wavelinks

Google’s Sidewiki has a sting in the tail « Richard Stacy @ Stacy Consulting

A few days after the announcement of Google’s new Sidewiki website commenting system, commentators are somewhat cynical about Google’s intentions, even perennial fan Jeff Jarvis thinks this addition could end up being an own-goal for Google, Richard Stacy writes:

A couple of days ago Google announced something very interesting – Sidewiki. This creates an overlay on any website / url allowing a form of commenting and rating. Because this is linked to the browser, the site owners themselves have no say here – you can’t opt-in or opt-out. At one level this could be a move which forces every website into the social media space – whether they like it or not.

Powerful stuff – so I signed-up and at that point realised the sting in the tail. In order to work, your browser has to send Google details of your browsing. This gives Google the information it has been craving for a long time, largely without success thus far – identifiable data about individuals’ behaviour, not just anonymous links that come into a website.

via Google’s Sidewiki has a sting in the tail « Richard Stacy @ Stacy Consulting.

Tags: annonymous, Jeff Jarvis, Richard Stacy, Sidewiki

Daniel Ek: Spotify will kill file-sharing, be a European home-run

It’s true to say, without a hint of hyperbole, that 25 year old Daniel Ek’s Spotify has taken the global music industry by storm, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Even in markets it hasn’t launched in yet including the US, Spotify is generating a lot of attention and is now valued at €170 million. Music lovers have discovered ways to circumvent regional limitations on the software and are already using the service heralded by some as the future of the music industry. And that suits the music industry just fine, especially since they’ve invested in it. At a Glasshouse event at the Royal College of Physicians in London last night, an assembled throng of the tech business community listened to Ek’s thoughts.

“Despite making every mistake in the book in my previous companies,” says Daniel Ek, “with Spotify things seem to be working out. It’s true that we underestimated how long it would take the labels to come in, though: we started the company in 2006, but didn’t launch a product until 2008 because it took so long to get the labels on board.”

via Daniel Ek: Spotify will kill file-sharing, be a European home-run.

Tags: Daniel Ek, File Sharing, iTunes, music industry, piracy, Spotify, TechCrunch

RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win – washingtonpost.com

[TechCrunch/Washington Post Reports] In the past few months, a lot of attention has been given to the rise of the real-time web. The problem is that the web wasn’t designed with real-time in mind. There is a huge need for the tech community to get behind new protocols that will power this fundamental shift in how web applications work. Today I want to take a look at two of the leading protocols that enable real-time notifications on the web. While there are older protocols that enable real-time notifications like XEP-0060, PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud are two new protocols which show a lot of promise of gaining adoption.

Both PuSH and rssCloud address a fundamental flaw in the way web applications work today. Currently, getting updates on the web requires constant polling. Subscribers are forced to act like nagging children asking, “Are we there yet?” Subscribers must constantly ping the publisher to ask if there are new updates even if the answer is “no” 99% of the time. This is terribly inefficient, wastes resources, and makes it incredibly hard to find new content in as soon as it appears. Both protocols flip the current model on its head so that updates are event driven rather than request driven. By that I mean that both protocols eliminate the need for polling by essentially telling subscribers, “Don’t ask us if there’s anything new. We’ll tell you.”

via RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win – washingtonpost.com.

Tags: atom, feed, Pubsubhubbub, PuSH, rss, rssCloud

World’s Largest Paid Blogging Platform Goes Real-Time – NYTimes.com

[the New York Times reports] Typepad, the SixApart-owned paid blogging service believed to be larger than any other online, announced this morning that every one of its blogs will now make updates available in real time. The service has implemented the Google-backed real-time protocol Pubsubhubbub, an Atom-centric alternative to the real-time protocol RSSCloud, which competitor WordPress turned on for millions of bloggers last week.

via World’s Largest Paid Blogging Platform Goes Real-Time – NYTimes.com.

VapURL: Create Self-Terminating Temporary URLs

VapURL is a simple purpose online tool that can generate temporary URLs which redirect to a page of your choice. You can customize the life length of the URL by time or number of visits, and it will stop working as soon as the limit has been reached. Pretty useful app for limited-time offers and similar online promotions and giveaways.

via VapURL: Create Self-Terminating Temporary URLs.

Tags: limit, online promotions, self-terminating, temporary, URL, VapURL

S4ve.as Makes File Sharing as Easy as Sharing a URL – File Sharing – Lifehacker

Need to share a file quickly and without the hassle of setting up a file server or other dedicated connection between you and the recipient? S4ve.as makes transferring a file as simple as pasting a URL.

Visit the s4ve.as web site, select a file you want to share, upload that file, and you’re given a URL. The URL is good for 24 hours from the time of creation. Anyone who visits it can download the file you’ve shared. You don’t need to be online, the file is temporarily stored on the s4ve.as servers.

S4ve.as is a free service with no restrictions on the size of the file you can upload.

via S4ve.as Makes File Sharing as Easy as Sharing a URL – File Sharing – Lifehacker.

Tags: 24 hours, File Sharing, free service, Lifehacker, S4ve.as, URL

Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text | Wired Science | Wired.com

Starting this fall, you’ll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia: An optional feature called “WikiTrust” will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

More than 60 million people visit the free, open-access encyclopedia each month, searching for knowledge on 12 million pages in 260 languages. But despite its popularity, Wikipedia has long suffered criticism from those who say it’s not reliable. Because anyone with an internet connection can contribute, the site is subject to vandalism, bias and misinformation. And edits are anonymous, so there’s no easy way to separate credible information from fake content created by vandals.

via Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Tags: color code, encyclopedia, Wikipedia, WikiTrust, Wired

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