• What are we Twittering?
  Twitterment is a Twitter search engine and buzz tracking system with a nuber of additional features.
  (tags: blog twitter search IR socialmedia)

We’re in Red Queen territory, that’s for sure. First we wrote web pages, then kicked it up a notch with blogging, which turned out to not be fast enough, and now we microblog with Twitter, Jaiku and Dodgeball. It takes all the blogging you can do, to keep in the same place.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

As new microblogging services appear, infrastructure and mashups sprout up around them like fast growing weeds. Consider Twitterment, a Twitter search engine that also does simple trend graphs and identifies the buzzy and fading terms. The weekly school vs. party trend, for examples, looks like an X with the intersection on, surprise, Friday. Twitterment results also display users’ locations on Google Maps, hourly and daily buzz charts and frequently co-occurring words.

I am happy to present Twitterment - a Twitter search engine and buzz tracking system. Twitterment provides a search interface over an index of recent updates obtained periodically from the public timeline API. You can also view the locations of users in the result set on Google Maps alongside hourly and daily buzz charts.

Blogpulse, Technorati and others provide buzzcharts for the Blogosphere. This is a great way to find interesting patterns and trends.
Twitter’s tagline is “what are you doing?” and often users talk about their daily lives. Aggregate trends over microblogging platforms are quite interesting and fun to observe. For instance, we know how well correlated coffee and work are:

Or that Saturdays are big days for shopping.

What makes microbloging content really valuable from an analytics point of view, is the granularity at which users are starting to provide information. This is an exciting new area is Social Media analysis and there is lot more we can learn from this. Right now are working on a sentiment analysis module and a social search feature. We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

Stay tuned for more updates on Twitterment.

Harry Story noticed that the current Business Week section on CEO Guide to Technology is focused on the semantic web. Items include

• Taming the World Wide Web - A rising tide of companies are tapping Semantic Web technologies to unearth hard-to-find connections between disparate pieces of online data
• Weaving a Web Around Information - Semantic Web technology allows companies to provide context for data, helping them distinguish or connect info from disparate sources
• Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee - Neal Goldman, CEO of Inform, explains Semantic Web technologies that are making it easier to categorize and find information on the Web
• The Future of the Web - The next big thing in data management takes skill, time, and experience. These tips should help you get the most out of the Semantic Web
• A video interview with Neal GoldmanCEO of Inform in which he “explains Semantic Web technologies that are making it easier to categorize and find information on the Web”

Also, check out their CEO Guide To Tech on Wikis.

The game console business is big and very competitive. Microsoft’s latest move in it’s three way battle with Sony and Nintendo is to allow users to link their Xbox gamertag identifier with an Windows Live Messenger account, enabling IM interactions via the Xbox. As reported in the NYT article Microsoft Brings Instant Chat to TV Screen, Through Games:

“We feel this is a huge step in driving social networking further into the family room by allowing Xbox 360 users to I.M. directly from their couch,” said John Rodman, Microsoft’s group manager for the Xbox 360, in a telephone interview last week. “Now you don’t have to manage two separate groups of friends online.”

I think there is a lot of potential here. There seems to be a trend in which social applications are spreading out from their base of blogs, forums and sharing sites to mobile phones (Twitter), music (last.fm) and now games.

Business week has an article on the need for companies to monitor their online reputation and take corrective action when it takes a downturn

Web Attack. Nastiness online can erupt and go global overnight, and “no comment” doesn’t cut it anymore. Here’s how to cope

There is a quote that goes something like “Never argue with people who buy ink by the gallon….” that is attributed to various people including Tommy Lasorda. Today is a good time to be an A-list blogger, it seems.

Companies such as Lenovo Group, Southwest Airlines, and Dell have specialists dedicated to engaging or co-opting their critics. Dell has made blogger outreach into such a discipline that the company’s team, including refreshingly straight- talking blogger-in-chief Lionel Menchaca, recently sat down for drinks, nachos, and fried zucchini at an Austin (Tex.) pub with blogger Jeff Jarvis. He’s the man who ignited the original Dell Hell customer-service crusade with his rants about the company. (Jarvis picked up his own tab.) “In a flash he transformed the borgish image of Dell for me,” says Jarvis. That wasn’t all. At Davos in January, Michael S. Dell sought out Jarvis at a cocktail party and apologized to him.

The article mentions BuzzLogic andReputationDefender. The latter was new to me. It seem aimed at individual customers and monitors social media and the web in general for “every possible piece of information about you”. If you see something you don’t like, you can push the DESTROY button and

Our trained and expert online reputation advocates use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the web. This is an arduous and labor-intensive task, but we take the job seriously so you can sleep better at night. We will always and only be in YOUR corner.

Everybody loves Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. The content is informative, thought provoking and at times even philosophical. But the form — a comic book about how comic books work — is not just cleverly self-referential but also a direct demonstration of the techniques that underly the unique graphical format.

Kongregate uses the same approach to explain the basics of computer games. They’ve released a set of four simple 2D flash games to “raise awareness for the basic concepts of computer and video games.”

• Episode one covers rules, interactivity, representation and simulation in games.
• Episode two deals with player’s motivation to continue playing instead of leaving a game and examines what makes a game fun — instead of frustrating — to play.
• Episode three introduces the principles of learning in computer games.
• Episode four explores identification in computer games

Technology review has an article on Twitter asking Is Twitter Here to Stay? with the dek “A new online messaging tool is hot, but it may be too banal to last”. The article starts by comparing Twitter to Jott, “a useful tool for capturing thoughts that occur to you when you’re away from your computer and unable to write them down.” While I’ve not tried Jott, the two systems don’t seem to have much in common except using mobile phones.

I did lear from this article that the first Twitter prototype was done in Ruby on Rails in two weeks.

Stone says the company completed a working version of the software in only two weeks using Ruby on Rails, a programming language and a set of prefabricated software modules widely employed by developers of the new raft of Web services known as Web 2.0. The hard part, he says, was “navigating the business aspects of the mobile industry. It took us months to get a short code and figure out how to play nice with all the major U.S. and international mobile carriers.”

I also thought this was a good illustration of one role that Twitter fills:

Dedicated Twitter users defend the service, suggesting that the daily minutiae actually add up to something significant. “Asking ‘who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day?’ misses the whole point of presence,” writes Liz Lawley, director of the Lab for Social Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology. “It’s about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you’re doing. When I travel, the first thing I ask the kids on the phone when I call home is, ‘What are you doing?’ Not because I really care that much about the show on TV, or the homework they’re working on, but because I care about the rhythms and activities of their days.”

• Bill de hÓra: Vocabulary Design and Integration
  There are two schools of thought on vocabulary design. The first says you should always reuse terms from existing vocabularies if you have them. The second says you should always create your own terms when given the chance.
• Loopster Makes Friends of Social Networks

Real estate magnate Samuel Zell’s offer for the Tribune Company was accepted last week. He’s supposed to be a smart guy, and must be since he became a billionaire as a real estate entrepreneur. So what are his plans for the second-largest newspaper publisher in the US?

Sell the Cubs is one idea. Dump the Internet tubes is another, according to the WaPo’s article Zell Wants End to Web’s Free Ride

In conversations before and after a speech Zell delivered Thursday night at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, Calif., the billionaire said newspapers could not economically sustain the practice of allowing their articles, photos and other content to be used free by other Internet news aggregators.

“If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” Zell said during the question period after his speech. “Not very.”

Both Zell and the WaPo reporters for this article seem to be a bit confused about the role of search engines like Google. I wonder what he makes of social media and user generated content?

• Sifry’s Alerts: The State of the Live Web, April 2007
  “Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we’re seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day.”

We’ll experience an embarrassment of riches in two weeks, with back to back talks by Richard Stallman and Jacob Slonim. Thank goodness it will be on a Friday!

Richard Stallman will talk about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement from noon until 2:00pm, followed by a talk (two floors up) by Jacob Slonim on research aimed at building a home, rich in technology, to help people age in place.