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mei.govonca, Delicious, and Korax

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Someone at the Ontario Ministry of Engergy and Infrastructure has been pumping bookmarks up to delicious.com (a service formerly known as del.icio.us) under the username of mei.govonca. They’re up to 314 as of yesterday. Nothing wrong with this, of course: I doubt that anyone is going to glean information that would otherwise be secret from scanning the list of bookmarks, nearly all of which are tagged “stakeholder” in addition to whatever other labels they may have. Still, it feels odd to find a government ministry making use of a service outside of the firewall like this.

It might be handy, however: most or all of Ontario’s municipalities are bookmarked here (@”municipalities”). And some or all of mei.govonca’s bookmarks have wound up in Favthumbs, another offsite service, which “visualizes” your delicious.com bookmarks by capturing thumbnails of websites’ main pages, so now you can look before you leap.

What is a bit curious is that the URLs Ontario uses seem to be undergoing change. http://gov.on.ca/mei resolves to http://www.mei.gov.on.ca.wsd6.korax.net/. The presumably newer URL, http://ontario.ca/mei gets you redirected to the same ultimate URL. Korax, it turns out, is a web hosting service; so it would appear that the Ministry is outsourcing its server requirements for at least the time being. Crummy government URL, though. But not quite as crummy as what happens when you go to the government’s main page (http://www.gov.on.ca) and choose English. The URL that results is hardly suitable for bookmarking anywhere, let alone on delicious.com: http://www.gov.on.ca/ont/portal/!ut/p/.cmd/cs/.ce/7_0_A/.s/7_0_24P/_s.7_0_A/7_0_24P/_l/en?docid=EC002001

Comments

  1. Pulat Yunusov
    August 12th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    Thank you for bringing up the URL hygiene issue. Sometimes I wish Osgoode URLs were ten times shorter and more reflective of content. (I am an Osgoode student.)

  2. Omar Ha-Redeye
    August 13th, 2008 at 9:26 am

    (He’s also an Osgoode student at our site).

    I’ve noticed over the past year that url hygeine services are increasingly popular. I have one added to my browser for quick copy, convert and pastes.

    However, these services have had their outage problems, potentially affecting the 1.5 billion hits/month for their service alone. Dependency could potentially affect web traffic that relies on stable links.