Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

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F1 technical information

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

McLaren Rear Wing Test Rig

It’s been an interesting few weeks with most of the F1 teams now deeply into their test programmes before the new season starts in a few weeks. 

This year Twitter seems to have been the place to keep up with the action, with the teams, drivers, the BBC and various independents posting updates and info.

One guy in particular has been tweeting some very good technical info about the new cars.  @scarbsf1 is an independent journalist following F1 and posts some great analysis of F1’s technical side.  He’s also setup a blog at http://scarbsf1.wordpress.com.  If the techie side of things interests you it’s a very good resource.

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Picture of Britain under snow from Nasa

Friday, January 8th, 2010

gbritain_tmo_2010007_lrg

Thanks to @Jangles for pointing out this great pic of the recent snowfall in the UK from Nasa.

Snow blanketed Great Britain on January 7, 2010, as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite passed overhead and captured this image. Snow covers most of England, from the east to the west coast.  The cities of Manchester, Birmingham, and London form ghostly gray shapes against the white land surface. Immediately east of London, clouds swirl over the island, casting blue-gray shadows toward the north.

The image is from the Earth Observatory site, here:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=42237

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Let it snow… Twitter becomes a weather service

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

I’m a bit of a Twitter fan.  Even I didn’t think I’d ever look at twitter for a weather report though.

As those of us in the UK will know, there’s some pretty cold weather here at the moment with snow being predicted over the next few days.  This afternoon I started seeing a few people I know from Seloc tweeting about snow where they were.  After a while I started seeing people using a twitter hashtag of #uksnow.  Great idea, by reading all the tweets with that hash I could read where it was snowing the most.

It’s now 11pm and I’m watching CSI and thinking about going to bed. Seeing as I have a 50 mile commute in the morning I thought I’d logon and see how the weather is looking.  In the space of a few hours the #uksnow tweets have organised themselves into a format of post code plus heaviness of snow out of 10 – so something like ‘#uksnow KT22 5/10’

With the info being in a known format, some enterprising chap has mashed-up the tweets with google maps so you can now see where the snow is falling.  All based on the real-time info posted on twitter.  Its impressive stuff – especially seeing how it evolved over a few hours!  A good example of how crowdsourcing can work for a common cause.  If you can get the information into a known and structured data set it can be used in so many different ways.

#uksnow weather mashup

Check it out:  http://uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk/ (original link http://www.benmarsh.co.uk/snow/)

Update… some more info on how it all came together courtesy of Paul Clarke: http://honestlyreal.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/a-flurry-of-uksnow/

Update 2:  there’s now an updated page at http://uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk/

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Rules of Engagement for Social Media

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

I spotted this a few weeks ago but forgot to post about it – fortunately a conversation at work today reminded me!

The rise of social media and its use in both our social and professional lives has caused some organisations a headache over the past few years.  Many have found it difficult to know how to react to this new form of media.  Should they allow its use at work?  Should they block it?  What if someone talks about the company or it work online?  To be fair, they’re not always easy questions to answer.

More enlightened companies will embrace this part of the internet – after all it’s not going to just disappear – and put in place guidelines or rules to help protect the company and it’s employees. 

There are a few good examples of these sorts of policy around, one of the best can be found over at Edelman.  A few weeks ago however I stumbled across this from the US Air Force: 

air_force_web_posting_response_assessment 

Personally I think this is a good, pragmatic approach to take.  It recognises the various characters you’ll find online and provides some sensible guidance for how to evaluate the conversation and whether to respond.

Having read a bit further it turns out that the USAF has some pretty lofty ambitions for its online presence, in effect preparing every airman to be an online communicator.  Someone who can support and promote the USAF online.  I think you’d be hard pressed to find many other organisations which actively encourage their employees to promote the company ‘brand’ online.  It’s a refreshing approach.

Links:
USAF on Twitter
Air Force Live blog
YouTube Channel
Podcasts

Hat tip to David Meerman Scott who has some good info on the subject (I can’t’ remember who’s tweet pointed me at his site though – sorry!)

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Windows 7 + Macbook Air

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

After a ridiculously busy day at work I was just catching up on emails and tweets and spotted this one from Steve Lamb:

Surprisingly Win7 Beta1 includes native drivers for the MacBookAir – no need for silly BootCamp DVD’s drivers – makes fo r v. Easy install:-£

I had been thinking about trying 7 on my work Mac to see what would happen, but thought I’d better wait until I had to rebuild the thing if it all went wrong.   Oh and actually learn HOW to rebuild it… I’m a PC at heart.  Having seen Steve’s post I’m now even more curious…

It would be quite a clever move for MS to ship 7 with all the drivers needed to run on the intel Macs.  After all, how many people buy Mac’s for OSX and how many buy them because they’re so pretty?

(Hope Steve doesn’t mind my including his tweet – check out his blog, there’s good stuff on there!)

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Fantastic picture

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

For a while now NASA have been twittering from the Phoenix lander on Mars – well someone on earth posts in the first person on the lander’s behalf!  Earlier today MarsPhoenix posted up this fantastic picture on TwitPic of a self-shot from an Astronaut:

astronaut

Those guys are always posting up great stuff, if you’re on Twitter MarsPhoenix is well worth following.

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Posterous

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki I just signed up to Posterous.  It’s a pretty good idea, the site allows you to email in text, documents, music, images or video which it then posts up onto a blog.  What’s more it can then cross post the new blog onto twitter, flickr, wordpress etc.

It seems to work really well.  You can mail from a number of different email accounts or phones and setup personalised domains or sub-domains. 

The one little niggle I noticed – well its really something to add to a wish list – is that there’s no way of automatically filtering out email signatures.  All my mail accounts have them, and my work account also adds the usual company disclaimer after it leaves my computer or iPhone.  It’d be really great if Posterous was able to filter these out so that every post didn’t have my phone number and company address appended to it.

Still, a great idea I reckon!

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Yammering

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

I’ve just been looking at Yammer a bit more after signing up over the weekend.  It’s a great idea – twitter for the enterprise.

Essentially you sign up using a work email address, and then you only see messages from users with addresses from the same domain. Clever idea.  What’s more, although it’s free for end users, the company can pay for administrative controls.  A nice business model I reckon.

They have a web client, a desktop client, iPhone client and one for Blackberry.  It’s odd there’s no Windows Mobile app, but I can only guess that will appear at some point.

It’d be good to see a SharePoint webpart as well, perhaps a couple in fact.  Maybe one to add a Facebook like status, and one to show your messages etc.

I also wonder what would happen for companies with multiple domains used for email – I know we have a bunch of them at work.  And perhaps whether you could ‘federate’ (in the LCS/OCS sense) your company messages with those of a trusted partner.

I really like the idea – I just need to get a few people from work to sign up!

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iPhone Apps

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Apps that I use day in day out…

Hahlo – not strictly an iPhone app, but the best mobile Twitter client that I’ve found.  It does everything I need of it (apart from maybe twitpic), it’s quick to use and looks pretty.  The only downside it that as it lives in Safari you occasionally get unwanted refreshes so you loose you place in the list of tweets.

Facebook – I’d pretty much stopped using Facebook before installing this app, but now I check it once or twice a day.  It just makes it so much easier to check for updates and messages.

Linked In – This app is much the same as the Facebook app, but perhaps slightly less well executed.  I have to say I use Linked In less, but it’s still a worthwhile app if you have an account.

Tris – I always was a fan of Tetris :)

Evernote – A fantastic tool, if you don’t have an account you should go and try it.  I love the way I can take a photo on the phone, it’s then uploaded to Evernote, OCR’d and indexed.  It makes recording notes from whiteboards so much easier, just take a photo then search for keywords. 

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Blippr – a great idea.

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

Yesterday a friend pointed me at blippr.com, a new (I assume!) site that seems to merge twitter like short comments with reviews of books, music, movies and games.

As a format it works really well, you just search for whatever movie you want to see reviews for and browse through the results.  Overall ratings are also aggregated  to provide an overall score. 

For things like movies and games I find a consensus of opinion much more useful than an in depth review followed by one persons opinion.   As Blipper can also import contacts and friends from Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook you should also be able to see what you buddies are think of the same movie, and what other things they are enjoying.

Reviews are short <160 character twitter style comments, and use a simple ‘love it’ to ‘hate it’ rating.  I’m not sure if there’s a mobile interface or iPhone app but it would seem like a great addition to catch people views right as they leave the cinema (for example).

The only slight flaw I found was that if you miss spell your email address when signing in the site creates a fresh account for you… so I now have a dummy account there!

Still, I like it :)

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