List Making Meets Redirection

My Belltown blogging and photography friend, Bruce Moore, passed along this hot tip of a new service that integrates the virtues and vices of redirection (ala PURLs and TinyURLs) with list making.

Submit a list of URLs and it creates a short URL that takes the client to a page with the list of the links (including an option to open them all).

Good for twittering a collection of links or sharing or 'naming' a list of web-addressable resources.

There is apparently a Firefox extension that will create a list of your open tabs, and an API (at this time, according to the website, the twitter bot is still in development).

Spam-redirects are not a problem (at least an automatic problem), as you are redirected to a list of links, rather than to the links themselves (though, that open all links button could bite).

One hears more and more about personal online identity management.  Interesting possibilities with this approach. The collection of links representing my current web presence:

http://linkbun.ch/0nw

No mention of persistence... how could there be?  I wouldn't bundle up all your URLs behind this service just yet. In any case, the idea is intriguing and potentially useful. I wonder if Eric Miller is listening....
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A gull at Torquay Beach, south of Melbourne (2008-02)

Comments

[eric miller]

you bet i'm listening ;-)

I think this is a very cool idea. We've been prototyping something we call 'Active PURLs' which are PURLs with associated or embedded services. Examples of these might be notification to publishers of problems with target URLs (basically a link-checker for PURLs), notification to readers of updates to target PURLs (a "what's new" feed for PURLs), etc.

More specifically the architecture allows for an open marketplace to grow around such services. The example you've identified strikes me as a very interesting and useful services that could easily be implemented.

We're busy finalizing and unit testing the core PURL codebase so the Active PURL implementation is only preliminary. But even in its early stage I'm finding this an extremely useful extension.

It's not a new idea (i can recall similar PURL discussions [1] in the past), but starting to see it in action is quite a different thing ;-)

[1] http://www.ifla.org/documents/libraries/cataloging/metadata/urn1.txt

[stu]

The gull is steadier on one leg than my cut and paste skills were... I *think* i got it corrected... my bad, not linkbun.ch's

I had hoped to sneak my edits in before you got hold of it Bruce... somehow I knew you'd be quicker afoot.

thanks for your loyal reading (and comments).
s

[Bruce]

Update: moments later it appears to be working. This is all so wonderful, and odd.

[Bruce]

While your magnificent gull only needs one leg to stand on, it appears the bun.ched url is a bit wobbly, and certainly not persistent.

A 404 means, essentially, your address doesn't have a leg to stand on.

Bummer. Or maybe just a cut-an-paste probl.em - but I like the concept.