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Like that midterm physics test that you didn’t have time to study for, what you really want is a cheat sheet. So, here’s my cheat sheet to you for what to use for the set of values you’ll be asked for:
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Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion system, making it easy to setup, browse, and track Subversion. Beanstalk has built-in integration with your favorite tools such as Basecamp, FogBugz, Campfire and more.
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This presentation puts forward ‘movement’ as a metaphor for the Web, introduces the motivations flowchart design process, and demonstrates Snap, a way of syndicating interactions from websites to the desktop.
Archive for March 2008
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This article will cover how to install Rails on Debian and how to configure it to work with Apache and a relational database of your choice.
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Key to decoding US-style METAR reports, with notes on how they differ to ISO standards
Although the main use of Twitter is for real people to say what they’re up to “right now“, it was quickly apparent to your average hacker that it’s just as useful for any service or device that changes state on a regular basis. Hence Tom and Tom making Tower Bridge Twitter, so that the bridge announces every time it raises and lowers.
Talking with Russell Davies a few weeks ago, he mentioned the Shipping Forecast – which immediately struck me as something that would be fun (although not necessarily useful) to get Twittering.
The Shipping Forecast is one of those uniquely British institutions – four times a day, the Met Office produces a forecast for the seas around the British Isles which is then broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Being brought up on the coast of the Irish Sea by Radio 4-listening parents, it was part of my life from an early age – and because it’s issued in a standard format, it’s almost poetic. Entire generations of Brits have grown up with phrases like “Southwest, backing southeast for a time, 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8″ becoming earworms. Hearing or reading it still brings back memories of a Roberts radio first thing in the morning, after Farming Today but before the Today programme.
Getting it to Twitter, though, presents one or two challenges. The first is getting hold of the source data – the Met Office being one of a number of British institutions that are forced by the grasping UK Government to be profit-generating, they want about £600 a year for the privilege of accessing a clean XML feed of the data. And although the forecast is published online by both the BBC and the Met Office, the quality of the HTML leaves a lot to be desired, at least from the point of view of scraping it.
In the case of the BBC, that’s because it’s presented primarily to be human-readable – in the case of the Met Office, it’s because they’re one of many brain-dead British public bodies that are Microsoft monocultures, and know or care nothing about standards and being good online citizens. Nor for that matter would they know good online design if they tripped over it. But that’s a rant for another day.
Back to Twittering. It’s a Ruby script that gets kicked off by a cron job four times a day, and uses the marvelous Hpricot gem to grab the appropriate page from the Met Office. Then the extraneous junk HTML is thrown away to leave just the table cell containing the forecast itself, which gets chopped up into a number of array elements by splitting it at the emboldened headings.
At this point the second problem arises – because the Forecast is intended to be read aloud, it’s fairly verbose. Fitting it into 140 characters is something of a problem. To get round this, the individual array elements get the snot parsed out of them, chopping down the character count by searching-and-replacing the content with abbreviations. It doesn’t make for pleasant-looking tweets, although if you’re familiar with the overall syntax and cadences of the verbal Forecast it’s actually surprisingly readable. Once squished down, each element is then tweeted out with the Twitter4R gem.
Originally I was going to set up a Twitter account for each forecast area, but that was a pain to set up (there’s lots of them) and awkward because area names like “Viking” had already been taken. So in the end I’ve compromised by pushing all the area forecasts out to the one Shippingcast account.
There’s room for improvement – cleaning up the abbreviations by using regular expressions would be one, or replacing obscure abbreviations with Unicode symbols being another. (There’s a key for the abbreviations I’ve used here) And it’s clearly not a particularly useful thing to be Twittering in the first place.
However, it’s made me realise just how useful it could be for public bodies to make their data available in structured, machine-readable form – and not to charge ridiculous amounts of money for it. The chances of the Met Office coming up with the idea of Twittering the Shipping forecast internally is next to nil – so this kind of “innovation” takes place externally. (I’m using innovation loosely here, but there are far more interesting and useful things that can be done with public data – anything that MySociety have done, for example). Making the information available would be trivial, if only there was the will to do it – and the potential benefits could be huge.
Richard Stacey of the Social Media revolution (in 15 minutes per week) points to a sudden jump in the number of his Twitter followers and wonders if that’s start of Hugh’s Law coming into play.
I’m not sure that’s the case. Hugh’s Law certainly applies to a lot of social networks – I more-or-less gave up on Facebook a while ago because the signal-to-noise ratio fell below acceptable levels amidst the welter of zombie biting and groups campaigning for Richard Hammond to plait his nasal hair (OK, that last one might be a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one).
But the key point about Twitter is that the follower/following mechanism gives a very clear and unambiguous signal about a potential follower’s intentions. If their ratio of following to followers is canted to following, it implies that they’re either a bot or they’re trophy hunters. And in either case, the solution is a simple ‘block’ action, which leaves you largely immune from their attempts at connection.
Technorati Tags: twitter
It sounds slightly heretical given what I do for a living, but I’ve never really fallen in love with social media like Facebook in the way that I’m apparently supposed to. The closest I’ve come to this is Twitter, which I do use, although I’d be hard-pressed to describe exactly why.
One of the terms used to describe Twitter was coined (as far as I know) by Leisa Reichelt, who calls it “ambient intimacy” (a long quote, but worth citing in full):
“Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.
Who cares? Who wants this level of detail? Isn’t this all just annoying noise? There are certainly many people who think this, but they tend to be not so noisy themselves. It seems to me that there are lots of people for who being social is very much a ‘real life’ activity and technology is about getting stuff done.
There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.
Knowing these details creates intimacy. (It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catchup with these people in real life!) It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch.”
This is a useful description, but it doesn’t quite get it for me – Twitter is actually more than just ambient intimacy. It helps to contrast it with blogs: which are, fundamentally, a broadcast medium. Now I realise that this is a statement that’s probably going to get me blackballed from the Social Media Brotherhood, but bear with me – while I know that “blogs are conversations” is the conventional wisdom, experience suggests that actually blogs are POTENTIAL conversations.
Having the facility to comment does not a conversation make. And in some circumstances, having the facility to comment actually DECREASES the signal-to-noise ratio, as anyone who’s spent any time reading the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site will know. It’s not so much conversations, as a thousand opinionated drunks in a bar all shouting over each other.
So why is Twitter different?
Firstly, there’s the 140 character limit. Expressing yourself in a smaller space is far more difficult that doing so when space is unlimited (which is why this post is three screens long) . The limitation emphasises the NOW of the “what are you doing right now” that is Twitter.
Then, there’s the follower / following function. Unlike blogs, I can see exactly who is reading my tweets. And not only that, but I have the option to follow them back – which together with the ‘@’ function means that the Twittersphere (appalling term, I know) seems like a bar with a number of people of varying states of inebriation having more or less coherent conversations. Some take this to the extreme, twittering bowel movements, but in general the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty high.
And overlaying the follower / following, I have the option to block potential followers. The result of this is a near-total lack of trolls and spammers – it’s incredibly easy to make a quick judgement on someone’s worth as a follower by looking at their following / followers ratio. All of the Twitter spambots have without exception had a massive inbalance in the relative numbers.
The end result is reciprocateable ambient intimacy – I can follow someone, they can follow me, but we both have complete control over the relationship. Which is a far closer analogue to real-life relationships that anything that’s come before.
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Clients are placing more emphasis on mastering social media but find their agencies ill equipped to help them succeed in that space, according to a new survey.
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Here’s what a number of successful bloggers with successful nonblogging careers say are the ways to think about getting into the business of blogging.
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“Desktop computers will gradually disappear, replaced by mobile devices, including laptops, that take on traditional office capabilities,” reads a summation in a company press release.
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Paul and I got together and decided to make our Arduino board talk to Flash. The idea was that we would turn the knob on a potentiometer on the Arduino board to adjust the height of virtual flames in Flash.
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Unfortunately, Polaroid has news: after next year, there won’t be any more Polaroid film.
Since our beloved Polaroid camera only has a year to live, we’ve decided to make it the Best Year Ever.
Let’s shake it!
