This is a proof-of-concept based on a recent blog post I wrote in wihch I posited that an easy way to create long posts for Twitter would be to combine the data:URI format with a URL-shortening service. This form basically does that. All you have to do is type or paste your text into the form below, click “Shorten” and you’ll be presented with a TinyURL that contains your encoded text. Copy and paste that URL into a Twitter form, and you’re done. The form itself is based on The Data:uri Kitchen, and I’ve chosen TinyURL as the shortener because it has a dead simple API.

Next up: Combine this with the Twitter API, so that you can automatically enter the shortened URL into a tweet.

Note: This works with recent versions of almost all major browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Konqueror. The one exception is Internet Explorer. So, if you’re planning on sharing your long tweets with folks who are still using IE, you’ll have to go elsewhere. And by that I mean go elsewhere and download another browser!

Update: TinyURL seems to have suddenly taken to choking on data URIs, So, it may be back to the drawing board this weekend!

(Photo: kopp0441)

If you use Twitter much, you’ve inevitably come up against the service’s 140-character limit, and have tried various workarounds to get your thoughts across within that constraint. You can judiciously edit your text, send followers to a blog, or break your content into multiple tweets. None of these solutions is ideal.

What’s really needed is a way to just type as much as you want into the text-entry field of your Twitter home page or a desktop client like Tweet Deck, click Update, and have your message appear on a web page, with a shortened URL helpfully embedded in your tweet. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to do that—yet.

What I present below is a proof-of-concept, which should allow a programmer to build this functionality into a tool like Tweet Deck or a browser extension like Power Twitter. I’m not a programmer, so I can’t build it, but I’m hoping someone will take this idea and run with it—or poke holes in it if there’s a better way to make it happen. (A programmer may also be able to find a way to make this work in Internet Explorer; right now, it works in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, but not IE) Here’s how my concept works:
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Katie Couric’s interview with hero pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger will air on 60 Minutes tonight, and like many people, I’m pretty excited to see what the captain has to say. However, I’m also disappointed with the way Couric and CBS handled their exclusive with Sully. I have nothing against news organizations getting exclusive stories. That’s how the business works. However, I do have a bit of a problem with the way CBS has successfully blocked even the tiniest bit of media attention to Sullenberger from occuring before the show airs. CBS’s control reached its apotheosis last night, when the network basically forbade anyone from getting near enough to speak to or snap a pic of the pilot—other than AP, which had struck an agreement with CBS —when he went to the hit “South Pacific” at Lincoln Center. I had hoped that some daring audience or cast member would have grabbed something with a cameraphone, but no such luck. (Where’s the guy who snuck the pic of Michael Phelps when you need him?) So, congrats on the exclusive, CBS. But as far as I’m concerned, your heavy-handed approach to the Sully interview is a big fail.

Like many people, I’ve shifted more and more of my computing activities to "the cloud," using services like Flickr, Zoho Writer and Gmail as regular tools, not merely adjuncts to desktop applications. And I’m not alone; entire businesses are being built on the idea that desktop apps are dinosaurs, and the future of computing rests with thin client appliances connected to massive servers and databases. However, this weekend’s outage of Amazon’s S3 data storage service may have some people rethinking their commitment to the cloud. It’s unclear how many services were offline as a result of the outage, but one that particularly irked me was Amazon’s own Kindle network. As a recent convert to Kindledom, I’ve gotten used to using the device as a thin client appliance, downloading RSS feeds, checking my email and sometimes even buying books. Yesterday, however, I was offline all day, and nothing on Amazon’s Kindle support site made note of the issue. I was left to wonder whether, despite having three bars most of the day, I had somehow wandered out of range. The event left me frustrated, and served as a reminder of how fragile cloud computing really is. As Om Malik points out, "the cloud has many points of failure – routers crashing, cable getting accidentally cut, load balancers getting misconfigured, or simply bad code." I’m not ready to give up on the cloud (or the Kindle) just yet, but I am going to continue to back up my data locally—and make more use of applications like Evernote that have both desktop and online versions, so that I can work efficiently regardless of connectivity, and be sure that my work is accessible wherever and whenever I need it.

I was going to post something about the now-infamous New York Times “death by blogging” article, but at this point, I think ZDNet’s Larry Dignan really has the last word:

Let’s put a little perspective on this blogging thing. You could be getting shot at in Iraq. You could be a single mom working three jobs to stay afloat (Happy Birthday mom). You could work in a coal mine. You could be in a life and death battle with Leukemia. You could be doing any one of thousands of high-stress jobs. Sure, the Web has a lot of stress but let’s get real: If you’re stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you’d be stressed by any profession you chose.

If anything, the Times article really just highlights a growing problem in America, of which over-stressed bloggers is one symptom: our work-obsessed culture. Back in the late 80s, there were a lot of reports out of Japan that stressed salarymen were dying in droves from karoshi, literally “death from overwork.” At the time, I was working for Business Tokyo, a magazine that covered the trans-Pacific business culture, and I travelled frequently between the U.S. and Japan. And Japanese culture at the time did indeed put such an emphasis on work—and work-related activities such as marathon after-work drinking bouts—that it placed a lot of stress on workers. In some individuals, such stress inevitably lead to heart attacks and other sometimes-fatal ailments, hence karoshi. Fast-forward 20 years, and Americans, on average, now work longer hours than anyone else in the world, including the Japanese. That isn’t a good thing, for bloggers, coal miners or anyone else. Many of Today’s young Japanese workers have rebelled against the salaryman ethos of the past, and have embraced a slacker culture that keeps them ensconced in their parents’ homes and part-time jobs well into their 20s. That may not be the best solution to karoshi, but it beats America’s current workaholic mindset. And if any of those Japanese slackers ever get bored, they can always start blogging. It’s not like it’ll kill them or anything.

(Note: The above is not meant to disrespect the memories of Marc Orchant or Russell Shaw, both of whom were acquaintances of mine from Weblogs Inc. While I know little about the details of their passings, I find it hard to believe that their choice of profession played little more than a peripheral role in their fates. Indeed, my brief conversations with Marc were always extremely positive, and I really think he loved his career. Both Marc and Russell died well before their times, and they should be remembered as individuals—not as harbingers of a hyped up “crisis.”)

When reporters visit North Korea, they’re usually given a highly restricted itinerary, consisting largely of visits with happy workers, tours of gleaming-but-empty buildings, and lectures about the glory of the Great and Dear Leaders. And, based on this Times report , the latest batch of reporters—who accompanied the New York Philharmonic on its historic visit to the Hermit Kingdom—had to follow the same script. But there was at least one striking lapse on the part of the group’s handlers, during a visit to the country’s National Library:

A librarian said the library had room for 30 million volumes and was 95 percent full. Two-thirds were said to be foreign-language books. The librarian summoned up some books on a conveyor belt and spread them out for the visitors to see. They were mostly computer books: “Electronic Packaging, Microelectronics and Interconnection Dictionary,” and a Windows 95 guide.

Yes, that’s right. Windows 95! If this is what they’re showing off to the press, who knows what’s actually in the rest of those 30 million volumes? Manuals for repairing your ‘46 Packard? The latest on that wacky new disco dancing craze? Suddenly, I’m a lot less worried about the North Korean nuclear program.

Paramount has begun what will eventually be a multimillion dollar marketing juggernaut behind the new Star Trek flick. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at StarTrek.com, the studio’s official site for the franchise. After a reorg late last year left the site basically staff-less, it’s essentially been in sleeper-ship mode, with a static home page promoting, not the new movie, which rolled out a teaser trailer last week, but an episode of the animated Trek series, circa 1973. The site’s news page was last updated December 18th (with a plea to “keep the conversation going on StarTrek.com boards”) and the page of the site designed to promote the new movie was last updated in early December (even worse, the landing page for the new, multi-city “Star Trek: The Tour” promotion is blank!). Of course, Paramount hasn’t given up completely on the web; a new “under construction” site at paramount.com/startrek has been launched to promote the movie, and a banner on the legacy site points to it. Still, the essential abandonment of the startrek.com domain at a time when the brand is due for a major revival deserves a raised eyebrow from Vulcans and experienced web marketers alike. StarTrek.com should be the go-to site for news and info about the new movie, and its current status as a ghost site that shows that, in the immortal words of Chancellor Gorkon, Paramount has a long way to go before it really gets the whole Internet thing.

Since everyone else has already compiled their “Best of 2007” lists, here’s mine, in no particular order:

The beauty of the Kindle isn’t its readability; its screen is basically the same as that of the Sony Reader. Amazon’s acheivement is solving the chicken-and-egg conundrum that ebook readers have faced for over a decade. With wireless access, tens of thousands of available books (including many that people might actually want to read) and even daily newspapers, the Kindle is the first ebook reader designed for readers. Now if they could just do something about that price.

Gore’s Nobel
Without Karl, Ralph or the Supremes in his way, the winner of the 2000 presidential race sailed to a well-deserved victory in Sweden. Of course, it remains to be seen whether his prize helps influence policy on climate change.

The Consumerist
Nick Denton will never be confused with Colston Warne, but as the force behind The Consumerist, he’s shown that he’s capable of actually helping people other than gossip-hungry New Yorkers and Valleyites. Featuring everything from recall news to guerilla support tips, Consumerist is the new face of consumer advocacy for Gen Y.

Alas, I didn’t make it to this show, the group’s first in over 25 years. But the YouTube clips confirm that my boyhood idols still sound great—but are now bald, fat and middle-aged … just like their fans.

Zoho Writer
Google Docs may get all the glory, but Zoho feels a lot more like a real word processor, and includes such niceties as a tabbed interface, ad-free environment, and, most impressive of all, a seamless offline mode—powered by Google Gears, which has yet to make an appearance in its parent’s online editor.
 
Forever Stamp
I buy stamps. I lose them. I find them five years later and have to buy extra pennyweight stamps if I want to use them. Not anymore. I can buy as many stamps as I want, lose them for decades, and still be able to use them to mail my pleas for cash to the Social Security Administration.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Alt-history, Chandleresque suspense and the “frozen chosen.” What’s not to like?

OLPC XO GOGO
I’ll leave the hardware reviews to the experts. But Nicholas Negroponte’s “Give One Get One” ploy was pure genius, and managed to change the public perception of the XO from a well-intentioned failure to a cool way to be philantropic and get a free gadget at the same time (or even make a profit, as some eBay merchants have managed to do.

Yahoo Pipes
Plug-and-play RSS mashups for the masses. Users have created pipes that do everything from add a category-specific price-watch service to craigslist to the most recent “interesting” flickr photos, except for those that feature flowers. And, of course, all scripts can be copied, merged, altered and further mashed as needed.

WGA Strike
The union movement in the U.S. may be a shadow of its former self, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely toothless. The ongoing strike has brought one of the country’s most powerful industries to its knees and, like the Tasini lawsuit a half-decade ago, serves as a reminder that companies that control content don’t have a unilateral right to use it “in any medium yet to be invented” without compensating its creators.

“Have you tried Netscape yet?”

“Netscape?”

“Go and download it right now!”

It was the fall of 1994, I was in the process of building my first Web site (Asia Inc Online), and a colleague tipped me off to a hot new browser that I just had to see. The next day, I fired up my copy of NCSA Mosaic, went to akebono.stanford.edu, and searched for Netscape. In no time, I was using Netscape 0.94b, and I soon learned that this hot new browser was the new brainchild of Marc Andreesen, the wunderkind behind Mosaic. In fact, this early version bore the logo of the Mosaic Communications Corp., which was soon supplanted by Netscape Communications, once NCSA warned Andreesen and co. that they were infringing on their copyright.

For most of the next decade, I stuck by Netscape, even as the browser’s early market dominance fell to such upstarts as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and even as the company was acquired by AOL, which somehow managed to help Microsoft grow its market share at the same time that it allowed Netscape to languish. Then, almost in spite of itself, AOL did one crucial thing right: It provided early funding to the Mozilla Foundation and allowed it to run free with Netscape’s source code. And the rest, as they say, is history.

When I read yesterday that AOL was officially ending support for the Netscape browser and telling users to switch to Firefox, it hardly came as a surprise. Indeed, I can’t recall the last time I used a Netscape-branded browser. And, in fact, all recent releases of Netscape were really reskinned versions of Firefox, so actual development of a “real” Netscape browser ceased long ago. It will be hard for me to mourn for Netscape, when Firefox has so much of it in its DNA. Still, I can’t help but get a little wistful for those early days, before Internet Explorer, before Netscape’s IPO, before the browser even went 1.0. Netscape was the Internet back then, and those of us who developed sites hung on every update, as Marca and company created new standards on the fly (look, it supports animated GIFs! Now that’s interactivity!). Today, though, we do the same with Firefox (look, it supports Silverlight. That’s interactivity?). And as long as I see that familiar mozilla show up in user agents in my server logs, I’ll know that all is right with the world wide web.

One of the first rules of just about every personal productivity plan is to avoid constantly checking your email. It’s part of the GTD credo, it’s mentioned about a dozen times a week on Lifehacker, and I recently caught the latest iteration of it in Michael Hyatt’s blog, courtesy of (of course) Lifehacker: “Unless you are in a customer service position where you have to be “always-on,” you should check email no more than two or three times a day.” Hyatt’s advice is very similar to a tip I made about ten years ago on iVillage, as part of a set of Five Tips for Email Users:

Checking your email frequently is one of the big time-wasters of the modern office. Avoid it if you can! Set aside two periods when you know it will be quiet—once at 8:30 in the morning and again at 6:00 p.m., for example—and check your mail then.

Sage advice, from Perton then, and Hyatt today. Unfortunately, I’ve almost never followed it, and I suspect Hyatt hasn’t either. In today’s always-connected world, with Outlook, Blackberrys, Gmail Mobile, text messaging and all the rest, it’s impossible to stay away from email. And the worst part of the always-on environment isn’t the mail itself, it’s the culture that has grown up around it. Even if you somehow have enough discipline to avoid email all day, chances are good that doing so will be detrimental to your career. Colleagues, clients and the rest of the connected world expect everyone else to be connected 24/7 as well, and that’s even truer now than back in 1997 when I was at iVillage.