The Web of Objects: @MyColdRoom

With the web and the real world becoming increasingly intertwined, I found myself wandering about how easy it would be for an appallingly bad programmer like myself to start automatically sending information from the real world to the web. This was the start of one of the most pointless feeds on Twitter: @MyColdRoom.



@MyColdRoom is a Twitter stream of the temperature in my home 'office', automatically generated when my desktop is turned on.

I started with a USB thermometer because:
1) USB thermometers are cheap (£10-£15).
2) USB thermometers come with software to write to text files.
3) My flat is generally bloody freezing and I wanted to know how freezing.
Unfortunately the software that came with TEMPerNTC was useless: 'device error'. Luckily [as always] there was someone out there who had created the appropriate library, and even a simple Visual Basic app. A dozen or so lines of appalling code later (and a shortcut in the right folder) and the application is posting to Twitter whenever the computer is turned on and every time the temperature changes by more than half a degree.

As was quickly noted, it is a rather pointless stream; beyond my mother there are very few people who care about the temperature in my office. However the interest in a web of objects has little to do with single streams in isolation, but with the patterns that emerge from multiple streams, and with information being shared between objects.

It's amazing how simple it is to set up an automatic Twitter stream from the real world. It'll be interesting to see who goes the furthest in automating the most mundane of events from around their home.

Twittering Your Work

As a general rule I always send an update to Twitter whenever I write a blog post or a piece of my work is published online. After all, like most bloggers, a couple of dozen extra visitors can be a significant proportion of my daily traffic. However equally important is the fact that URL shorteners like bit.ly can provide useful information about the impact of my work.

This was emphasised today when I sent an update about my latest online article: Web 2.0 fails to excite today's researchers. I was surprised to find that it was actually already the subject of a number of tweets (admittedly a couple of them were automated).
However without twittering about the article myself I would never have found some of the comments about the piece: with only 140 characters article titles are often ignored or abbreviated, whilst the use of URL shorteners means that few comments will be identifiable through Yahoo's Site Explorer (which has an uncertain future anyway).

So if you want to know what people are saying about your work on Twitter, you really need to talk about your work on Twitter...or at least create the bit.ly links.

Can you question technology without being labelled a Luddite?

Researchers have warned that technology addiction among young people is having a disruptive effect on their learning [via the BBC]. Like so many academic reports, it provides support for the bleeding obvious. If I, a middle-aged cantankerous git who regularly rails against the whole of humanity and desires nothing more than to be left alone on an island with a pile of books, finds myself regularly distracted by the temptations of social media, how much more so the social teenager who wants to reach out to the world.

Yet some people are not happy with such reports:

Twitter gives little room for elaboration, instead opinions become polarized. The report becomes 'pants' and the authors 'Luddites'. There are questions that may be raised about the wording in the study, and the changing nature of 'learning' in a connected world, but Twitter gives little room for such subtleties.

When people talk about technology being neither good nor bad, they are often providing a defence against a technology's misuse. It is important that we don't automatically presume that a technology is good, but continue to question the effect technology is having. Albeit at the cost of being called Luddites.

Twitter is dead, long live RSSCloud

RSS has had a bit of a hard time lately. "RSS is dead, all worship at the alter of Twitter and the real-time web" seems to have been the general sentiment. Over the last couple of months however, people have been working away on RSSCloud: real-time RSS. Yesterday Wordpress gave it its substantial backing.

The difference between having blog posts brought to your attention as soon as they are published, rather than 15-60 minutes after they are published is insubstantial for the majority of blog readers. It will, however, encourage the sort of conversations that take place through microblogging. Whilst microblogging can be a distraction, and 140 characters is rarely enough, it has encouraged conversations, the essence of social media.

With RSSCloud the lines between blogging and microblogging will become increasingly blurred, allowing for more substance with your conversations, and the once great Twitter will merely be a site for those who don't want to host their own real-time data stream. But who would want to give Twitter control of their data when they can keep it for themselves?

Now we just have to wait for the host of exciting applications that will be built on the back of RSSCloud to emerge.

The Distraction of the Real-Time Web: I want to get off

Whilst everyone seems to want to get on the Twitter train of the real-time web these days, I think I want to get off and take my time to blog a bit more.

Since I first went to the Birmingham Social Media Cafe back in January I have thrown myself into Twitter head first: following 124 people, posting 1,403 updates, and even going along to the BrumTwestival! However there is a downside: I blog less.

Those who read my blog may not think of my blogging less as a downside, but blog posts are as much for me as my readers. They are an opportunity for me to put down my thoughts on the web in a fairly coherent manner. The real-time web means that I am more focused on what is happening right now, rather than reflecting on what has happened.

The real-time web has it's place for breaking news and customer engagement, but for some of us a slower blogosphere (or even traditional publishing) is a more suitable place to explore our thoughts. Let's hope the world doesn't go too far exchanging quality for speed.

Social Media Non-Adopters: Engagement v. Exposure

The topic of last Tuesday's Black Country Social Media Cafe was Social Media Non-Adopters. Although the group chose the topic it was quite a quiet event, so we dumped the panel-at-the-front format in favour of a round table discussion. Despite the limited numbers (or possibly because of the limited numbers), it turned out to be a really interesting discussion, covering numerous different topics under the umbrella of 'Social-Media Non-Adopters'; from the protocol of ReTweeting on Twitter to turning your avatar green for Iran![Nb. As I've mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of many social media campaigns].

The area of discussion I found most interesting was that of 'Engagement v. Exposure': When we encourage people to participate in social media are we giving them the support necessary to engage successfully and deal with the problems that come from potentially exposing yourself to communication with some of the world's less desirable elements.

One seemingly innocuous example was that of retweeting, i.e., re-broadcasting a message in Twitter by updating with someone else's message with 'RT' and the original messenger's username at the front. Whilst a RT is generally seen as highlighting the noteworthiness of someone's content, it can also be used to attribute content to a person who never twittered it. Such false-attribution could be anything from adjusting a comment for length, to attributing something embarrassing/slanderous to someone. Most such examples are examples of misinformation rather than disinformation; they are not deliberately trying to give a false impression. And most disinformation is more likely to be in an attempt to drive traffic than to be slanderous, for example:

'RT @stephenfry Probably the most interesting person ever http://bit.ly/LnyqI'

Which is probably more likely to generate traffic than the same quote without the Stephen Fry attribution.

Responses from Twitter show a mixture of those who accept the need for shortening tweets, and those who expect a carbon copy.

The problem of celeb-attribution-spam was the topic of a post at bloggingtips last week, unfortunately they are not all as obvious as this:

Fuck: What have you got to swear about?

The words people combined with 'fuck' last Wednesday on Twitter (i.e., before the world went you-know-who crazy):
I may get this printed as a prompt card for when I get myself into arguments and my middle class background fails to provide me with the required lingo. Just take a selection of words, mix them up, and you're "shit hot like fuckin transformers".

[nb. This is absolutely the last Wordle].

Twittering Jackson

As a follow-up to the last post it seemed appropriate to show what people were actually saying about Michael Jackson. A Wordle of the Twitter comments on Friday 26th June mentioning 'Jackson':

Personally I thought there would have been a few more negative comments, but seemingly most people really don't speak ill of the dead.

That's it...I promise no more Michael Jackson Wordles...although I may be tempted to post some other Wordles from my Twitter corpus.

[N.B. The words 'Michael' and 'Jackson' were removed from the Wordle as they far outweighed all the others.]

Seven Twitter Wordles: #MJ's Death was massive!

Despite a few problems with my programming, I finally got a random sample of the Twitter public timeline: the top 20 feeds from the Twitter public timeline were collected every 30 seconds over seven days. The Twitter updates were then put in Wordle (with the 'common English words' taken out).

Even mundane wordles can be interesting to look at. Over the week you can see just how small the trend words are in comparison to the mundanities of life. Then Michael Jackson died.

[you can click on pictures to enlarge]

Tuesday


Wednesday


Thursday


Friday


Saturday


Sunday


Monday
The Twitter community soon get back on an even keel.

Personally I'm always surprised how little people swear on Twitter.

How much is a Twitter update worth?

A couple of days ago I posted my thousandth Twitter update, and an earth shattering post it was to:

A comment appropriately enough about Twitter, an update that was meaningless to anyone who wasn't already aware of Opera Unite, and representative of the banality of so many of my Twitter comments.

As I discussed when I passed my 100th Twitter comment, the value of Twitter is hard to quantify, especially in monetary terms. Throughout social media, the value of the content we generate is generally indirect rather than direct: Dave Winer has made over $2 million via the stuff he talks about on his blog, whilst I have made $32.02 through the Google Adwords on this blog.

Nonetheless the dream of direct income remains. On the same day as I posted my 1,000th update, I received an email asking me to review the TwitPub marketplace. Basically TwitPub allows you to create a Twitter stream that people pay to get Direct Messages from. Whilst the concept is interesting, the content offered is generally poor. The only feed I came across which had any subscribers (supposedly '2') was a feed for real time trading alerts (at $0.99 a month), and the author's web site link was to a page of adverts.


Twitter works because you follow many people, no single person is indispensable. If you want to get useful trading information you would do better follow numerous people in the field and drawing your own conclusions rather than paying $0.99 for the opinions of one person, however good they are.

So who could make use of TwitPub? Those who already have a loyal fan-base. It provides a simple means of monetising an existing brand. But when everyone else is offering their Twitter streams for free, I don't imagine most fans being loyal for long.

Twitter, like other social media, is most likely to generate income indirectly. For me that has been £100 to write an opinion piece on Twitter in a magazine (JISC Inform 25 - see page 20). I doubt my Twitter-stream would ever generate that sort of income through TwitPub.

Brief Thoughts on Twitter and the Turing Test

Before heading off the allotment to pull weeds this morning I downloaded some podcasts from a Berkeley course on Foundations of American Cyber-Culture. One of the things discussed was the Turing test [summary by Saygin]:

The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal, therefore can't see her counterparts. Her task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human only by asking them questions. If the machine can "fool" the interrogator, it is intelligent.

Whilst I don't generally give a lot of thought to the Turing test, the idea of creating an automatic Twitter account in an attempt to pass the test was immediately appealing:
- Twitter offers a massive/current conversational database to draw on.
- The 140 character limit means people are more likely to be forgiving of answers that are not totally explicit.
- The API means that programming knowledge required to create such a bot (albeit not necessarily a good one) would be relatively simple.

I was not surprised to find therefore, that other people have had the same idea. However, how much of the human created Twitter data could the bot use and still be considered a bot? If the bot merely relayed the questions asked of it to someone else, and responded with their answer it would be considered cheating, but if it just found the answer of someone else who had answered a similar question would it be acceptable?

There are just not enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to in this always-on world.

Mixed Messages: Please comment on my blog!

Something I find increasingly annoying is the tendency to have discussions across different media. Most noticeable in people responding to everything with twitter comments. If I post a blog post people comment on twitter. If I set up a wiki people comment on twitter. As such, discussions are scattered all over the web. However useful and interesting these comments are, they are invisible to most people.

Last week Jon Bounds asked whether the solution was technical or social:
To which my answer is 'social'.

Although technical solutions have worked in the past for distributed conversations, e.g., trackbacks, when the conversation is distributed across different media there is a greater chance of inappropriate comments being tracked automatically as people use the different media differently. There is more chance that a blog post linking to a post is making a useful relevant contribution than a Twitter comment responding to a blog post.

A specific example: two comments from a Finnish colleague regarding my previous blog post:
One comment represents the ephemeral conversational nature of Twitter, whilst the other is more akin to the sort of comment that could be considered a contribution to the blog post. Whilst a technical solution may have been able to identify both comments, it couldn't determine which was a contribution.

There is also an ethical dimension to take into consideration. When someone comments on your blog they are consenting to the contributions being seen on the site. When someone chats with you on Twitter, they don't necessarily expect it to be permanently visible somewhere else.

Unfortunately, I fear the actual solution will have to be technical. This blog post will do little to hold back the tide of Twitter's real-time conversation at the expense of useful long-term contributions. But maybe for this one post people will comment on here rather than on Twitter.

Many a slip twixt the phone and TwitPic?

Yesterday evening I was having a game of chess in the Posada pub in Wolverhampton. As it was the first game I had played in years, I couldn't let the occasion pass without telling the world. I sent this photo to TwitPic using PockeTwit:

However I have just discovered that was not the picture that was published:

Ignoring for the moment my inability to spell, where did this car come from? It is not a picture I have taken or even seen before! Admittedly I was having a pint with the game of chess, but I'm sure I would remember nipping out to take a photo of a rally car. No such picture exists on my phone.

On this occasion it didn't matter; no one even questioned the disparity between the photo and the text. However it could have been a less appropriate photo in a more professional context.

In attempting to keep up in the social media game many of us are relying on technologies that have not yet been robustly tested, and generally recommending these technologies to everyone else as well. Maybe we should make a bit more effort emphasising the fact these technologies should be treated as being in beta...even if they don't say they are.

Why has the BNP failed on Twitter?

As I have mentioned before, the BNP tend to get a far higher proportion of political traffic than they deserve. Whilst this can be attributed to the web providing a forum for the discussion of vile ideas that are unacceptable amongst the general public, it is interesting to note that their success has not carried over to Twitter.

Whilst the Twitter logo is proudly displayed on the BNP homepage, the official BNP Twitter account has only been used to highlight blog posts on their web site, and even this has not happened for a over a month. The result of their Twitter experiments: a more motley bunch of 58 Twitterers it would be difficult to find.

So why has the BNP failed on Twitter? After all, my own criticism of Twitter is the lack of room for reasoned arguments...something the BNP has no time for.

Their failure is mainly because people can see who you follow on Twitter. As I have mentioned before, as someone interested in politics I often follow opinions which are the opposite of mine. The shame of being mistaken for a BNP supporter, however, would be too much even for me (and I follow @MayorOfLondon!!).

There is also an argument that Twitter is just too open. As the BNP constantly strive to promote a professional image they know that their own members are their biggest handicap. If the BNP truly embraced Twitter the facade of respectability that they constantly strive for would soon disappear under the weight of their own members' ignorance.

The BNP thrive in those online places where their members are in the majority; their lack of presence on an open site like Twitter shows what a minority they are.

Twitter Bathos: When 140 characters are just too many!

At the moment all my blog posts seem to be about Twitter and take quotations from the OED...nonetheless...bathos:

2. Rhet. Ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech; anticlimax.

Twitter is the darling of the liberal media these days, and when liberal Clement Freud died yesterday it wasn't surprising that the Guardian chose to inlude a Twitter comment from Stephen Fry. Whilst turning to a Twitter comment may seem a "ludicrous descent", there are those who manage to contain the whole descent within the 140 character limit:
Maybe there should be a campaign to shorten then length of twitterings.

Twittering: A sign of mental illness?

It is difficult not to think of narcissism when thinking about Twitter, after all, it is filled with people answering the question: "What are you doing?". It almost forces us to look at ourselves. According to the OED, one meaning of narcissism is:

2. Psychol. The condition of gaining emotional or erotic gratification from self-contemplation, sometimes regarded as a stage in the normal psychological development of children which may be reverted to in adulthood during mental illness.

Such a definition would seem to equally apply to Twitter. Whilst I'm not aware of anyone who gets 'erotic gratification' from Twitter, I'd think that there are plenty of them joining the majority who gain the emotional gratification. Why else are people there if they are not getting some sort of emotional gratification?

Shouldn't most of the people on Twitter have outgrown the emotional gratification of self-contemplation by now? If we continue to consider narcissism a mental illness shouldn't the government be shutting Twitter down before it sucks more people in? Or is it just too late as Gordon and Obama join us in enjoying picking fluff from our respective navels?

...off to 'Tweet' this...mmmm....emotional gratification of self-contemplation....

Twitter: The Strength of Ephemeral Ties?

Whilst shaving this morning I was listening to the Oxford Internet Institute podcast Facebook: The Strength of Weak Ties, this got me thinking about the nature of Twitter ties. The title, The Strength of Weak Ties, comes from Granovetter's seminal paper of the same name, emphasising the importance of acquaintances as well of friends: close friends often have access to the same networks of people and information, whilst acquaintances have access to a different set of people and information. Although Twitter includes strong and weak ties, it also includes a new sort of relationship: the 'ephemeral' ties.

People are regularly contacted on Twitter by strangers in response to comments they have posted. If I mention that I am doing some programming in Python a stranger may ask what I am programming; if I say I am off to a conference, a stranger may point out that they are going to; if I ask a question, a stranger may answer.

Such connections are weaker than 'weak ties' as there is no permanence to the connection, they are transitory or 'ephemeral'. Whilst such connections are not new on the Internet, has any other technology emphasised the importance of ephemeral ties to such an extent as Twitter?

The Social Web and a Leicester Hotel Owner

People realise that a static web site is not enough to promote their business, but that doesn't help them embrace the social web. There are a multitude of different social media technologies available, and the person needs to select the right ones, learn how to use them, and understand the culture of the different communities using the different technologies. Unfortunately the successful adoption of social media takes time; there are no quick fixes.

I have just spent the last two hours on the phone to a friend discussing how he can make the most of social media to promote his hotel.

The Old Approach
His hotel had a web site http://www.campbellshotel.com/, but it didn't particularly do much for the promotion of the hotel. Whilst there are design issues (don't even think about looking at it with Mozilla), the primary reason the web site failed was that people didn't come across it. If you Googled Campbells Hotel the site would be number one, but looking for a hotel in Leicester? No chance.

The New Approach
Engage with the online community, and let the world see more than a brochure. As such I have encouraged him to revolve his new online presence around a blog (http://campbellshotel.blogspot.com/), incorporating other technologies such as Twitter (@Campbellshotel) where appropriate. Whilst such an approach is natural to those involved in social media, it's a big leap and a big commitment for someone who has little experience of social media.

The Philosophy
Whilst I struggled to explain how the social technologies could help, and that it wasn't about sending Tweets to everyone you came across; his moment of epiphany came with the comment:

"It's like liberal evangelism"

Exactly. It's not about trying to force doctrine down someone's throat, it's about demonstrating it in the way you live your life; it's not about Tweeting adverts at everyone, it's about demonstrating the way you run your business.

Nb. If you have any advice/suggestions for a small business owner trying to make use of social media I'm sure commenting on his blog would be appreciated. http://campbellshotel.blogspot.com/

Twitter Denier or Twitter Realist?

There is an article over at the Times Higher Education site that discusses, albeit briefly, the potential of Twitter in academia. However, as the article didn't claim that Twitter should be interpreted as the second coming of Christ, certain elements were displeased:

Oh dear, yet another very poor article situated firmly at the 'denial' end of the Twitter press coverage spectrum.

As my contribution to the article helped it gain the 'denial' label, I thought I would elaborate on my stance:

For most academics, Twitter will provide a poor return for time invested. There are generally other tools more appropriate for specific tasks.

I don't argue that Twitter is of no use to any academic, merely that for most academics the Twitter-noise would far outweigh the benefits of Twitter.

One comment points out: "One of our PhD students is, at this moment, meeting an interview subject in London thanks to a relationship built through Twitter." PhD students have a lot more time than the average academic, and if they are on Twitter I am sure they will come across useful people and information (as I have myself), but such an example in no way provides the start of an argument for a use of Twitter in academia.

One of the problems of using Twitter in academia is that 140 characters gives very little room for establishing any form of argument, but it's great for detailing what you've had lunch. Whilst one comment responds: "Rather than eschewing quality Twitter, does in fact encourage brevity". Noticeably this is part of a far longer comment, totalling 805 characters.

Whilst Twitter is many things to many people, we should not get carried away into believing that it is a substitute the tools that are currently available.
-News source: If you need to be sure you don't miss an important story then you should be using an RSS reader instead.
-News distributor: If you have to make sure a group gets a message, email is more appropriate. After all, people don't read all the updates of all the people they are following.
-Discussion forum: If you want to engage with complex arguements you need more than 140 characters; get a blog.

If such a position makes me a 'Twitter denier', then I wear the badge with pride. Personally I think that it just makes me a Twitter-realist.

What is the best Twitter Recipe?

One of Boris Johnson's (@MayorOfLondon) twitterings got me wondering, what is the best recipe that can be created in 140 characters or less?

Creating a tasty meal in 140 characters seems far more difficult a task than poems, jokes, or even stories (not that chutney is a tasty meal). However most people go for the easy option and those twitterings labelled #recipe are actually links to other web pages...where's the fun in that?

nb. Just to be 100% clear, highlighting one Twittering of Boris in no way an endorsement of the man or the party. Real men vote Labour.