Tamlyn

In August I posted about an emergent trend of sharing web addresses by quoting search terms rather than URLs. For instance the PM programme on BBC Radio 4 says “to find our blog, put pm blog into any search engine.” Since then I’ve noticed this pattern in a few other places.

I’ve updated the code that runs @trendingtopics. It will now tweet sooner, avoid duplicate tweets, ignore hashtags and add links to Wikipedia and Google where appropriate. My aim for this update was to be a bit more intelligent in what to tweet and when. I also wanted to show a bit more about the topic without having to read through a stream of tweets on a Twitter search page. This update goes some way towards those goals but I’ll be tweaking it more over the next few days so please let me know what you think, either here on or Twitter.

Update: here’s a technical description of how it all works.

Ever since I first heard about alternate reality games, I’ve been interested in the crossover of gaming ideas into the “real world”.

I came across a game called Akoha a few months ago that promises to use mission cards to encourage good deeds and interactions with new people. They recently made packs of cards available for a few dollars and mine arrived just before Christmas. However after looking at the concept in more detail I feel that they’ve misjudged people’s motivations for playing such a game and have therefore got the interaction model wrong.

There’s a great thread over on the IxDA mailing list discussing “As an interaction designer, how do you explain your work in social situations?” Here are my favourite answers.

Hopefully these PHP snippets can be useful to someone. The first function formats a number to a specified number of significant figures (this is different from rounding to a number of decimal places). The second function uses the first to display a number of bytes with appropriate human-friendly formatting. e.g. 12345B becomes 123kB (to three significant figures). 

I’d like to organise an informal gathering of Twitter users from Hackney and heareabouts. There’s a bunch of us living in the neighbourhood and i think it would be nice to get a proper introduction so we can put faces to the usernames. I was thinking the Pembury Tavern for a couple of drinks some time next week. Please let me know your availability and I’ll try and pick a day that suits everyone.

Update: We had the first Hackney Tweetup last Wednesday 3rd December at the Pembury Tavern. Thanks to @ollieRelph @monkchips @phoebebright @ewebber @hackneye @gradualist & @kuxi for making it a success. Keep an eye on the #twee8 tag for updates.

I’m planning a trip to North America this winter and I’ve just realised that not only will that mean I’m not very far from SXSW in March but I’ll be in Vancouver on the exact dates of Interaction’09 in February! My problem is that as I will be between jobs I would have to pay for these myself and at $425 and $699, respectively, they’re not cheap.

I wrote to East Midlands Trains last week to claim a refund for a cancelled train. Yesterday I received this reply:

The @trendingtopics Twitter bot tweets the topics that people are talking about most on Twitter. There’s also an RSS feed if you’re interested. It’s a very low tech solution and it’s not guaranteed to work but I find it quite useful.

Phew! It’s been a while. I actually compiled this mix back in May or June but didn’t get round to finishing it until now. Once again there’s no theme other than music I’m currently enjoying – or at least, was enjoying 4 months ago!