If you're on one of my YahooGroups mailing lists you may have noticed that it "breaks" long URLs, making them no longer "clickable" in your e-mail window. Web-based e-mail programs like Hotmail may do the same thing.
Here's a solution: http://tinyurl.com
This free (donations invited) service will create a smaller address, such as http://tinyurl.com/1shv for a longer one that might otherwise be broken by the "line wrap" of your mail service.
In my example above, the "real" address is "http://help.unc.edu/?id=1980&bc=trail=1146,1601&type=all" (a Web graphics tutorial at UNC Chapel Hill). TinyURL helps even more with very long addresses, like this one:
http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&filter=0&q
=cluster:www%2ecanada%2ecom%2fhealth%2fstory%2ehtml%3fid%3d8
F6DF8AA%2dBF52%2d4F91%2d96CF%2d4681B844BD84
Like Yahoogroups and some e-mail programs, my weblog page breaks that URL in a couple of places because the log itself is created by typing in a small text-entry window on a Web page with Radio Userland. TinyURL reduced that long address to "http://tinyurl.com/1p0o" -- which worked as long as the news site that published the original story kept it online. (A good point to remember when writing log entries about news sites: The linked story probably will fade eventually, so put enough information in your log entry to make sense to the reader even if the link stops working.)
My other useful tool for this week is the service that generated that long URL in the first place: the beta version of a news headline "aggregator" from the folks (and chips) at Google.
Google's recently-improved http://news.google.com scours the Web for major stories and presents not one or two samples, but scores -- even hundreds -- of versions of the latest story on a topic , noting the date and time each went online. The 727 versions of an Ivory Coast story earlier today were pulled from the Austin American-Statesman, the BBC, the Boston Globe, ABC, CNN, various Reuters services (e.g, http://www.alertnet.org/), and sources as far from us (and Ivory Coast) as Australia and the South China news.
Again, some links may fade when online publications shift older news to a "paying customers only" archive site, but plenty of the Ivory Coast links were still alive after two days. I don't see the New York Times and The Washington Post in Google's lists, presumably because they block such links.
Google's robots do offer the work of Times and Post reporters through other sources, such as a Post news service story on HIV research, appearing in the MIT Tech.
The "20 minutes ago," "5 hours ago" flags on the stories appear to indicate freshness, but the reader should use common sense, too. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle's AP story about a Boston Globe/WBZ poll is headlined above today's Globe and Herald stories.
In fact, Google's "front page" link to the Globe in this case was to a different story in the O'Brien-Romney election campaign, not the Globe's page one story about its own poll, which appeared down a few items in Google's "more links" jump.
As you might imagine, "online news" professionals are debating what Google's powerful automated "aggregating" of news means to the industry. It's not the first such service (see moreover.com and http://news.yahoo.com/), but it could have great impact by riding on the popularity of Google's search engine. Coming to those stories via Google presumably doesn't expose the reader to Boston.com's "front page" advertising, which doesn't help pay the salaries of any Globe reporters. On the other hand, perhaps once a reader follows a link from Google to a story he or she stays at Boston.com to look at other things. What do you think?
To see what others say about the topic, search the archived Online News mailing list for "Google," "deep linking," "aggregation" and related keywords. You can choose "visit online news without joining," but joining the list is a great idea for students taking online journalism courses.
Feel free to carry your thoughts about this online discussion into your own logs -- and bring it back class!
10:28:37 AM 
|
