Hat tip to Network-Centric Advocacy, where you’ll also find some decent ideas for improving the widget.

My complaint about it? These numbers don’t mean a thing to me. Sure, they’re large, but absent any context, some part of me wonders “Uh, is that a lot?” Show me the extent of the oil plume, show me the degree of damage, and I get it.

We missed this last week when ReadWriteWeb reported it, but maybe you did, too. So here’s something we’ve just discovered.

A small but very handy change at Twitter‘s search engine, search.twitter.com, means it now peeks inside the expanded versions of web addresses shortened using services like bit.ly and TinyURL.

The implications for you? Here are two:

• Searching using your site’s domain as a keyword (e.g. “socialsignal.com”) will now turn up tweets that linked to you but used a shortened URL. In the past, you had to rely on services like BackTweets or Ubervu to find shortened links to your site; otherwise, they’d be hidden behind a short, random series of characters.
• You’ll now also find links that have keywords embedded in the address – which means it’s now even more useful for content-management systems to generate SEO-friendly (and human-readable) URLs.

Handy, no?

Long live face-to-face: one of the great things about conferences is reconnecting with old friends. I ran into Ian Capstick, a pal from my election campaigning days, at Northern Voice earlier this month.

He pulled me aside and shot a quick video for his company’s blog, MediaStyle. We covered a lot of territory, much of it involving transparency and openness, in particular our Open SoSi project. Have a gander:

Interview with Rob Cottingham from Ian Capstick on Vimeo.

And by all means start reading Ian’s blog. He has some terrific insights and gives you a valuable look inside his many projects.

I don’t usually comment on current events in Noise to Signal, but I’m finding I can’t ignore the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

We can’t treat the world as though it’s simple enough for a Missing Manual… or even an O’Reilly In a Nutshell book. (Imagine having to pick just the one woodcut animal for the cover.) But we insist on doing just that… and assuming that the documentation, if it existed, would align neatly and conveniently with whatever our economic interests happened to be at the moment.

If I sound gloomy, I am. Reports that oil from the spill (my friend James Glave suggests “hemorrhage” is more accurate) has now entered the Loop Current are pretty alarming. And while I’m still pulling for BP to cap this thing, and for the damage to fall well short of a worst-case scenario, I have to wonder how many other Deepwater Horizons are out there – in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere – waiting to happen.

While conservatives in the U.S. have tried to label this catastrophe “Obama’s Katrina”, whereas the contrast between Bush’s callous and detached response to that catastrophe and the Obama administration’s engagement with this one couldn’t be more stark, there is one crucial parallel.

The Gulf of Mexico taught us with Hurricane Katrina that government has a critical responsibility to invest in infrastructure – and that failing to meet that responsibility results in massive devastation, death and suffering. This disaster teaches us that government has a critical responsibility to regulate for public safety and environmental protection – and that failing to meet that responsibility can unleash untold ecological and economic impact.

(Okay, some cleverpants out there is going to say, No, it’s to yourself. Or to your inner voice. Or to your calling. Wonderful. For all of you, just replace “first duty” with “second duty” – or third, fourth, fifth or eleventh, depending on how clever you’re being.)

This weekend, in the run-up to publishing my newest cartoon on ReadWriteWeb – about Facebook and privacy (also posted on the N2S site) – I posted this tweet:

Which I figured would serve most of the people reading it well. They probably know that iconic cartoon as the “New Yorker Internet dogs cartoon”.

But as cartoonist Liza Donnelly pointed out,

I cringed a little as I read that, realizing that I’d basically assigned credit for one of the defining cartoons of the networked era to the magazine that published it, and not to the cartoonist who conceived, wrote and drew it. Good on the New Yorker for recognizing a great cartoon – but it was Peter Steiner’s creation, not theirs.

Yet if I’d used his name instead of the New Yorker’s, I’m guessing a lot fewer people would have known what I was talking about. The best solution would be to use both, of course… but that’s not always possible on Twitter, where you’re aiming not only to come in under the 140-character limit, but leave room for your user name so people can retweet you, and a little extra in case they’d like to add their two cents.

So, in sum: I instinctively credited the publication, not the cartoonist, because I wanted to serve my readers. But I ran afoul of professional courtesy, respect for creators and, let’s be honest, the golden rule: I’d be miffed to see my cartoon become identified with the place that published it, and not with me.

Which may actually be what it ultimately comes down to: how would I like to be treated – or tweeted – in someone else’s place?

Any thoughts, blogiverse?