project management from an entirely different angle: A focus on communication and collaboration. Basecamp brings people together.”

Well that’s what they say.. over the next week we will test drive Basecamp with an open mind. We will report our findings here at wavelinks.ie

Basecamp is made by 37 Signals who have a work ethic that includes a 4 day week… mmmm Monday or Friday off? Perhaps they can afford to as they’re are so well organised using their own software? We’ll see.

Tags: 37 signals, basecamp, Collaborative, project management

send in the clouds

So a lot of your data is stored in the cloud saving you thousands of euro, but you need to audit your data locally or have it archived to the vaults for safe keeping but it will take weeks to download and the broadband is not the greatest speed and prone to disconnect at 2am. What is required is a courier service to send you back YOUR data when YOU want it.

Those clever folk at Amazon have a service to do just that.

AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.

The beta currently supports importing and exporting data into and out of Amazon S3 buckets in the US. Support for EU buckets will be added in the coming months.

so if  you need to retrieve  over  1TB of data and you are on broadband it will take more that 82 days to download, it will ship quicker in Europe and the service isn’t even launched here yet!

Tags: Amazon, AWS Import/Export, broadband, buckets

HP selects Galway as global centre for cloud computing

by JOHN COLLINS Irish Times
HEWLETT-PACKARD (HP) has designated its Galway software development centre as a global centre of competency for cloud computing.

The first fruits of the new designation is a product recall service for the food industry, which is being launched in Canada.

Announced yesterday, the service will run on HP’s cloud computing platform for manufacturing and is being offered through a partnership with GS1, a non-profit organisation that attempts to make supply chains more efficient.

Cloud computing, which involves accessing applications over the web rather than installing them on a customers’ own premises, is gaining popularity rapidly.
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Tags: Cloud Computing, development centre, Google Mail, GS1, Irish Times

Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Watch the demo video below. Give this 1.5 hours of your undivided attention.

Tags: Collaborative, developer, Google Wave, video, YouTube

Google Reinvents Email, Docs with ‘Google Wave’

[www.pcmag.com] What would e-mail look like if it were invented today, rather than several years ago? Meet Google Wave, a preview application shown off Thursday at the Google I/O conference.

The Google Wave site is now up and running, although access to the application will be restricted. Google Wave was developed by the Google Maps team, led by Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens.

“One of the best times of my life was in 2005, just after the launch of Google Maps, when developers started doing crazy things with the APIs,” Rasmussen said, adding that he hopes developers will do the same with Wave.
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[latimes.com] Google presented a private demonstration of its much-anticipated collaboration tool, Google Wave, this morning. Even after watching all of the videos and talking to the developers, the
first thing that struck us is how rough it is around the edges.

To be fair, Google calls it a developer preview, meaning it’s not meant for the prying eyes of the average user or critical journalist. Yet, the Times got an invitation anyway.

First, the good news: Wave has a lot going for it. Its function for letting users watch as you type each letter is punchy, just like it was in the demo, and works surprisingly well. At first, it feels sort of strange exposing your own typing habits and witnessing others’. But it really speeds conversations along.
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[arstechnica.com] Google is looking to change the way we use the Internet to communicate with a new service that it calls Google Wave. Wave was previewed Thursday during the Google I/O conference as a way to combine e-mail, chat, photos, feeds from around the Web, and more in a collaborative environment. The project is not only cool-sounding, it’s also quite ambitious, and Google hopes it will eventually replace some of our uses for e-mail.

In a post to the Official Google Blog, Google Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen discussed the evolution of Wave after he and his brother Jens joined Google. According to Rasmussen, too much of our Internet communication was created out of imitation of a real-life form (e-mail, live chat, document sharing), and as a result, it had become too segmented when it didn’t have to be. “What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?”
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Tags: Collaborative, email, Google, Google Maps, Google Wave, PCMag.com