Human/machine readable format for titling links in Tweets

Summary

Give your Tweeted links titles by using the following format:

"This is my link title": http://example.org/

Raison d'être

Link titles enable us to add meaning to links. This is especially beneficial for shortened URLs which are even harder for people to decode than verbose ones.

This format degrades gracefully ie. it is human readable even in Twitter clients that don't support the format.

Enriching links in this way improves the Twitter experience.

License

This Twitterformat Proposal is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

I wrote this to appear on: http://twitterformats.org/2009/12/proposal-ping/

Give me your links

Someone just asked me if they can email me stuff from delicious, you can – here's how:

You do it with a for: tag…

When you're adding a link to delicious, just tag that link with for:{{username}}

i.e. my username is danny.hope, so if you want to send something to me add the tag for:danny.hope

Anything tagged in this way goes into my inbox in delicious:



That's it.

Why not, put your username in the comments so I can send stuff to you too?

Trusting the Cloud

I've seen various articles recently, asking should we trust ('cloud based' apps such as) Google Docs for serious work?

Overlooking the fact that Google Docs doesn't offer the functionality that some clients seem to need, I think we're well on the way to having an online office.

However there needs to be a change: Our data (docs etc) need to be stored in a distributed way – synchronised across multiple (online) services.

So it won't matter if system-A (say, Google Docs) goes down, because your documents will have been synchronised with system-B (say, Zoho) and system-C, in fact any number of other systems.

As long as one of those systems is your local system, it won' t even matter that you can't get online; you can just switch back to your preferred desktop editor like Word.

So, questions;

• what are the technical and security implications of this approach?
• will vendors play nice and share your data accross with your nominated systems?
• what else needs to happen to make this a reality?
• are we already there and I'm just unaware of existing tools?

Logos on Homepages

In the context of the homepage, the image itself is part of the content, so it should be shown as an IMG inside an H1 – not a background in that H1.

On other pages, however, it makes sense for the image to be the background element of the 1st H2 (with the text of that H2 being offset out of view). The 1st H1 being the title of that page.

Anyone got any thoughts on this assertion?

Mad Dogs and Enlgish Wine

Henry (who talks at the Geek Wine Thing) and Andy from The Butlers Wine Cellar are doing a 2000 KM cycling trip to raise:

• money for the the Chestnut Tree House children’s hospice and…
• awareness of quality English wine.

Being a bit of a Google Maps junkie, I decided to plot their journey:

View Larger Map
More info is available on the Mad Dogs And English Wine website.

Geek Wine Thing – Back for 2008

Having just spoken to Henry from The Butlers Wine Cellar, I'm pleased to announce that the Geek Wine Thing is back for 2008.

You can register on upcoming.

We haven't agreed a theme yet, so please feel free to suggest a theme in the comments.

Also, you can now follow what's going on with the Geek Wine Thing via Twitter.

Emotional Engagement

For several months now I've been irritated by a pair of annoying pop-ups (modal dialog boxes to be precise) that appear, one after the other, every time I start iTunes.

This is the SRS iWOW plug-in telling me that my trial period has expired and asking whether I want to buy a license. I do not.

Showing a modal dialog box is bad, showing 2 of them is really bad and presenting no way to remove the software makes the problem inescapable.

These two pop-ups are really annoying:

• they interrupt me
• they require my input
• they interrupt the importing of songs - so that I have to initiate the opening of files twice, and they're ugly.

I resolved never to buy anything from this company!

In desperation I emailed their customer support not expecting either to be ignored or, at best, a dismissive, reluctant response containing complicated instructions. I couldn't have been more wrong - what I got in response was a prompt, apologetic and helpful email written by a real person (someone called Michael Gonzales).

As it turns out, this would completely changed my opinion of their whole brand.

Some time after this email exchange, I came across the TunePro iPod Speaker Charger Alarm Clock (nice name) which bore the SRS logo and, to my surprise, I found myself wanting the thing. Because it had the SRS logo on it. Baring in mind that I'm the sort of person who couldn't care less about having an alarm clock, this is pretty amazing.

It just goes to show how wide and complex the area of user experience is. Who'd could have predicted that I'd reverse my decision to never buy their stuff based on one email?

Emotional Engagement - A Lesson from Darth Vader
Bad experiences engage you as deeply as good ones.

And then, If a bad brand redeems itself, it stays with you but now it's switched and quickly becomes your friend - like Darth Vader at the end of Jedi.

3 Ways to Improve Your Website Based on Statistics

Website stats contain so much data that it can be hard to know what to do with that information.

Here are 3 ways that you can use statistics to make your site better:

1. Look for the most frequent search term and work that term into a prominent link on your homepage.
2. Find the most popular broken link (AKA, 404 page) and replace it with a real page. Alternatively, configure your web server to issue a permanent redirect response, this way people are unaware of any issue.
3. Find out your site's most popular entry point and concentrate on the design of that page like you would your homepage.