Twitter

A few bits and pieces that have crossed my browser in the past couple of weeks (though mostly sifted through yesterday). The NoSQL (or LessSQL) movement has garnered a lot of attention over the past few months, but numerous people have pointed out that MySQL can be adapted to cover many of the most common use-cases. Flickr’s Kellan kicked off a series of posts on that topic with Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr and Richard Crowley responded with OpenDNS MySQL abuses. On the other side of the coin, Luke Melia has a write-up of how he uses Redis to build a “who’s online now list” and Sean Cribbs’ (fairly convincing) Why Riak should power your next Rails app is worth a read even if you’re not a ruby developer. ...

I really liked this story about the NPRbackstory twitter account. The panel at SxSW about newspaper APIs (which NPR was tagged onto) was one of the highlights, filled with promise, and it’s good to hear about a tangible (albeit experimental) use of one of those APIs to begin to contextualise breaking news. All too often we lack the memory or the back-knowledge to appropriately interpret the stories that dominate the news (I was a little surprised and disappointed that the BBC stories about Khamnei’s comments on Britain didn’t note that “blame the British” is a common off-hand comment in Iran). News organisations often have vast resources that could help us develop some of that back-knowledge but they’re under-utilised. It’s rarely helpfully presented by web-based news outlets, but for a radio station it’s particularly hard to get that out. Twitter provides a nice way of passing on some tidbits and it’s great that NPR are using it for more than driving traffic to their very latest content. ...

The past two weeks haven’t really left time to compile my selected links, though there have been many. A few days at SxSWi (on which more, later) followed by travelling with the family and the inevitable work backlog moved blogging way down the priority list. So here’s a mammoth selection to get me caught up. Particularly interesting has been the discussion around the future of newspapers (represented here by Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Russell Davies), which seem to have finally pushed beyond “how t ind a good business model for papers” to looking at where the real value for society lies and how we can preserve and extend that in a changing landscape. ...

Big themes this week have mostly revolved around twitter, facebook, and openness. Some have focussed on facebook redesigning to embrace a more twitter-like “web of flow” approach, and others on the fact that they’re jumping on various open web bandwagons. It’s been interesting to see some tie in with the government transparency thinking going around, as particularly noted by Chris Messina on FactoryCity. Meanwhile there are quite a few nice new tools emerging, and I really must try heroku one of these days. ...

It’s always a little embarassing to realise that two or more consecutive blog postings are nothing more than a collection of links, but that’s the way it is at the moment. Busy-ness, illness and distractedness have all kept me from the blog this week. There aren’t any clear themes in this week’s links either. Chatter around OAuth has continued apace, as have musings about fuzziness, location, time, and the web (represented well by Matt Jones’ piece), but mostly this is the (to be) usual random assortment that have spent more than a few seconds open in my newsreader or web browser ...

For quite a while I used del.icio.us to post summaries of interesting links here on an almost daily basis. After a while I got a little tired of the aesthetics of that: the clunky titles, the way it inserted tags, the fact that sometimes there was just one link and sometimes many. And I realised that for the quick/transient linking twitter works better. So for now I’m going to try and post a digest every week or so, selecting the highlights. If you really want regular updates on what I’m keeping from what I’m reading, you can always follow me on delicious. ...

A few months back—while we were discussing the number of talking objects appearing on twitter— Jenny pointed out to me that all Heathrow airport arrivals and departures data is online. That set my mind racing, as if you know all the flights leaving that currently controversial airport, there are all manner of things you could begin to do. Working out miles travelled and carbon emitted, spotting delays, and so on. But at the time it all came down to a quick note in Things to some day set aside time to explore. ...

Yesterday, responding to a post Steve wrote on our Social Media efforts at Greenbelt I noted that it’s important to remember that this wasn’t the first year we’d worked with social media at the festival. Flickr has been our most prominent outlet, with the festival’s tags being some of the most visible in the week following the festival for several years now. But as I’ve written about here in the past (from a fairly techie perspective), we’ve made efforts to aggregate content from multiple blogs, social bookmarking services, and the like a few times previously. So what was different this year? ...

For this year’s Greenbelt a group of us decided it was time to beef up the festival’s ‘social media’ output. With approval from the powers-that-be, the help of some phones from Nokia and the energy that comes from a festival’s buzz, we built up a twitter community, streamed plenty of content live to qik, and enjoyed the fact that the festival’s flickr presence now has a momentum all its own (the official photos had over 100,000 views in the past week and there are over 3600 photos tagged greenbelt2008 as I write this). ...

I was pleased a few months back to see Calvin College sign up for twiter. A small college in the Michigan town where I lived for three years up until last summer, the college is my wife’s former employer, a previous client of mine, and a place that dominated quite a bit of our social life in Grand Rapids. Twitter seemed a simple way to keep up with what was going on without much effort. But within a couple of months I stopped following them, partly out of frustration with some recent political developments on the campus but primarily because their twitter presence felt far too much like an anonymous broadcast, and close to an abuse of the medium. ...