BK.LY Launches
We’ve just launched a new website this morning called bk.ly that is designed to serve two purposes: 1) As URL shorteners become a ubiquitous part of the Internet experience, it makes sense to have some kind of local identity to the shortened web addresses, especially in the case of Brooklyn where local pride runs thick;…
We’ve just launched a new website this morning called bk.ly that is designed to serve two purposes: 1) As URL shorteners become a ubiquitous part of the Internet experience, it makes sense to have some kind of local identity to the shortened web addresses, especially in the case of Brooklyn where local pride runs thick; 2) Twitter also provides a powerful way to collect and rank local news. The way site works is pretty simple: If you tweet a link that’s been shortened using the bk.ly URL shortener, it’ll automatically show up in the site’s Tweet stream; likewise, if you append any Tweet with the hashtag #bknews, it will also show up in the stream. The latter will hopefully be used widely for mobile Tweets like “three-car accident at Fulton and South Oxford #bknews”. We’ve also got a Most Popular widget on the site to track which links have been Tweeted the most. (This will soon be available for any bloggers to embed on their own sites.) Within the next couple of weeks, you’ll be able to log into the site with your Twitter username and Tweet directly from bk.ly while tracking the click-through performance of your links. It’s very much an experiment so we look forward to specific suggestions to make it more useful and user-friendly.
there’s really no reason to use a url shortener. you can copy, paste, and click on a url thats 1000 characters just as well as one that’s 20.
“CNN was using tweets as “sources” on articles concerning the election in Iran.”
Yes, but by simply citing those “sources” as “tweets,” they have at least maintained journalistic standards by identifying sources. To me, the larger issue is that “twitterers” via their technology-enabled ubiquity, are “replacing” trained media personnel, slowly KILLING the traditional news delivery paradigm. There are good and bad things about this, but for the professional journalist, it’s mostly bad.
“a trend of Japanese men being in love with and having relationships with anime characters (2-D love) and then the story about artificial intelligence becoming too smart?”
I think too many people are caught up in the technology. No question, it enables broader, faster forms of communication. But in the end it still involves the sharing of thoughts. In that’s there’s nothing new.
That said, people who fall in love with cartoons are…what’s the word? Oh yeah – schizophrenic.
Science fiction is fast becoming science fact. Writers like Isaac Asimov and Philip Dick, and even Jules Verne, are all being seen as prophets now, not overly imagined, wacked out writers of low brow popular fiction. That is actually very cool, although scary, as the mis-uses of technology and information form the underlying plots of most of their writing.
East NY – you are right, it is the present. I don’t know if you caught it, but CNN was using tweets as “sources” on articles concerning the election in Iran.
There is something wrong and somewhat apocalyptic about this to me. Did you see the two articles in the times today, one about a trend of Japanese men being in love with and having relationships with anime characters (2-D love) and then the story about artificial intelligence becoming too smart? I know older generations usually shun technology but something about this stuff is not quite right…
OMG. WTF? SOL. Too old (35)
In other words, bodhi, there IS no way to ensure that information relayed in this manner is any more accurate than the gossip you hear on the street (in some cases it IS the gossip you hear on the street). Anything else would be journalism – that is, when properly practiced. But as I mentioned, this is the future.
Hell, it’s the present!
bodhi,
we’ll have an admin interface where we can remove and block spam…also hope to add a feature for flagging problems…
Well, if you haven’t gotten on the Twitter bandwagon, it’s not surprising that the entire post would sound like gibberish…You should have seen us trying to explain this to the ‘rents this weekend!
Tweet globally, link locally.