The Power of Naming+cruft

help edit space_dashboard
Could do something in the sidebar based on _main's left's type, etc.

SHORT

less typing

Once you've seen a few snailmail addresses you can start figuring out how to create them. Web addresses within and across websites should strive for that simplicity. (Okay to require some learning - eg zip codes, two-letter abbrevs.)

If people can construct working URLs *guessing* at some of the URL (command) they want, computers will also be able to. del.icio.us good example of a site that takes this deeply to heart.

2. Past all netty/webby stuff, what do we like?

Messy chunking (English) - symbols, words, terms, sentence fragments / phrases / sentences

Meaning-full - a name that lets us know what we're getting into. Plenty of room for opinion. Name of site? Name of page?

every word is metadata

http:// could have been fewer characters; syntactic space was left to specify things about the kind of connection when we didn't know that the web was going to take over so much.

Twitter's @; shell prompt


HUMAN READABLE

tr.im/7Ytb9a - where'm i going?

Even with a 'real' URL:

hackable

Meaning-full - del.icio.us decided to let individuals work their tag namespace as the like; but those individual pools can also be looked at together by removing the username from the URL, and see together what terminology emerges. They never did much with creating more than a direct democracy with it though. (You could have many processes to help the community converge on terminology, split, etc.)



Namespaces? original wiki, one per wiki.

Other wikis experimented with multiple namespaces, often hanging off the first:
RegularWikiPage/SubPageOfIT

But generally no connection between those namespaces



what metadata in names? Twitter's @

browser addresses as command line commands

REST

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WikiWed examples:





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wiki

Flat namespace; names are atomic

 of some programming patterns

DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork



Wagn

Structured wiki without losing wiki-ness.

Okay, the shortest Wagn contest will never be four lines of code. (SigWik, 4 lines, 222 chars, Perl and Shell.)

Names are non-hierarchically holonic.


"...postscript seems like the perfect language for a wiki."

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Short URLs rock. If you don't have a brief domain and specify an idea simple enough for a good URL API to make pithy: shorten (despite evil)

Often no URL is better. Don't worry. There's still plenty of metadata weaving your tweet into the net - author, time, language, rhythm

( @claudinec tweets about standing desks )

@claudinec Been thinking standing desk on and off for quite a while. Fun! (Explicit metadata! Sorry, Claudia, continuing meta-tweet-thread.)

@: Twitter's mark for explicit metadata - people, or at least accounts. In the Twitterverse, as important as links, the web's currency.

The @ itself is metadata. It commits meaning in relation to the text up to the next space. One character instead of http://'s seven; brevity

@johnabbe and johnabbe are two different kinds of names in the same namespace.




If the metadata is visible


Shells show metadata as a (or often many) characters at the left before you start typing.


unposted

metadata such as Twitter names -- are the dendritic filaments http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY1GevvwaTA that weave the web together