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Podcast: Tell me in your own words May 10, 2010

Download Second-Hand Information via Twitter
 
Length: 1:59

This blog post is audio. Essentially, I wonder if our skills of storytelling will go away if we’re able to link to everything. Instead of “you should have been there”, will it be more like “I’ve got to find this link for you”.

I’d love your comments.

When was the last time you favorited a tweet? June 29, 2009

A few days ago I was listening to @davewiner and @jayrosen_nyu on their Rebooting the News podcast, and dave was talking about his 40tweets app.

40twits takes a look at the stats for the shortened URLs you post to twitter and decides which ones are most popular, then displays them in order. Dave’s current top link as about Wikipedia and Michael Jackson.

I don’t know if it counts the link being retweeted, but I’m going to guess yes.

This got me thinking about one of the original features of twitter – the favorite. I remember using favorites a lot before I started following 1000+ people. Now I just sort of let the wave go by. Also, not every desktop tool has an easy/visible favorite button.

I put out a call to my twitter group: “when was the last time you favorited a tweet?” and got a big response. (displayed in reverse order)

Thanks @gilcreque, @modulist, @karschp, @thandelike, @ericschechter, @domhay, @staticnrg, @tiburon, @doreeno, @incanus77, and @mrscrumley for replying. Of everyone who participated, it seems like Eric Schechter and myself are the only two people who don’t use it very often, or at all.

Looks like I’m not the only person thinking about the utility of Twitter Favorites. This post by Christopher Lynn is about the same subject.

TweetDeck has a view to let you look at your favorites, but I didn’t see a place to add a favorite very easily – it’s hiding under “other actions”, which you see when you hover over the user’s icon. Tweetie (desktop) requires a right-click, or you can press the “F” key, then a little star appears next to the tweet.

I currently pipe my blog feed to twitter, and I don’t hear a lot of complaints about that. I’m thinking about piping my Delicious bookmarks to twitter as well. Do any of you folks pipe your bookmarks in? Would you like to see more useful links on twitter?

My Pipes to Retweet Article as a Video May 28, 2009

I’ve been getting lots of good karma and feedback from people about my retweeting recipe using Yahoo Pipes. In truth, the tutorial can be a bit hard to swallow if you aren’t familiar with pipes or a node-based editing system.

Xavier Vespa from Hyve Up has done an easy to follow, step-by-step version of a retweeting recipe based on the content of my original tutorial.

From: HU Twitter: How-to Retweet Automatically – Video Demo

Howto: Yahoo Pipes Auto-retweet recipe for Twitter February 3, 2009

I have 5 or 6 twitter accounts, and some of them are only meant to serve as a discovery point for a blog, podcast, or community. That’s why I cooked up this little pipe recipe to auto-retweet around two possible keywords, but NOT to retweet my own retweets if I did so from another account. Get it? Well, I’ll explain:

Yahoo! Pipes is a free, web-based, visual programming environment. Those of you familiar with node-based editors like Shake or some other graphics and sound programs will feel right at home. Each “module” represents an input or output, or most importantly, ways to process and filter data as it travels through the pipeline. Pipes takes as input just about any feed or structured data – in this case, the river of tweets from a particular user’s friends.

It’s pretty easy to register for Pipes and create a new pipe. When you’re done, you get a big blank piece of graph paper, and the list of sources, operators and other junk you can drop in on the left side.

The first thing you need to do is go ahead and grab the twitter feed. In the left sidebar you want to find Sources > Fetch Feed and drag it on to the working area. In addition to the url to your friends list, you have to provide your username and password, because Twitter’s API requires authentication.

Like this:
http://user:pass@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.atom

At this point, if you take the output from the Fetch Feed module to the Pipe Output module, you have a working Pipe. But what you want to do here is filter out results based on certain keywords, so the output can be used to help you track a conversation.

The next module you’ll want to take a look at is under Operators > Filter. Drag this one out and take a look – this one reminds me of the Smart Mailbox rules in Mail.app, and it works in much the same way.

In this case we are going to:

Permit items that match all of the following Rules
item.title Contains fringe
item.title Does not contain bloggingfringe:

What does this mean?

1. The first rule just pulls out tweets that contain a single word or phrase you’re looking for – in this case, “fringe”.
2. The second rule filters out tweets by a particular user. In this case, the username contains the word you’re filtering on, so you try to take that into account.

Again, you could connect the Fetch Feed to the Filter, and then to the Pipe Output and have a working version of the Pipe. In fact, I ran the pipe like this for a long time without anything else. But this is a two-keyword tutorial, and there are some other tricks I’d like to show you.

The next phase of your retweeting script is going to prepare the text of the tweets so they give a link back to the original author. You’ll also remove a few precious characters by removing your own username from an @reply.

RSS and Atom documents coming out of your twitter friends feed give the title and body of each item the following format:
liberatr: @bloggingfringe I think it's really cool how you're retweeting our posts about fringe automatically!
This is the format you’re going to pay attention to when you apply some simple regular expression replacement to the titles.

To give all of the retweets a more trational RT @user message format, you’re going to grab the Operators > Regex module next. There are two rules you’ll use:

In item.title replace : @bloggingfringe with :
In item.title replace ^ with RT @

1. On the first rule, we are just cleaning things up in the case of a reply. Check i to ignore capitalization, so the rule matches @bloggingFringe or @BloggingFringe as well.
2. The second rule just adds a few letters to the beginning of the outgoing tweet.

Adding the second keyword

At any given time, there are other cultural events happening, not just fringe, so you might like to make two pipes, one pipe to track each event. If both keywords are going to the same account, you can use the Split and Union operators to apply different kinds of filters.

You need to use Split and Union in this case because your filtering has too many AND and OR questions:
If someone is tweeting about "fringe" AND it wasn't written by @bloggingfringe, OR
If someone is tweeting about "arts fest" OR "artsfest" AND not "fringe"
It’s important to add the “and not fringe” to the end, because we don’t want tweets appearing twice if someone mentions artsfest and fringe in the same tweet.

I’m going to gloss over a few steps here, because they are simple, and you’ve already done a few just like these:

1. Create two new Filter modules
2. The first filter looks for your keywords, in my example the word could have spaces in it, so I needed a whole filter to spell out each variation
3. The second filter makes sure you’re not duplicating tweets in the final pipe output
4. Put the Split operator at the very top, just after Fetch Feed. attach one of the outputs to the very first Filter and the second to the new keyword Filter.
5. Put the Union operator just above your Regex operator from before, with your two filtering decision trees going into the top, and the output from the Union going to the Regex, and that module’s output the the Pipe Output.

The last rule you’re going to apply is one final Filter module. Since you’re retweeting any tweet that mentions these keywords you care about, you may end up catching some retweets yourself, if your friends decide to share what you wrote. In the example, I have this filter appearing in between the Union and Regex modules, but you could also put this at the very top, above the Split.

Block items that match any of the following Rules
item.title Contains RT @bloggingfringe
item.title Contains Retweeting @bloggingfringe

Finishing Up

Once you get all your filters connected, splits and unions, regular expressions, feeds and outputs in order, you should have something that looks like this:

Please note the output (in the gray area at the bottom), and how it took the original tweet and just added 4 text characters to the beginning, adding a bit of context.

Now you have to make sure you Save your pipe, and finally click the link at the top saying Run Pipe... The only thing I want to warn you about is Publishing your pipe. Please remember that your twitter password is in there!

Pipes will format your output as RSS or JSON (or serialized PHP objects), as well as hooking into your favorite RSS aggregator and Yahoo! Alerts. As if that wasn’t enough, think about all the RSS-to-Twitter applications that exist. My personal favorite is Twitterfeed.com – which is a free service, but I encourage you to donate a few bucks via PayPal, because it’s just a fantastic thing to do!
Edit: also check out the excellent TweetBots, another way to get feeds to twitter, but it also has auto-follow and a cool way to allow multiple people to update the account using direct messages.

Gotcha: Make sure you select “Title only” in twitterfeed’s interface, or the first few words of short tweets may be repeated!

I’m sure there are lots of other ways to filter your friends’ tweets, and tons of ways to create a retweeting service, but this is one that works for me, and I just wanted to share with anyone looking for a little help.

Update: Double-retweeting
Since retweeting is so widespread, you may come across several instances where you are retweeting a retweet. Most times this will be pretty innocuous, but if you get into a situation where several of the people you’re following retweet the same message, it’s probably best to avoid those.

Example of the bad behavior:

RT @Obsessionful: I have been retweeted by @VociDance and @bloggingfringe. I'm awesome. xP: Obsessionful: I have.. http://tinyurl.com/bewhqw

RT @VociDance: RT @Obsessionful: "I think the thing getting me through this mountain of homework is the fact tha.. http://tinyurl.com/dx3x4g

RT @Obsessionful: I think the thing getting me through this mountain of homework is the fact that Arts Fest is t.. http://tinyurl.com/br65e5

No need to retweet it a second time.

Therefore, add one last Filter module just before the Pipe Output.

Block items that match any of the following Rules
item.title Matches regex RT.*RT

That should take care of most double retweets.

After I first made this script, I was thinking about setting up two accounts that just retweet each other all day, and call them “echo” and “chamber”…

RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT @chamber RT @echo RT...

You get the idea…

Tons of Notes, BlogOrlando Aftermath 3 October 1, 2008

Party, originally uploaded by funkeemunkeeland.

Folks, I’ve got things to tell you, and things I want your input on. First of all, huge thanks to Tim Welch for his excellent BlogOrlando3 “Best of” post.

Next, I want you to stop reading this post. STOP! Go to the Florida Creatives forum and contribute to this discussion, or start a new discussion about something for which you are passionate.

If you’re still reading, I’ll remind you we have TWO BarCamps coming up. Count them.

BarCamp Tampa Bay is going down in less than two weeks. If you were at the Orlando BarCamp in April, this will seem familiar to you – Tech Day, Media Day. Held at USF’s Business school, Saturday and Sunday, October 11th and 12th. I believe there is a party-bus or a caravan of some kind headed down that way. Check the Twittersphere (92 followers, natch!) or Doterati? for more details.

BarCampChaos held on Monday October 13th, the first night of CreateChaos08 at the Mariott down by Disney World. It’s 10 conferences in one, and one unconference, and bunches of parties, like a certain Internet Marketing and Tech association I know of, and an Advertising and Design Alliance I know of, and a Create Awards, and a Job Fair, and an Expo, and lots more, including $200 off registration if you register for BarCampChaos.

The Florida Creatives website now has 4 feeds for you to pay attention to:

1. Podcast Feed (original)
2. Site-Wide Feed (includes groups, events, blogs, forums)
3. Event Feed (mashed up from all over town)
4. Comments Feed (in case you don’t prefer emails)

Those of you already subscribed in iTunes will continue to receive podcasts.

Those of you who used feedburner email subscription should keep getting your emails (of the site-wide feed).

The events feed is pulled from the Florida Creatives group on Upcoming.Y!, the Calendar feeds of The Daily City blog, Doterati and the newly-formed Advertising and Design Alliance (I don’t even know where to link for it yet).

The old Florida Creatives Google Groups is going away. I have already closed out new people from joining. With a forum, email subscriptions for feeds and all the other stuff, it should be easy to stay informed.

If you haven’t checked out the Florida Drupal Group yet, please do. Classes are third Saturdays at 1PM in Maitland, and completely worth it. We are talking about putting together a DrupalCamp early next year, so get involved now.

Did you realize that Café Scientifique was today? I sure didn’t, but I’ve been an extremely busy man of late. Chad is organizing some awesome talks down at Stardust, these are not to be missed.

The 2nd Annual ELLA Music Fest is this weekend. Crazy that a year has gone by already. Orlando Scene TV has some vids from last year if you want to know what you’re missing out on.

Ubiquity: Web Services + Microformats + Quicksilver = Mashups (in your browser) August 27, 2008

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:
* Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
* Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
* Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
* Extend the browser functionality easily.

I think Microsoft is going to copy the hell out of this and release a “Microsoft Live OpenWeb Command Window Beta” before mid-September.

Hey Mary Gardner, I heard you are getting into Twitter July 19, 2008

Shout-outs to Mary Gardner, who happens to be my manager’s wife. She is a very cool lady and someone you should all get to know. Here’s an excerpt of her blog where she recounts our meeting over lunch today with most of the PHP Team and a couple of project managers:

The Charisma Coach!: Hanging out with the Techies

They’re programmers who have a personal interest in social media as well as doing it for their jobs.

For me, it was so much easier hanging with them for an hour than reading a techie magazine, and easier to pick up on the language. They gave me content for an upcoming business article and ideas for others.

Hanging with those outside your own industry can give your own creativity a boost and sharpen your own knowledge about something that might be out of your comfort zone but that is interesting.

I told her she MUST go to BlogOrlando and add me on twitter as well as Eric and the other twitter folks at the table. For her it makes lots of sense, she is in the life coaching and professional speaking fields, and she wants to build a personal brand around celebrities with causes. I think she will find some great resources and utility through twitter, so Mary, hoping you have Google Alerts turned on, sign up; or if you saw the “new blog post” link in Twitter, good for you!

Either way, welcome to the Dark Side, Mary. I look forward to your update in my daily (OMG, they mean daily) Orlando Business Journal update.

Falling in Love 5 Seconds at a Time April 25, 2008

As a follow-up to my last post, I will give the additional point that on Twitter your 5 minutes are reduced to something more like 5 seconds

Falling in Love 5 Minutes at a Time

A few years ago at the second Orlando Puppet Festival, I was trying to sell Heather Henson on the idea of my podcasting about the festival becoming official. Needless to say, she’s super-busy running the festival, and we don’t have time to get into all the ins and outs of podcasting, so she asks me to give her a sample. The next time I see Heather I hand her a CD, and she’s grateful for the ability to time-shift her decision-making process.

The following day I see her, she’s a bit frustrated with me, because she says “I put this in my car and nothing happened, you gave me a bad CD!” Oops! Not the case, in fact it was a collection of every podcast I’d released to date – totaling around 80 hours of audio, or about enough to fill 60 regular CDs. “They’re MP3’s” I said, “Normally you’d have to spend hours downloading them all, and I’ve saved you the trouble!” Heather retorts, “But how do I know where to start?” She didn’t like having the entire library of congress and no card catalog (OK, not the ENTIRE library, but still…).

This brings me to an interesting point I haven’t dwelled much on in the past year and a half. How do we begin to introduce people to something like, let’s say Lady Raptastic, which has more than 80 hour-long episodes by itself, not to mention all the other shows Mark Baratelli produces. I suppose the old adage “You’re only as good as your last [whatever]” may come into play here, but that’s just not how it is with blogs and most podcasts.

I was having a conversation with someone at BarCamp about this very subject. She was getting into blogging based on a few pokes by her friends, and she was worried about writing something relevant. I told her “The magic of blogging doesn’t happen in an instant, you sort of fall in love 5 minutes at a time.”

I don’t really know where else to go from here, but suffice it to say there will likely be a “part 2″ of this post, and perhaps more. I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’d especially like to see what the 200+ attendees of BlogOrlando have to say about the subject.

Steve Jobs Never Finished College, Speaks at Graduation January 27, 2008

via johl’s ramen soup

Several of my teachers at UCF used to say “Fail early and often”. Failing early and often requires you to stay hungry and foolish like the back of the Whole Earth Catalog said. Both statements belong someplace where you can see them, like in your cubicle or near the door to your house. Maybe that’s a good use for the “Hello, Dolly” plugin that comes with every Wordpress install. Now you can share those quotes with yourself and your blog readers. Also check out @iheartquotes on twitter. I think I found that because of Alex’s fun and useful Twitterholic.

Also about the video:
As always, Steve has prepared every moment of this presentation to the exact second when people will clap and he takes a sip from his water. I also really like how they show the graduates who have no respect for what they’re wearing at all, because it’s just gotten ridiculous to wear a gown to a party anymore, and they know it. The final message “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” is not how I would put it, but if you know what’s behind it, then it works.

Johl (whose tumbalog I nabbed this from) is friends with Johannes from monochrom, and I’ll believe those kids are all hungry and foolish, and they’ve certainly found what they love to do.

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