Mike’s Digital Laboratory

Paul’s plea for help integrating Twitter with Wordpress has got my hacker juices flowing again and I spent some time today fiddling with this integration challenge. It is the end of the day and I have something working here.  The first thing to sort out was what are our goals.   So first noodling around different questions like  “why tweet in the first place?” and “if your are tweeting your blog post is the tweet the same as the title of the post?” and so on. My answer, simple; I’ve decided to start using status updates on social networks (tweets) in ways that might help others when I find something of potential value. And I came to the conclusion by the way that a tweet about a blog post isn’t or shouldn’t necessarily be the same as the title of the post.  One is the title the other is a teaser (the tweet) to get someone to the post.

I think the most interesting outcome for me was the realization that the global tweet stream might actually have some hidden potential value for the semantic web.  what I once thought was a fairly useless communal stream of consciousness, the endless stream of twitter messages about silly things and foolishness, might actually contain hidden semantic gems.

It turns out there is a common subset of twitter messages that follow the same pattern of semantic metadata.  For example many messages are commonly in the form of;  “Mike Axelrod is going to the Rochester Museum and Science center today http://www.rmsc.org/“  This twitter message actually contains some fairly decent semantic data.  It’s in a nice concise triple form (subject, predicate object) it’s just not quite consumable by machines, yet (that is to say, not in the RDF, OWL)  Hint, Hint  folks, we could have something interesting here.  As it stands if we just filter for all the tweets that have URLS we might have some interesting semantic data to mine.  Tweets are so short that if they do contain an url typically it will be just one.  This guarantees us a semantic triple every time. The sender, the comment and the url.

Ok on to the second part of this post. So how do I actually fit this whole tweeting, twittering foolishness into my lifestyle?  Well here’s what I came up with so far.  First of all  I only want one point of entry for my tweets.  One client, one ping to rule them all. So naturally I’m gravitating to ping.fm.  This tool allows me to route a single status update  (tweet) to all the social networks I use.  This would be LinkedIn, Facebook, and (it seems) twitter now.   Next I want a better client experince than what a web page can offer.  It’s just not conducive to the way I work to have to navigate to an url when I want to post an update. additionally some of the clients have a very concise format and play well on my desktop.   And finally I want control over where tweets go.  Sometimes to linkedIn, sometimes to Facebook, sometimes to both and sometimes to my Wordpress blog.  So ping.fm gives me this fine grained behavior with one exception. To route tweets to my wordpress blog I had to install the ping.fm wordpress plugin, which I’m happy to say works like a charm. (<–look over there in my sidebar and you’ll see it.)

Now there is only one missing piece of the puzzle. Of all the front ends to ping.fm I tried. None of them had all the features I wanted.  Twitterific is wonderfully simple but only works with Twitter, Tweetdeck works well but only gives me the choice to send to Twitter or Facebook.  Twhirl is getting much closer to what I need and has almost everything except one critical feature. The ability to easily pick which ping.fm group I wan to send to. The last one I tried today does this! It’s called MePing but alas it does almost nothing else, compared to the others I tried. (It’s very beta) Well I’m not giving up and I’m sure very quickly one of these clients will fit my full set of requests. I have the feeling we are in a horse race right now and if you are reading this post 6 months from now many of the above mentioned clients will have everything you need (or will have dropped out of the market.)

There is plenty more to explore with twitter intrgration to websites. I certainly won’t be spending a great deal of time looking at all of this but I do believe there may be some value to discover, if applied correctly.

ZipcodeZoo is big, really big. But with ZipcodeZoo you can also get local. By entering your zip code you learn about species of plants and animals that live near you.  After I entered my zip code I was qucik to learn to learn that At least 374 species that live near my home in Fairport NY are declining in population.  Zipcode Zoo is also a good exampe of how we can combine ecological data with online mapping tools.  Clicking on the “distribution tab” of a species specific page in Zipcode Zoo reveals numourous maps including in some cases embedded Google Earth renederings of actual sigthings. Virtual Globes such as Google Earth and tools like Google Maps are great because they provide a common browsing experience for the expert and novice alike, and can be repurposed to support almost any kind of geographically related data.

Here’s how big Zipcode Zoo was today:

“This site is big. As of Tuesday, April 28, 2009, this site is home to 2,607,667 web pages describing 1,295,353 animals, 1,067,966 plants, 193,843 fungi, 17,577 chromista, 16,063 protozoa, 16,113 bacteria, and 459 viruses. Pages contain 277,365 photos taken by 1,447 photographers, 1,471 sound recordings, and definitions of 223,189 terms. 85,429 Large photos can be zoomed and panned.

We have gathered a total of 127,715,647 field observations from 28,481 data sets and 1,547 data providers which show latitude and longitude, from which we have generated 254,338 State Maps, 1,430,347 Country Maps, 450,700 Google maps showing up to 200 sightings each, and 450,700 Google Earth maps showing all sightings. Click on a pinpoint on one of these maps, and you’ll learn more about that observation.”

Being  affiliated with RIT I applaud  president Destlers (and many other university presidents) commitment to improving our global climate. You can catch the signing  at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow in the Al Davis Room, Student Alumni Union.  Kudos to the RIT Student Environmental Action League for sponsoring the event. The thing I like about this commitment is that it proposes real action. Just take a look at the list. (follow the link) 

“We, the undersigned presidents and chancellors of colleges and universities, are deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale and speed of global warming and its potential for large-scale, adverse health, social, economic and ecological effects. We recognize the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is largely being caused by humans. We further recognize the need to reduce the global emission of greenhouse gases by 80% by mid-century at the latest, in order to avert the worst impacts of global warming and to reestablish the more stable climatic conditions that have made human progress over the last 10,000 years possible.”  more…

Playing for Change.  Moving.  Watch this and understand.

Thanks to a tip from my friend Karl I’ve just ordered my Galileoscope™ . “The Galileoscope™ is a high-quality, low-cost telescope kit developed for the International Year of Astronomy 2009 by a team of leading astronomers, optical engineers, and science educators.”  We’ll have fun with this at home, but if you are an educator don’t miss this incredible deal for your classroom.

This week I traveled to DC to participate in Ontology Summit 2009. The workshop this year  was a part of the NIST Interoperability Week 2009 and featured a coming  together of folks from the ontology community and the standards community.  I felt the atmosphere in the room was very energetic and constructive.  In addition to fostering coomunication, we also had a goal of endorsing some projects that highlighted collaboration in these two domains. To illustrate how positive the atmosphere was at one point instead of voting for the 4 best projects to endorse, the group unanimously endorsed all of the projects proposed.  You can read more about it in the communiqe that was issued as a result of the workshop.

My good friend Nancy Doubleday, (along with her students I presume) has created Puddle, an interactive installation designed for the upcoming Imagine RIT festival. Make a wish and interesting interactive creatures emerge from the pool.  Very cool.  The best part is you don’t have to wait for the festival , it’s up and running  and you can try it out now.  You can also check out the puddle blog for more puddlish stuff.