2012-11-10: Site Transitions, Cool URIs, URI Slugs, Topsy

Recently I was emailing a friend and wanted to update her about the recent buzz we have enjoyed with Hany SalahEldeen 's TPDL 2012 paper about the loss rate of resources shared over Twitter. I remembered that an article in the MIT Technology Review from the Physics arXiv blog started the whole wave of popular press (e.g., MIT Technology Review , BBC , The Atlantic , Spiegel ). To help convey the amount of social media sharing of these stories, I was sending links to the sites using social media search engine Topsy . Having recently discovered it, Topsy has quickly become one of my favorite sites. It does many things, but the part I enjoy most is the ability to prepend " http://topsy.com/ " to a URI to discover how many times a URI has been shared and who is sharing it. For example: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120927-the-decaying-web becomes: http://topsy.com/http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120927-the-decaying-web and you can see all the tweets th