mediaczar

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.
Continue reading ‘A first stab at a perl script to create Twitter friend/follow matrices’

TwitterCounter, the service that tells you how many people followed a given Twitter user on a given date (among other things) has an API – so I thought I’d take a look at it to see whether I could create a quick automated table of rankings.

Here’s the simplest way to query the API:

[code]

http://twittercounter.com/api/?username=mediaczar&output=xml

[/code]

Just cut and paste that into the address bar of your browser for example. Fairly simple. Change the username and you’ll get the data for a different user. Here’s what you get back from the API — an XML file with lots of rich meaty data:
Continue reading ‘Counting Twitter followers’

Marshall Kirkpatrick has published an excellent process for getting up to speed with what the big issues are in your market sector. Is there, he asks:

any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the “Google and wander” method?

He then outlines an almost perfect example of how to use social media to do this.

You should read his article before reading any further. It’s short and punchy and won’t take much time.

Read it? Good. Now you may have noticed in the comments section that the first commenter doubts that you can:

find one baker or candlestick maker that will go through all of that.

So I thought I’d see if I can automate the process. The short answer is that I can and I can’t. I can’t yet automate one or two really important bits and pieces, notably:

1. ranking delicious bookmarks by popularity, not recency
2. human editorial selection of bookmarks

Perhaps someone could help me with this.
But otherwise, I’ve published this Yahoo! Pipe, Automating Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Social Media Cheatsheet Process which automates 90% of the process, and may make it easier for the bakers and candlestickmakers.

All comments and — more importantly — suggestions and improvements gratefully received.

Monday, 12 Jan 2009 00:27: I’ve just added a bit to the pipe to list posts in descending order according to PostRank. Don’t know if this is useful

Over the holidays, I started playing with a new Yahoo! pipe to pull information from Technorati into a spreadsheet. The reasons why I wanted to do this are covered in this post about the quantitative analysis of blogs, and my eventual perl-based solution to the problem is covered in this post.

The problem with the perl-based approach is that it’s a little inaccessible to people who aren’t comfortable using a command line environment. So I really wanted to make something that more people would feel comfortable using, and perhaps play around with.

So, with some help and kind words from Bob Briski, one of whose pipes I’d stumbled across and bookmarked during my research for this project, I decided to finish off the pipe and publish it so that others could use it, or (better still) improve upon it.
Continue reading ‘The Technorati Authority Yahoo! Pipe’

Sometimes (for instance when I’m doing the research for the blogger typology) you need to get a whole load of Technorati data for a whole load of blogs.

This research can (of course) be done by hand. And (of course) for a long list of blogs this would take a great deal of time. Handily, Technorati provides developers with an API that lets you automate those queries. An API (for those of you who don’t know) is an Application Programming Interface – a toolkit provided by a service or application (in this case by Technorati) that lets other computer applications ask it questions and use the answers for their own purposes. It may be helpful to think of APIs as being like the knobs on top of a Lego brick that let you stick other Lego on to it without in any way changing the nature of the brick itself. On the other hand it may not be so helpful after all.
Continue reading ‘A simple perl script to interrogate the Technorati API’

Since writing this post, three simpler, better ways of solving the problem have been submitted in the comments section. Feel free to read this post, but look to the comments for the solution!

If you already know about conditional formatting and navigated here via Google, please jump straight to the hack. If not, I hope the following introduction is useful. You might also like to check out the WikiHow introduction to conditional formatting in Excel. This post is actually concerned with an interesting hack that lets you reference the value of a cell itself when setting up formula-based conditional formatting rule.

Conditional Formatting

Excel’s conditional formatting feature is a boon to heavy spreadsheet users like me. It is a flexible and powerful tool that (among other things) lets me highlight data according to a set of rules so that I can easily spot the interesting bits in what would otherwise be an almost impossibly dense and meaningless cloud of numbers. Here’s an example; a table of the correlations between 32 different statements (taken from some ongoing work looking at a simple blogger typology.)

Continue reading ‘Referring to “this cell” using Excel conditional formatting’