Archive for July, 2009
#wediaczar (or “I’m getting married in the afternoon”)
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
Tomorrow I’m getting married, so I probably won’t be posting for a while. Not, of course, that I’ve been posting a lot recently.
Without wanting to get sentimental (it’s not that kind of a blog, and I’m not that kind of a man) I can say that not only did I never believe that I’d find someone like Krista, but that now I have found her, I still can’t really believe it.
I’m saving the rest of what I have to say for my speech tomorrow evening. There are all sorts of little surprises planned for the day, but one of the biggest surprises right now is “what Mat will be saying in his speech” because I’ve yet to write it. Tim has told me “be nice to everyone and try not to sound like Hugh Grant.”
Anyway, the hashtag for my wedding will be #wediaczar. Given that the audience is startlingly low on digital media bods, it’s not like I think it’s going to trend or anything, but it seemed like too good a hashtag to waste.
Tags: #wediaczar
Posted in life | 13 Comments »
A first stab at a perl script to create Twitter friend/follow matrices
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
Geek alert: if the title of this post isn’t a dead giveaway I should tell you — unless you’re interested in APIs and badly-put-together bits of code — this probably isn’t for you.
I’ve recently found myself using a service provided by Damon Clinkscale called DoesFollow. All it does is answer the simple question “does twitter user A follow twitter user B?” Apart from a frill which lets you reverse the order of your question (“does twitter user B follow twitter user A?”) that’s all it does. You can even interrogate it from the address bar like this: http://doesfollow.com/barackobama/mediaczar
While I was thinking about how useful a service this is, I was suddenly struck by a moment of clarity. A lot of the research I’ve been doing could be simplified by something like this.
(more…)
Tags: kludge, network analysis, networks, perl, twitter
Posted in hack, twitter | 6 Comments »
The #interestingOPMLexperiment (stage 1)
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
A couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of people to send me their OPML files (for those of you who aren’t aware, an OPML file is what tells your RSS reader what feeds you’ve subscribed to — it can act as a way of moving your subscriptions between readers.) Some of the more trusting among them agreed, and that gave me the raw material for the first bit of my experiment.
Some red herrings
Along the way I uncovered a couple of things that were interesting but not (entirely) relevant to the experiment.
- Some people are cagey about sharing their list of feeds: whether they consider it intellectual property, or whether they think that it may be too revealing, I don’t know.
- Lots of people said things like “oh — my RSS reader? Haven’t looked at that in a while. I get all my news off Twitter these days.”
Tags: #interestingOPMLexperiment, bloggers, citation analysis, influence, influence mapping, network analysis, opml, research, social media, visualization
Posted in influence, networks, research | 4 Comments »
