Tag: twitter

5 years ago… my BBC colleagues wrote

@jas's picture of Herbkim

In my last post I wanted to include this picture of Herb Kim talking about me at Thinking Digital 2010. Still not heard what he actually said (could have been slagging me off or something *joke*) but I’m thankful for what he did do, as I was due to close down BBC Backstage on stage.

It of course never happened till much later of course.

Looking at the work/BBC angle was quite interesting. I have always said my work, personal and play lives are intermixed, and I like/prefer it that way. What happened while I was gaining consciousness says it all…

I saw this blog a long while later after I came out of hospital. I hadn’t realised the open and close battle (best word I can think of) which was kind of happening.

My parents once they received the call from Adrian came straight up to be with me. But my dad kept returning to Bristol for a house move was being finalised. So my mum reached out to Sarah (ex-wife) who recently moved near Manchester. She helped setup the carringbridge site after using it with her brother when he had fallen off something in 2009. Sarah was so supportive and contacted all of my old friends she still had emails for to tell them what had happened.

While this was happening Adrian, Tim and others were trying to keep things quiet by only telling people that needed to know. To be fair I would have done the same and they had no idea about Sarah and my mum spreading the word. The hodge also setup a form to collect responses from friends which was lovely and I thank him for doing so…

but this was trumped by the Carringbridge site Sarah and my parents setup.

I gather looking at the Twitter responses, there was a lot of wonder and doubt about what had happened. With information circulating from my mum and Sarah. I guess it became clear that the BBC needed to say something more official than tweets. I gather this isn’t normal but hey nothing about me and what happened is business as usual.

Adrian/Ant wrote…

This is just to let you know that unfortunately Ian Forrester, Senior Development Producer of BBC Backstage was taken ill last week and is now recuperating in Hope Hospital in Salford.

At the moment he is in a serious but stable condition and is being well cared for by the staff at Hope and his family.

For those who want to pass on their messages the Message for Ian Google form is here.

[Edit 04/06/10] Now that Ian’s family have set up the Caring Bridge site we’re recommending that people wanting to drop him a line use that channel instead.

Flowers aren’t allowed in ICU, but cards are, and can be sent to:

Ian Forrester
c/o Intensive Care Unit
Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust
Stott Avenue
Salford
M6 8HD

We will keep you updated when we hear anything more but until then we hope that you can have Ian in your thoughts and let his other close friends know.

Dr Adrian Woolard

[In Ian’s hopefully short absence I’ll be looking after this blog- Ant Miller]

Back to instant messaging

instant messaging sites

I bet the figure above has changed in recent times, as everybody turned back to messaging it would seem. Maybe realising that using social networks as a way to do instant messages is a bad idea (not judging, as I have been lured into a one 2 one conversation quite a few times over twitter).

I use to be a jabber/xmpp fan and when GTalk adopted xmpp, I was pretty happy. However over time the xmpp standard was built upon and in the end removed. I was one of those people who ran a client (pidgin) which supported multiple im protocols.

I considered installing pidgin again but I thought I’d give the alternatives a try. However Josh tweeted something which I wanted to consider when choosing a client and protocol.

Looking at the list I decided to try Silent Text/Phone from Silent Circle and Telegram. Telegram has clients across operating systems and devices, while silent text/phone is mainly mobile. Telegram also has the option of working within Pidgin if I decide to switch back.

For me its not that I actively want to hide secret messages, I just want the option to flex my privacy. Instant messenger for me is more private than social broadcasting platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Do I trust facebook messenger? Do I heck! I actively don’t have it on my phone along with the Facebook app.

I know theres rumors twitter are due to spin out their direct messaging part but looking at the rest of the crowd, are we really expecting twitter to adopt a secure and private system? Their track record hasn’t be bad. Actually there are twitter direct messaging clients which is cool but how many times has twitter changed the rules of the system, how long till direct messages are treated differently?

Consequence or Inception of connecting people

I saw the below tweet and felt like it needed to be not just retweeted but also blogged…

Help this teacher make a great point to her students about the consequences of social network use. Please RT widely

From Twitter

It says…

I want to illustrate to my junior high students (grade 7-9) how fast a photo can be shared on the internet. Please “Like” and “Share” this image to help me teach caution and discernment to the students in my classes.

Although a great idea and I’m not against teaching and eduction, but its worth pointing out the incredible power this also brings to each and everyone of us. Empowerment should also be taught in the same lesson. Never has there been a way to connect a mass audience at such low cost and such speed. The inception of the internet and social media is a great thing too. And its too easy to teach the negative. The internet and social media isn’t something which should be feared, rather taught how to responsibly participate in.

 

Umairh says… Its not Sci-Fi

_T5P1197

After yesterday’s lists from Umair Haque, who I had the pleasure of meeting once a long while ago. I thought I’d share a couple more of his lists of Twitter knowledge.  Here a couple which caught my eye and had me retweeting earlier in the week.

I’m going to do five quick points on stuff many Americans think is science fiction, but isn’t 🙂 17:13:23
  1. In London, I can walk down the street, visit the doctor, and get healthcare. Free!! It’s not science fiction 🙂
  2. In Europe, I can take trains across the continent, that are effectively faster than taking planes. Cheap!! It’s not science fiction.
  3. In Australia, I can go take a walk and see happy people. Smiling!! Having fun!! Because they have nice lives. It’s not sci-fi 🙂
  4. In Paris, I can hit the bistro on nearly any corner, get a nice meal, and a bottle of wine. That won’t kill me! It’s not sci-fi.
  5. In Scandinavia, if I’m homeless, I probably won’t die. I’ll get a place to live and an income. It’s not science fiction.
  6. In London, in the summer, people leave the office at 5. And sit outside and have beer until the sun goes down. It’s not sci-fi.
  7. There’s more to life than work. If you’re spending yours on the bullshit of bosses, meetings, and powerpoints, you’re wasting it.

From a few of the questions I use to get when in the states, I can imagine these questions and thoughts will be like sci-fi to some parts of america. Specially like the health care one and of course the beer after work. Very much part of the UK culture which takes some time to adjust and understand. Of course number 7 is great and reminds me of this next list.

I’m going to do five quick bits of life advice. Enjoy 😉 08-23-2013 17:14:52
  1. The point of life is love.
  2. You can spend much of your life running away from the fact that the point of life is love. Many people do 🙂
  3. It takes courage, determination, and a lot of reflection to live the life you want.
  4. Don’t accept mediocrity. Be awesome.
  5. Everybody needs to change the world a little bit. Why do you think Bill Gates isn’t golfing all day?
  6. You can do it. But you have to start 😉

Reflection is something I’ve already starting doing and Adrian did suggest updating my grassroots innovation blog one day soon.

Why I’m not taking part in #twittersilence

I was writing blog posts and writing my book as I do while sipping a red wine in vividlounge. Not really paying attention to Twitter and I tweeted a few things during the time. It was about 10pm when I noticed Kevinmarks asks if twitter will be quiet tomorrow except for an announcement about Dr Who.

Starting to looking into it, and I decided although I’m very much in favour of female rights and being a feminist myself. The idea of not tweeting for 24hours seemed to bug me.

I’m not great with Peer and Social pressure at the best of times (tend to reject it) but it also seemed to pointing the finger at the platform and not the actual problem. Twitter is a platform for speech, the problem is humanity. Some idiots and fools will always use the platform to spread hate and negativity. We need to stand together against these people but I’m lost to what the protest will do or help? I wonder also if silence is a good way to protest?

Sure I’ll add to this post when I get more time…

The streaming consciousness

How Lifestreaming Is Shaping Web Culture

I can’t believe Stowe Boyd doesn’t get a single mention in this article about streams…

So although the web has changed out of all recognition in two decades, our underlying metaphor for it probably hasn’t changed that much. And this has the downside that we’re effectively blind to what is actually happening, which is that we are moving from a world of sites and visits to one that is increasingly dominated by streams. The guy who articulates this best is a Yale computer scientist named David Gelernter.

The title of his latest essay on the subject – “The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It” – conveys the basic idea. “The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream,” he writes. “This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams and Facebook walls and timelines. Its structure represented a shift beyond the ‘flatland known as the desktop’ (where our interfaces ignored the temporal dimension) towards streams, which flow and can therefore serve as a representation of time.

Shame because he’s been thinking about this stuff a whole lot longer than most…

Times review of the Year of Making Love

Year of Making Love Times review

Thanks to Teknoteacher for the tweet… alerting me to the Times review

Just as I feared…

Unfortunately very little airtime during new series “The year of making love” is given over to actual “science” involved

Science…! Yes science we all shout…!

@zeonglow  said something interesting while I was watching the latest episode.

#yoml isn’t science. They should have matched up half of them at random. That would have been interesting.

All the science in the programme is 2 scientists looking pretty saying comments like, “oh there a good match…” I would suggest the title is quite correct, biology lessons minus the science.

Yes most people who watch BBC Three would yawn but thats part of the reason why I personally took part…

The whole post is online as you’d expect. But I leave you with this fun section…

Unfortunately, very little airtime during new series The Year of Making Love is given over to the actual “science” involved. Essentially, personality-profiler Thomas and behavioural-psychologist Emma have analysed the assembled single masses and paired them off with one another. Imagine Yente, the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof, if she exchanged the layered shawls for a lab coat.

Reconnecting with half the memories

hajimemashite watashin wa. Ian desu. dozo yoroshiku

Its great looking through my Twitter archive/dump but its frustrating that I can only read half of the conversation.

Funny looking back at this tweet as it was less than a week before I had my brush with death…

6 May 10
These early morning meetings are killing me, wondering what people would say if I started setting meetings for 6pm and 7pm?

Yes just imagine… Anyway I can clearly see the gap in my tweeting From 7th May 2010 to June 9th 2010. Not a single tweet…! I also noticed theres no Direct messages in the archive so I can see… Which is a good and bad thing I guess?

Anyway enough doom and gloom…

Here’s is that classic moment which I’ve used to talk about how great open sharing can be/or how twitter is better than facebook.

From 4th January 2009…

Unfortunately you will need to read it from the bottom upwards

Although you know what happens, so it doesn’t really matter 🙂

“thank you but…” passing the card back.”I have a boyfriend, he’s picking me up from the station” so no joy but thanks twitterverse View on Twitter

so I gave her the card and smiled. she looked at it read it with richards jp on one side and my contacts on the other and said…. View on Twitter

Ok headphones are off and shes packing up. Here comes my moment. Geez  View on Twitter

@richardsproject: Ok Richard wrote it, the card is ready. I just need to know what it says View on Twitter

At Stockport View on Twitter

So i was planning to offer her one of my kitkats but i like the card thing. if Richard tells me what it says  View on Twitter

@richardsproject: Tell me what it says and i’ll do it View on Twitter

@sheilaellen: Nope only 10mins left View on Twitter

@JeniT: Ummm like what? View on Twitter

@billt: Ok now i’m laughing out loud, thanks Bill. Think she is running Windows too actually. But shes watching a film View on Twitter

Just passed Mansfield so not long till we get to Manchester View on Twitter

@cisnky: Now that would be good. But how do I start that conversation 🙂 Geez I wonder what @tommorris makes of all of this View on Twitter

@davemee: The twitterverse is my strategy, come on people I got 30mins left to make a good impression and type up my blog entries View on Twitter

@sheilaellen: Shes got headphones on, so that won’t work View on Twitter

Sitting opposite a stunning Japanese lady with a oversized acer laptop. Playing footsie under the table but no joy… View on Twitter

Microblogging dataportability at last?

Twitter data dump

Finally got the ability to download my tweets… Over 6 years of tweets in 6.8 meg of files.

It comes in a zip file not a tar file which is interesting because Facebook uses Tars for its data dumps. Structures interesting because its less of a dump and more a formal backup of your data complete with HTML file bring it all together. Theres a README.txt file which reads…

# How to use your Twitter archive data
The simplest way to use your Twitter archive data is through the archive browser interface provided in this file. Just double-click `index.html` from the root folder and you can browse your entire history of Tweets from inside your browser.
—
In the `data` folder, your Twitter archive is present in two formats: JSON and CSV exports by month and year.

  • CSV is a generic format that can be imported into many data tools, spreadsheet applications, or consumed simply using a programming language.
  • ## JSON for Developers
  • The JSON export contains a full representation of your Tweets as returned by v1.1 of the Twitter API. See https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1 for more information.
  • The JSON export is also used to power the archive browser interface (index.html).
  • To consume the export in a generic JSON parser in any language, strip the first and last lines of each file.

To provide feedback, ask questions, or share ideas with other Twitter developers, join the discussion forums on https://dev.twitter.com.

Most of the data is JSON which bugs me a little only because I would personally have to transform it all to XML but alas I’m sure everyone loves it. The CSV spreadsheets are odd and could do with being XML instead of CSV but once again sure its useful to someone out there. The nice thing is there is tons of meta around each microblog/tweet including the geo-location, time and device/client. Even the URLs have some interesting things around it, because I was wondering how they were going to deal with shorten urls, retweets and mentions…

 “urls” : [ {
“indices” : [ 69, 89 ],
“url” : “http://t.co/GSzy55vc”,
“expanded_url” : “http://epicwerewolf.eventbrite.com/”,
“display_url” : “epicwerewolf.eventbrite.com”
} ]

Doesn’t always work… specially when using urls shortener which don’t keep the url after a certain time period. Interesting internally twitter always uses its own t.co for everything…

Right now I’m just interested in the period around my brush with death… Real shame theres no references to mentions you’ve had, as I would have loved to have seen some of those. Guess Twitter were not going to delve into that can of worms…

I want to know why theres no status.net inporter?

Cnet have a overview of how and what to do with the archive. Thanks Matt