Whenever I visit a Dreamwidth journal and leave it open in a tab, I always find myself wondering why I was looking at the Debian GNU/Linux website. For possibly obvious reasons:
I can’t imagine how I keep mixing up a dark red 1½-turn counterclockwise spiral with a dark red 1½-turn clockwise spiral! 😀
Twitter writes that link length shouldn’t matter, but the zillions of URL shortening services out there show that, for now, it does.
But why?
There are two main reasons to shorten* a link:
Right now, with Twitter messages limited to 140 characters and links forced to share that space with the rest of the post, URL shorteners are critical. But they’re working on a plan to accept longer URLs, and specifically shorten them for SMS messages. The full link will be available on the Twitter website, desktop clients, and other platforms that don’t have that hard and fast limit.
That will cut down on the demand for shorteners, but they’ll still be useful.
For one thing, there are other microblogging platforms out there like StatusNet.
For another, there’s email.
IIRC, the first URL shorteners launched because email programs often break up really long lines, including really long URLs. In plain-text messages, that leaves links not just unclickable, but inconvenient even to copy and paste, because you have to copy each line separately and paste them together. This will continue to be an issue as long as people continue to put visible URLs in email.
And then there’s the human factor. It might not be easy to remember http://is.gd/cGE8V, but it certainly takes a lot less time to write it on a scrap of paper than http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/07/hard-to-port-eject-goose-eject/.
Which of those URLs would you rather type on your keyboard? Or worse, on your mobile phone?
*In this case, I mean making it really short and cryptic. There are plenty of reasons to keep links readable and sort of short.
So, remember this photo of a door labeled “This is not a door?” Last year, someone else sent a picture of the same door to FAIL Blog. Then a week ago, someone submitted mine to Friends of Irony, where Katie spotted it a few days later.
Here’s where things get interesting.
On both sites, people were absolutely convinced that it was “obviously” photoshopped.
*headdesk*
No, it’s real. It’s in a small business complex at the corner of Newport Ave. and Irvine Blvd. in Tustin, California. You can go there and look if you want. And of course there are the two photos taken from different angles.
The obvious conclusion is that people don’t really know how to tell whether a photo has been manipulated. At least on FAIL Blog, some of the doubters had reasons, even though they amounted to not understanding perspective.
I was tempted to post a comment linking to this XKCD strip (My hobby: insisting that real-life objects are photoshopped), but settled for requesting a photo credit instead.
The last days of the floppy diskette are approaching: Sony will stop selling them in Japan next year.
No word on how long they’ll continue selling them in the US…but when was the last time you saw a new computer with a floppy disk drive?
Hello chkdsk, my old friend
I’ve got to run you once again
Cause my Windows box is acting weird
And the disk drive must need something cleared
And the error that was printed on my screen
Made me scream
And put aside my work
For chkdsk
