How to block pamripley on Twitter

I recently saw some accounts on Twitter basically spamming people via the @reply mechanism. Here’s an example: (Note the #FF – Follow Friday – love) It’s a bit of an annoyance, nothing more. Someone wanting to gain followers by showing the fake #FF love and promoting a link to site. If you manage multiple accounts [...]

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MIT on Twitter

Below is an unofficial list of Twitter accounts run by on-campus entities. If you know of one that’s missing, please let me know so I can add it to the list. Note: The MIT News Office curates an official list of MIT Twitter feeds. Their list is more comprehensive and has descriptions for each feed. [...]

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An example of hyper-local and real-time web

I’m on the number 1 bus, Mass Ave. from Boylston to the Orange Lime T. Checking Twitter I see a friend is at the Ben Fold’s show at Boston’s Symphony Hall; it’s on the route. As we pass by the symphony, a mother, remarking on the un-symphony like crowd says: “who’s playing tonight?” She picks [...]

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3 Things Slate Does Very Well

1. The Explainer Column “Answers to your questions about the news.” Top-notch analysis; crispy clean copy. Ex. “What’s ‘Unlawful Sexual Intercourse’? — And other questions from the Explainer’s Roman Polanski roundup.” 2. The Slatest The read the news so you don’t have to. 3. News Dots Visualizing the relationship of trending news topics. If someone [...]

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A Wedding Wordle Visualization for KimE

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Wordle visualization of my Tweetstream

Inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s post, I created a wordle visualization of my Tweets. Tweets were retrieved using this python script. Then I ran the output through this sed filter: sed s/\<[^\<]*\>//g tweets > tweets.txt The result:

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Explaining Twitter (or trying to, at least)

Every few weeks at work we have an editor’s brown-bag lunch to share information, leads, story ideas and sometimes a technical skills-share. A while back I gave a presentation on RSS, how publishers are using it and how we might get started with it (both publish and subscribe-side). Today I had the unenviable task of [...]

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Randomizing a list of 25 things using Python

I got tagged in the oh-so popular “25 Random Things” meme on Facebook. To make a point that I sometimes think in code and I don’t think its weird, I wrote the script below to randomize my list before I posted it. import random f = open(’25-things.txt’) list = f.readlines() “”"Magnus L Hetland’s solution http://bit.ly/uN4iq”"” [...]

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“Democratizing Data” W. David Stephenson’s talk at IgniteBoston 5

David’s keynote presentation at Ignite Boston last night shows examples of the power data transparency, portability and ubiquity can transform government, workplaces and lives. (This video is very shaky at times. I forgot the tripod, its hand-held above a crowd, 20 minutes.)

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Salesforce.com is not a substitute for communication

I recently received a nice, polite, relevant email from an account exec. who works for a Social Media company. No surprise there, a few weeks ago I went to a networking event this company was a sponsor. Nothing to weird right, they sponsored a great event, making it very affordable for a bunch of interesting [...]

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