Roundtables

August 28, 2009 —

One of the things that keeps me from attending many conferences is the inherent lack of participation. Assuming you’re not speaking, you have very little control over the experience. You get what the event organizer says you get.

Sure, you probably get to raise your hand in answer to the “how many people here have an iPhone?” question. And, maybe you stand in line to ask one of the 3 or 4 brilliant questions at the end of each presentation. But, you probably just sketch in your free moleskin, drink your bad Earl Grey tea, and thumb type the twitter-worthy stuff.

At the end of the day, you head to your hotel room and call your significant other and check twitter to see where the people you’ve heard of are heading and when. Then you grab some individually-wrapped food and head to the lobby hoping to catch up with the group before they disappear for the three-hour speaker dinner.

Skip ahead a few hours and you’re at the after party, buying Dimon a drink and yelling at beep to tell him how great his slides were. Maybe the dj cools it a bit and you can hear people talk, but probably not. So, unless you had a friend invite you into the speakers-only thing, you’re taking in the entire event much like you’d take in a webinar. I mean, a webinar wouldn’t let you see Jeff Croft on the dance floor, but you’d have similar influence over the event.

I realize there’s no way to read this and not think I’m complaining, so I’ll say this: go to An Event Apart in December. It really is a brilliant conference, and this one’s in my favorite city. The point I’m trying to make, though, is that I wish there were more options. I wish there were roundtables. Like take the three-hour speaker dinner and screw the rest of the conference.

I guess what I’m trying to say is Vegas has some really good deals lately. That’s all.

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Shorter URLs

August 10, 2009 —

I’m not going to lie to you and tell you I worry about obfuscated links in my tweets. I include the actual, un-shortened URL when I can and don’t worry about it much when I can’t. Query strings and stuffed permalinks will get most links auto-shortened anyway — twitter shortens anything longer than 30 characters regardless of preference.

I’d probably care more if I dropped links to my blogging into twitter. The idea of pushing masked links to my own thing just strikes me as dirty. Like self-seeding Reddit. (No offense to those of you who do that — your posts are probably more awesome than mine) Or rickrolling pals. But, without the humor.

Regardless of my personal use, though, I think it’s time we get our permalinks shorter than 30 characters. We could even keep the out-of-control keyword stuffing in place for search engine indexing and just 301 the short ones to the longer ones. In other words, this post could be http://aaronmentele.com/p/793 and everyone on twitter would know if I was link spamming my own stuff. Google, though, would see it at http://aaronmentele.com/2009/07/17/shorter-urls/ and give me a sooper rank on the phrase.

We could all push whatever we wanted and not feel dirty. Our clients could link to themselves and reinforce their TLDs without loosing search traffic. Nobody would be left guessing.

It took two lines in the .htaccess file to do it here and on the EP site.

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^p/([0-9]+)/?$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/?p=$1 [R=301,L]

I’m sure there are WordPress plugins available to do the same thing if you hate htaccess files, but you get the general idea. Most CMS apps have rewrites in place, and there’s no reason you can’t create a second rule.

I’d love to hear if anyone has a better idea. But you don’t have to look far to see there are other reasons to get URL management figured out. Right?

UPDATE: I see now that Zeldman has a recent post on the topic. At quick glance, the plugin he’s using seems to require manual set up for each link, and that’s probably more additional effort than I’m willing to give my modest posts. Also, I realize this whole idea isn’t new idea or unique. I’m sure smarter people than me have said these things long ago. And, finally, thanks to Michael for straightening me out on the rewrite above. That was embarrassing.

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