Alex Muller

So, tell me this… why has Flickr not implemented Facebook profile tagging on its photos, the same way it does with Last.fm or Upcoming events?

Tagging a photo with, say, facebook:profile=012345678 would add a link to that person’s Facebook profile, and could then be used (effectively in reverse) on Facebook profiles.

June 6th: Since writing this post, I’ve come across a really cool Flickr machine tag browser that you should check out.

It’s the day before exams start here at university, so needless to say I’ve got my priorities straight and am messing around with things on my blog.

There’s been big discussion on the Internet for a few weeks now, I think, on rev=canonical. If you need to get up to speed, take a quick look at Jeremy Keith’s post titled Revving up. I’ll wait, it’s ok. You can even skim or speed read if you’re desperate to get back here.

So, the benefits should be obvious. Providing short URLs from a domain that you have control of, so as not to rely on a third party service. That’s how I interpret it, anyway. It’s important to note that big sites like Flickr are already implementing this, taking links like http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexmuller/3473217214/ and turning them into http://flic.kr/p/6hV9tq. Cool stuff, definitely.

I have an incredibly short attention span. There, I said it. If you’re like me, with the concentration of a tired racoon, here’s what you need to do. Readers, consumers, everybody: grab the rev=canonical bookmarklet created by Simon Willison and use that to find short URLs before other services. Creators, bloggers, people with a website: if you’re using WordPress, install the WordPress rev=canonical plugin which will provide shortened URLs for your blog or site. Everybody’s trying to reduce the impact that linkrot could have, one step at a time.

And there you have it. Every article on this blog now has a short(er) URL, which you can find using the bookmarklet I linked above. Those links will be good for as long as this blog is around, which is potentially longer than URL shortening services. The link for this post is http://mullr.net/blog/pap.

Small update

The plugin broke fairly soon after I implemented it this morning, possibly because of a 301 redirect I have going on from mullr.net to alex.mullr.net. Duncan Robertson, the plugin’s author, replied to my plea for help within half a day with a fix for the issue, so massive thanks to him. I’m sure an updated version will be released on his site that sorts this problem.

I took the photo below as a bit of a joke (hey, Vaio stickers are a joke… right?) but it’s interesting to have a record of the "old" Google Reader which was on my screen at the time. When it recently changed, I remember quite a few people complaining at how the layout seemed less intuitive; now, of course, I’d easily vote for the new, cleaner look.

Sometimes, I guess you just have to get through a few days or weeks of your users complaining at change – especially in this fairly new space of constantly evolving online software. And other times, the change isn’t so great and your users might actually have valid concerns (hey, Facebook, look over here).

I’ve had a few issues with my Virgin Media cable connection over the last few days, and wanted to write about it here. We’re in a pretty difficult position at home: as Virgin have a monopoly on the UK cable market, and we can’t have ADSL over our phone line, we have to stick with them no matter what. I’d never tell them that to their face, of course…

So, our connection died at about 4pm on Monday afternoon. I called up their support number at 9pm and got put through to India. I was asked to reboot the modem, and when it didn’t work again I was told we could wait for it to be sorted, or book an engineer.

I decided to sleep on it, and called them back on Tuesday daytime (again, Indian call centre). Again, I had to reboot the modem, and was told to disconnect my Apple router because they couldn’t support that. She didn’t sort the problem – when I tried to get her to report an issue (open a ticket, have an engineer look at it on their end), all she’d say was the stock line: "I’ve checked the system, there are no issues in your area."

I was out all day Wednesday, but called them back that night. I was put through to John in Swansea; whatever Virgin are paying John, it isn’t enough; VM should be proud to be employing somebody so competent. He did some tests straight away on my modem, saw some strange power fluctuations, and said immediately that it needed an engineer to look at it. He booked one for Monday, commented on how their internal support systems are so slow, and let me off the phone.

At 1pm today (Thursday), I got a text saying they’d fix the problem within eight hours and that they’d cancelled my engineer. At 4pm, I received a voicemail saying the problem was sorted. I don’t know whether John was correct that my modem needs looking at, but if so… it can happen some other time. The connection’s working fine now, and I’m happy.

Here’s the interesting thing (to me): I was really pissed off on Tuesday afternoon. Truthfully, I was incredibly pissed off until I spoke to a UK call centre. Quality of phone support is so important, and I hope Virgin aren’t moving more of their operations out of the UK. That’s the kind of thing that, in the long run, would lose us as customers. And finally, to the people behind @virginmedia on Twitter: what you’re doing (openness & pretty immediate availability) is really cool… please keep it up.

A few days ago on Twitter, I wrote this:

Hashtags are "a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets." To see what I mean about normal words being tagged, go to search.twitter.com, pick a random word and put a hash sign in front of it.

Updates like this annoy me, because there’s absolutely no need to tag normal words in a tweet. For every person on Twitter who’s versed in all things #, there are many more who haven’t had the trend explained to them. This means there are people tweeting both "#episode" and "episode", so we’ve got two terms that need to be searched for to find tweets relating to TV.

I’ve seen some nice Twitter guidelines in the last couple of weeks (some on corporate usage spring to mind), so I thought I’d have a go at some for hashtagging…

When should I tag?

There are a couple of things in this category:

• When at an event, or a gathering of people – or trying to keep track of an event. Future of Web Apps and The Pirate Bay’s trial are two that have worked quite well in the past.
• When Twitter’s search might not give proper results for a phrase. #safari4 was one from yesterday, as I suppose “Safari 4″ could give some strange results.

And when should I not?

Essentially…

• When the search function on Twitter will give you exactly the same result. I cannot see the point in #plurk or #youtube. I suppose #lost (for the TV show) does make some sense, as it’s trying to differentiate from people just using the word "lost".

By way of an update to my earlier post, The Guardian reported late on Tuesday that the Internet Watch Foundation has decided to reverse “its ban on a Wikipedia page and image of a record album cover showing a young nude girl”.

This apparently “unprecedented move” (of what, jackasses changing their mind when they’re clearly wrong?) is a brilliant thing. As though it couldn’t get better, they even admitted that it actually had the opposite effect to what they’d intended. In other words, many more people have seen the album cover now.

This whole situation is hilarious. They’ve now admitted that they can, at times, be wrong, which is going to make life a hell of a lot more difficult for them in the future. Enjoy, IWF. Here’s a link to their press release.

Here’s the deal, if you haven’t heard this blow up in the last couple of days. It first kicked off around midday on the 5th December when it was discovered on Wikipedia that all users in the UK were being passed through a transparent proxy; allowing content to be filtered, in this case the Virgin Killer article and image.

The Internet Watch Foundation is deeming that this image should be blocked in the UK because, after receiving a report from a member of the public, they decided it was child pornography. Whether it is or isn’t is up for debate (though personally I think there’s no way in hell it qualifies), but what really pisses me off is that they don’t even apply their own rules across the board.

The following screenshot was taken from my O₂ phone (because thankfully we’re not filtered here at uni):

On this same phone, the Wikipedia article mentioned is blocked – if you’re interested, I get an "HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden" error. I guess the only message I have to share is that censorship does nothing.

There’s a good conversation from BBC Radio 4′s Today programme between David Gerard (a Wikipedia contributor) and Susan Robertson of the IWF included below, originally here. There’s a massive discussion on Wikipedia about it, and Ian Betteridge has one of the better articles.

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You’ll never guess what the email address associated with this account is…

abuse@digg.com

Cool little feature that I believe is unique to Break’s video service – in that I haven’t seen it anywhere else yet.

Every video has a “play this next” ticker that scrolls through related videos while the current one is playing. On hover, it displays a preview of the related video and once clicked it changes to an “up next” (in a queuing kind of way).

Innovation in stuff that’s as normal (apply air quotes) as online video streaming is getting more and more rare, so it’s nice to see Break implementing things that aren’t just other sites’ features rehashed.

I’m not too sure where I stand on how Twitter is evolving and growing at the moment. Guess if I was forced to opine, it would be that they’re not developing, improving or evolving fast enough. I know they’re trying to keep the service simple, but the lack of a few would-be-amazing features (groups, anyone?) makes it seem stale and unloved.

This was prompted by me thinking up ways that they could make the site more useful, primarily in terms of adding more user-generated information while still keeping the original, simple tweet structure. How about a community wiki-esque (oooh, but limited to 140 characters – I just thought of that) system for explaining what the hashtags actually mean. I searched for #pop this morning (it’s a course I’m doing) and it came up with a whole load of results about burgers. I’d love to have been able to hover over #pop in the tweet and see a 140 character explanation of what this place was.

Spam’s an issue, clearly, which is why the system would be community moderated. Once a site has the giant user base that Twitter does, I reckon they could leave a lot up to the users.

Finally, a really, really basic screenshot of the kind of thing I’m thinking about: