hfastedge's Journal: protocols in the human machine

I have something really big brewing that I wish to dissemenate via this journal, but I'm waiting for the forces that be over at cspan.org to put up a video in their online archive. Its a recording of John Chambers (cisco ceo), addressing a meeting of the National Governors Assocation http://www.nga.org/nga/newsRoom/1,1169,C_PRESS_RELEASE%5ED_4054,00.html. I watched it online via cspan when it was still just being repeated b/c it had recently been aired (but its not in the more permanent collection).

Anyway, Im not going to comment on what im brewing, but looking at that link above i'd like to take a segue (hahaha, yes its spelt thusly).

I only assume that the link above is generated by some stupid content management system. It's perfectly acceptable within the context of the internet; however, imagine trying to communicate such a link to a person in an audio conversation (in person or over the phone)....

If you don't know the person, and you're trying to lobby an idea (hint hint), its amazingly annoying to transmit such unwieldy information. Imagine: you'd have to read it slowly to them, and then politely ask them to confirm it....Morever, as we are social beings, the person you just shared it with, might want to share it with others...and so forth. Lots of bad potential karma here. In all actuality, its sometimes easier to ask them to google for the term, in fact if you google for "john chambers national governors association" the number 1 hit will be the above link. But this is not a reliable process at all, and its not really designed for this purpose im trying to give it.

Another examples of this from my daily adventures https://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=6695&group_id=1#projectweb.

I've actually chatted with the sourceforge devs, and they say one of the longest,nagging feature requests is to clean up the url structure.

Anyway, this is just sort of interesting eh? It really gives you a sense of the contrast shown in the interface between the internet machine, and the global-human machine. If you don't get me here, maybe you would like to look at one of my self deeemed favorite comments here on the /

So, if you want to cleanly and humanly communicate information outside the context of the internet machine, i've found some free web services that have developed out of the demand for easy communication. Basically, they let you give them a complex, hairy link and they'll give you a temporary link (in a clean manner) that will resolve to the original.

Eg: http://makeashorterlink.com or purl.com or sow.as . It's quite a simply idea and could be executed with less than 10 lines of code ;-).