Life with the Twitterbots

Image from Digital Breezes.

ONE OF THE BEST time-wasting values of Twitter comes in the form of Twitterbots who follow me. They bring equal measures of absurdity and serendipity while reminding me the Twitterverse never sleeps.

Twitterbots are also one of the most public manifestations of creative creative programming. A clever Python coder can recycle ideas that can be leverage for-profit or for charity. Year ago, people might have moaned about getting spam in their e-mails but I don't hear the same strident objections from people when they glance at their timelines and see a few Twitterbots chatting at them.

In fact, I think you might conclude Twitterbots are merely evidence of modern automation. They show up when you're talking about coffee, holiday destinations or software. They are as harmful as graffiti sprayed on the side of hoarding alongside a busy highway. 

I'm sure Twitter will start to figure out ways of blocking the bots because in their current form, today's Twitterbots are riding inside the mainstream without paying for advertising time. But if Twitter starts to clamp down, they risk making this online conversation pit into a quieter, gentler place. And who wants that when you like bot such as Mark Sample’s My Favorite Things, which substitutes random words into Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics while still keeping the song’s rhyme scheme?

Tweets Reveal the Real You

 

[Bernie Goldbach asks, "Strange midsize amateurs, loomed up with sites? These are a few of my favorite kites".]

Rob Dubbin -- "The Rise of the Twitter Bots" in The New Yorker, November 15, 2013.

The Oxford Lane Snippets

Photo of Oxford Lane by @topgold.

I GOT A GLYMPSE of Oxford Lane and several interesting snippets along a laneway that remains invisible to Google Street view. I'm indebted to Liam Daly for sharing.

Until Liam sent me a Glympse of his Oxford Lane studio, I didn't have the Glympse app on my Sony Xperia phone. Years ago, I watched Liam cycle around Ireland, using Google Latitude to view his progress. Latitude has been relegated to a function inside Google Plus and until Glympse, I didn't have an easy way of seeing and sharing collaborative locations.

Latitude, like Foursquare, connected me to a smaller, tighter circle of people who shared with a focus. In my personal case, Latitude let me see how close I was to people and that facilitated real-time meet-ups. It had its weaknesses but worked years on Symbian before any related location apps emerged on iOS. I'm glad there's a fall-back in Glympse.

Then there is the real touch point of truly social meet-ups. Liam and I have watched the online social scene morph and change in Ireland. As Twitter approaches its IPO, we wonder what comes next. I think the next communication medium must be standards-based platform services as functional as e-mail. And I'm curious to find out if a follow-on Oxford Lane conversation might specify how that new communications plumbing will evolve.

[Bernie Goldbach snapped Oxford Lane and published this item with his Nokia Lumia while listening to chatter from #DalkeyOpen.]

Deconstructing Messaging Fundamentals

Photo of written work under @topgold's old electronic kit.

I HAVE A LONG relationship with a process that helps me create essential messages, starting with a simple black Moleskine and assisted by clever one-pass technology. I try to share the fundamentals of that messaging process with university students every autumn.

This year, I'm making a short Slideshare that builds on a metaphor of old skool (Ham Radio) messaging dynamics. I've a license from the FCC to operate upper sideband and single sideband in aircraft along with practical experience with the same. Running a message flow through new media isn't much different, if you break down the component parts. I hope my current crop of Media Writing students take my process to heart as we begin a fresh semester of work writing effectively for new media publication and syndication.

There's a short 20-minute presentation included with this blog post and the 33-slide deck flicks through several main points, exposing my preference for online tools such as Tumblr, Flickr, Audioboo and Google Plus.

To each, their own.

Messaging Fundamentals

Learned After Using LinkedIn for 10 Years

Screenshot of @topgold on LinkedIn.

I'VE LEARNED A LOT from LinkedIn since first dabbling with it in the fall of 2003. Back then, I couldn't find more than a dozen people in Ireland using it but today, I get more cost-effective interactions through it than time spent on Facebook--and there is much more cross-talk on Facebook than LinkedIn.

I remember hearing about an "online business network" (aka LinkedIn) during a year that I spent developing a design pattern that became an Irish patent. I was spending a year away from teaching duties and had the time to explore new frontiers. So I built my first identity on LinkedIn and watched nothing happen. Back in 2003, the happening space for me was the Irish Internet Association's Webmaster Shoptalk List. And then Boards.ie for some good dust-ups. Nobody in my immediate circle was using the kludgy forms-based LinkedIn system a decade ago.

It wasn't until 2007 that I started seeing LinkedIn's value as a placement mechanism. I was able to go directly to CTOs and CEOs with requests for summer internships needed by our students as part of their creative multimedia degree programme. Based on the connections I'd developed, I got faster results and placed more students than a full-time student services staff member accomplished.

Effective Social Activity Delivers Results

Photo of @jangles by @topgold.

I'M SHARING A WEALTH of knowledge about social activity streams with fellow educators in Limerick today and can't help but credit Neville Hobson (pictured) and Shel Holtz for showing me inside information about how effective communicators do their work. They produce For Immediate Release once a week and it's an essential listen.

Maths are part of the equation

Screenshot by @topgold of everyday physics.

I HAVE BEEN TEACHING social networking at third level since 2007 and I'm still trying to work out the maths. After chatting with fellow lecturer, Pamela O'Brien, I'm convinced maths are part of a well-rounded study of what we do online.

I'm not trying to comb applied mathematics textbooks to find equations that I can snap into place. No--I believe it is better to fit a mathematical model to the real world than to find a mathematical equation I understand and then attempting to shoehorn data into that equation. John Maynard Smith, the esteemed biologist who applied game theory to the study of evolution, once scathingly described such models as "theories looking for a question to answer."

But I do have a little maths envy when I see clever formulas used behind the scenes with Universal Analytics. Some of those formulas are very predictive and they help identify leading indicators for important metrics such as footfall. I rambled on about this kind of thought process in an Audioboo audio clip I've attached.

Maths are part of the equation

Tweets as Community Voice

Photo of Nationalist tweet shots by @topgold.

THERE IS OFTEN an authentic local voice in tweets coming from places nearby so when The Nationalist, our local paper, started publishing them, I was interested in what they said.

I sometimes wonder if people actually think before they tweet and I had that same thought when looking over the tweets in the snap from the paper. And because I know some of the back stories behind product placement and name dropping on tweets that run on the bottom third of TV shows, I've become somewhat jaded.

I have a list of students' Twitter accounts that occasionally show some streams of consciousness that wouldn't fit well in the context of a job interview. I save some of those unformed thoughts for private review sessions with folks who are often left with no option besides changing the name and avatar of their online personas after they soiled the first one. And often the second one too.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches social media for business in the creative multimedia degree programme at the Limerick School of Art & Design.]

Following @MagicRecs to see Social Graph

Screenshot of Realtime Recs by @topgold.

I OFTEN GET INTERESTING direct messages from Twitter when people I follow start doing the same thing. The information trickles in at regular intervals when Europe is awake, mirroring the demographic of those I follow.

#audiomo That's a Wrap

Screenshot from my Lumia 925.

I FINISHED #AUDIOMO this month with several lingering thoughts about social audio. In short, I think spoken content can sustain community initiatives.

You won't find more than an niche of people online who admit to subscribing to audio content as well as creating their own spoken responses to it. That's what makes the annual audiomo project more interesting for me. When I spend the time to set up a listening post as well as carve out the time to make my own contributions, I get real engagement.

It's engagement that extends beyond the month-long activity stream. In my case, I've audio subscriptions set up that extend before Leo Laporte had RSS audio feeds for his radio show. I've been listening to some of the same voices for more than 10 years now and I've two 250 GB hard drives that contain half-hour podcasts from the first semesters that I taught creative multimedia to university students. It's a genre that paved the way for broadcasters to extend their message (and their marketing reach) into the hundreds of thousands. Sponsor jingles and embedded messages crossed oceans and went into outer space, thanks to engaging audio clips.

A few special things happened to me during this month's audio activities. Because I committed to trying to make a five-minute contribution every day as well as to listen to a core group of 20 people offering their own audio, I had to give up listening to a dozen other audio subscriptions that were downloading all the time onto my iTouch. Now I feel behind in my professional listening. But a little voice inside my head suggested that because I took the time to hook up, listen and respond, I'd developed important and engaging professional contacts that should serve well into the future.

Audiomo2013

Playing TripAdvisor vs Foursquare

My shot of TripAdvisor in Cashel.

TRAVELING WITH GRANDPARENTS gives me an opportunity to see how intelligent electronic services like TripAdvisor and Foursquare can be when compared to printed brochures or well-presented street signage. All three deserve consideration.

For several years, I've searched for things like "coffee" or "kids" with Foursquare and then a very credible "explore" function appeared. I've also used TripAdvisor's "nearby" facility to scroll through options but the results seem slower to present on screen when compared to Foursquare. And then along comes Here City Lens which offers an augmented reality perspective on what's nearby for food, accommodation, shopping, going out, and sights. If I cross-reference City Lens to TripAdvisor and Foursquare, some rather compelling ideas emerge--and I avoid the embarrassment of trying to find imaginary venues that exist in both TripAdvisor and Foursquare.