Missed Tweets Through News.me

I've never really been a twitter nut.  There are already enough sources of distraction for me, I don't need to add another source.  It just seemed really noisy.

However, people have been saying and linking to important things on twitter for a while now.  I'm just not discerning enough and don't have enough time to filter the firehose in a useful way.

The most helpful summary of interesting news I skim regularly is the weekly LinkedIn emails.  In fact, I think it may have been through a link chain from one of those emails that I stumbled on unionfs, as reported in the last post.  If I could have the same thing for twitter, but personalized to the people I follow, that would be really helpful!

Ironically, as part of the effort to make this blog more stuble-upon-able, I was looking for a way to auto-post on twitter and facebook whenever I post on this blog, and I found twitterfeed.com, which does all of that and more.  And it's easy to set up.

After setting that up this morning, I wondered: "What is the company behind twitterfeed.com?", and found betaworks.  They run some very interesting sites/companies, some of which I knew about (bit.ly), some of which were new to me (findings.com, chartbeat.com).  The interesting one for me right now was another site called news.me.

Turns out that news.me is just the kind of thing that has the chance of making twitter useful to me.  If things go well, you'll probably hear more about it.

Link to Paper

Dear Lazyweb,

I've wanted to link to pages of books, or at least down to the chapter, or subhead.

Take, for example, the following blog post:

http://deliberate-thinking.blogspot.com/2010/04/reality-quotient.html

In that post, I refer to printed, copyrighted content by URL, but with lame google books URLs that have nothing to do with the structure of the book, and that border on the potentially problematic situation traditionally called "deep linking".

Look for the following text in the blog post:

• text: Total Useful Mental Discriminations
• and link: http://books.google.com/books?id=563gvssRPvkC&lpg=PR1&dq=slack&pg=PA72#v=onepage
• text: capable people are credible
• and link: http://books.google.com/books?id=31Qe_e61Y10C&lpg=PP1&ots=bBbef5O2a3&dq=speed%20of%20trust&pg=PA92#v=onepage

Do you know of any way that I can manage a list of URLs per book that are just markers for the sections within that book?

Not page linking, but sections as defined by the work itself.  No content extraction except perhaps to put the subhead text in the URL itself (either in English, or in the work's native language, or both).  Now there would be a global permalink for a given chunk of a work.

So, as an example of what I'm shooting for, the following author has already done this with his book:

http://book.personalmba.com/bootstrapping/  (full of promotional material)

Even though this page is full of promotional material, the link itself has value, because now I can refer to that small section of the book and talk about my own ideas, relative to that section.

And I can do so in a web-friendly way, with a meaningful URL.

The closest think I found was OpenLibrary itself with canonical URLs to Works and Editions.  But has anyone done "link to paper" in a general sense?

Sincerely,
John...

Links to New FamilySearch persons

Persons are referred to by id, but there is no support for hyperlinking to a certain person's page.

So I built an app that writes links to the current New FamilySearch website. Now persons can be linked to.

Here is a link to Samuel A. Shine.