Tamlyn

I made the @trendingtopics Twitter bot to keep me and others up to date on the (often) interesting topics that are being discussed most across the Twitterverse. This is a slightly technical explanation of how it all works.

I’ve just discovered that my laptop touch pad has multitouch, it just needed to be enabled! There are two parts to this process and it will take a few minutes but it’s well worth it in my opinion.

This mix starts off a bit electropop then veers off into indie and other good stuff.

I just wrote a letter to my MP and thought it would be worth sharing here.

I’ve got a problem and I need some help. I’m building a semantic webby type thing where the web page you are viewing will be augmented with a menu showing other relevant info gathered from elsewhere using a clever algorithm which is already built. 

I’m sitting in a bungalow near a babbling creek surrounded by lush, green fields lined with evergreen oaks and nestled amongst rolling, tree-covered hills. This is California and I love it!

At least, this is part of California at a particularly wet time of year. I’m told that for most of the year the creek dries up, the grass dies back and there’s dust everywhere. But right now, where I’m staying in Dry Creek about 10 miles north of Santa Rosa, it’s really beautiful.

Four days of presentations, workshops & chats have drawn to a close. I’ve had a great time, learned a lot, met interesting people and leave full of ideas and enthusiasm. Full videos of every session will be posted up on the site in due course but in the meantime, here are some of my highlights.

This is mainly a 50s mix with a few tracks bleeding over into the adjacent decades. When I listen to this music I can’t help but bounce around with a grin on my face while my worries melt away. Try it – it’s better than prozac.

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.