Between maps.google.com, digg.com, amazon.com, youtube.com and ebay.com, I send a minimum of 15-30 links a week via email, IM or SMS. The reasons are as varied as the sites themselves … directions, product comparisons, market research. You name it, I have a good reason for forwarding URLs to other people. And, I am sure that I am not the only one.

One thing remains consistent among each message I send, I invariably use tinyurl.com to compress these unwieldy URLs into something far more manageable for both the delivery vehicle (email is notorious for mangling long URLs) and the intended audience (many folks are not web-savvy enough to reconstitute mangled URLs on their own). I love tinyurl.com … it is a brilliant service. But, why aren’t companies baking this into their online applications as a native service?

Technically, it cannot be that complex. It is essentially a redirection service. WordPress, Drupal and darn near every other Open Source CMS has some sort of short-URL/human-language-URL method either baked in or available as a plug-in/module. Is it a licensing issue? If so, acquire tinyurl.com or license the name/engine from them. If not, replicate and improve on the idea.

This is low-hanging fruit. Pick it already!

The ocean sunfish mola mola is the largest bony fish in the world. It is a unique pelagic fish, and specimens of ocean sunfish have been observed up to 3.3 m (11 ft in) length and weighing up to 2,300 kg (5,100 lb.)

Fogonazos: The giant ocean sunfish

Check out this very cool article on the Mola Mola or Ocean Sunfish.

Congratulations to friend and former Zoomtown colleague Dave “The Fuzzy Llama” Coleman and his wife Jessie. They just welcomed their firstborn son, Owen Maxwell, into the world. And, courtesy of Zoon, the little ankle-biter is well-dressed in a Trogdor onesie. All together now …. “Awwwwwwww!“.

Things just keep getting worse for Carlos Mencia. A San Diego morning show had him on and tried to offer an olive branch to get Mencia and Joe Rogan to make peace. However, during the course of an interview, Mencia drops a bit about “Sterotype Olympics”, which apparently two of the DJs knew had been lifted from other DJs in Florida. They did not call Mencia on it. Instead, they just let him dig a deeper hole. When the interview was over, they busted him on-air. Listen for yourself.

Why should you take this seriously? Well, consider the fact that these DJs stand to lose their jobs if they are lying. I am sure they do not have Mencia’s bank acount to fall back on. With that in mind, they had to feel pretty damn certain they were right before entering the fray so publicly. DJ Mikey went so far as to ban Mencia from the show. With Rogan’s claims now independently corroborated, I’d expect this thing to start snowballing.

To be fair, Carlos calls back in to clarify the issue. I don’t know. The whole deal still smells like rotten fish. Can you say “spin control”?

For the most part, I agree with Mikey’s perspective on Mencia. Carlos sems like a likeable, decent guy who dug a hole so deep hat he has no idea how to get out of it. He took a short-cut and cannot find his way home. What should Mencia do now? Easy. Come clean.

Mencia needs to admit the issue and take the very likely hit of losing his show. He is clearly a talented guy. If he comes clean, asks forgiveness and starts working at it from the ground up aain, he has a chance. His fan base is rabidly loyal, so he could turn this into a lon-term positive. But, if he clings to his cheating past, Mencia will be come a punchline in American culture, much the way Milli-Vanilli has.

Carlos, you know its true.

PS: Thanks to nike182 for the original DIGG.

Sent to me by my buddy John, this video reminds me of someone. My wife? Well, at least until the violence and profanity breaks out towards the end. If you like this, you may want to check out Muffins and other offerings from A Liam Show.

As you can tell, we’ve undergone a major overhaul this weekend. While I love the Hemingway Theme, it has issues with Wordpress 2.1. A completely original theme is in the works, but won’t be ready for a while. So, we’ve moved to a heavily modified version of the Enlightenment theme from StyleShout and Enblogopedia.

Along with an overhauled look, I’ve added the following modules to our arsenal.

• Sociable: A great set of social bookmarking links/buttons. You’ll see them at the bottom of every post now.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags: WP 2.1 really hates the embed tag. Youtube, Google video, it does not matter, WP 2.1 mangles embed code at every turn. That is where this little plugin comes in really handy.
• Draft Control: A great little tool for managing the stacks and stacks of draft posts that we seem to accumulate. This feature should really be added to the WP Core.
• WP_Amazon 2.0b: A long-awaited updated to this module. Though in Beta, the UI is really strong and makes finding and including Amazon assets extremely easy. There are some bugs, but it looks very promising.
• WP Contact Form 2.0: A great improvement over past iterations of this tool.
• Mint 2.0: Not a Wordpress Plug-in, but it is the latest and greatest blog-metrics tool around. It is not free, but it inexpensive and well worth the investment.

Additionally, we are playing around with a bunch of new Wordpress Widgets. More on that as we bring some online.

Finally, I am working with Geeeek to enable moblogging here. The process is a little arcane, but we’ll soldier through until we get it right. I have a new Samsung Blackjack that, like Mark Cuban and Katherine Heigl, I am itching to use.