Steam Punk Beta Tweet-O-Meter

As regular readers will know our Tweet-o-Meter features tweets per minute within a 30km area of New York, London, Paris, Munich, San Francisco, Barcelona, Oslo, Tokyo, Toronto, Rome, Moscow and Sydney.

Ben Blundell, here at CASA, has taken some time off from our TOTeM project and has hooked up a series of panel meters to the script via a custom arduino module. The result is a suitably 'steam punk' version of Tweets per minute in New York, London and Paris. We would of hooked up Munich but ran out of meters:

Analog Tweet-O-Meter from Benjamin Blundell on Vimeo.

All it needs now is a brass case and an 'on/off' handle...

Currently in beta and part of our wider 'Ask' tool it allows anyone to 'mine' data from Twitter or carry out a survey of either the world, a continent, a nation, a city or a local area. In short, we think it has notable potential for social science and the analysis of trends and relationships in a variety of areas.

We have run various beta tests on data collection with the main mining process starting next week over a 24 hour period. We aim to collect all tweets with a geo-location tag in the above cities, this is a large amount of data allowing various social, spatial and temporal analysis to be carried out.

The system is under development here at CASA as part of a wider survey tool as part of the NeISS project being coded by Steven Gray in association with Urban Tick, currently carrying out analysis on the data sampled so far.

See http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/tom/ to view the Tweet-o-Meter, we should have some early analysis soon and graphs for the cities within the next day or so. For those too young or perhaps simply nostalgic for the late 70's/early 80's hit that inspired the work, here is PopMusik via YouTube (its great...).

Thanks go to Ben and Steven for their work on this - see Bens http://www.section9.co.uk/, and Stevens http://stevenjamesgray.com/ for more info on their work both inside and outside of CASA time. Thanks also go to Russ Garrett (russ.garrett.co.uk/) and the London Hackspace for help with the code.

Writing: OmmWriter - Write those Posts/Papers Quicker...

A post of a slightly different flavour this morning (bare with us), as recently we have been churning out the words for various papers/reports and it got us thinking. Writing, as i think we all know, can be hard at times and the cold yet cluttered look of many word processing packages can make writing the latest scientific paper a laborious process. After all if you have a wide screen monitor and a browser with your word processor of choice side by side, it is only two clicks away from facebook, twitter, YouTube or any google search in the name of research. As such i thought i would write a quick post about OmmWriter, a new kind of word processor that somehow takes away the distractions, presenting a full screen experience without any icons or clutter in sight. In fact the only thing i can see at the moment, as i type, is a winter scene and a tree lost in mist at the bottom right of the screen – such is the interface.

While your typing OmmWriter also plays gentle calming music, its all very new age and to be honest something we would normally run a mile from. Its certainly a long way from the ethos that is all things digital and urban.



Yet, there is something strangely compelling about the whole experience, sure it cant help with the content but for anyone wishing to find a new way to write i heartily recommend taking a look at OmmWriter. It is available free of charge, currently only for the Mac but a windows version seems to be in the works. If they could just put an image of the city in the distance...

Google Buzz Layer on Google Maps: The InfoCrowd

Google has just announced 'Google Buzz' a social networking tool similar in some ways to Twitter but with location brought to the forefront. You can quickly add your location to your 'buzz' and its viewable on a map. Of note is the 'buzz layer' in the new Google Maps app that allows you to see whats going on in a location via the local information provided by the users using buzz - the InfoCrowd:

Interesting and big enough to cause an upset in the current social networking scene, also powerful enough to change the way we view information about the city.

Visit buzz.google.com from your phone's mobile browser to start using buzz.

Washington Snow Timelapse

Created with a Nikon D200 capturing a picture every 5 minutes between 5-6 February in DC the timelapse below by amandareckonwith over on YouTube shows the weight of snow that fell:

The difference between our own timelapse of London Snow (captured using an iPhone) showing the heaviest snow in 18 years is stark:


iPhone Timelapse Sample 2 from digitalurban on Vimeo.
Thanks go to Dr Yechezkal Gutfreund of the Draper Laboratory for sending us the link. 

Fotografic Memories: Memories, Music and Timelapse

Photographer Salman Ashrafi notes that in today's world, depending on what we do, we rarely find the time to just sit and observe everything that goes on around us. His movies, known as 'Fotografic Memories' represent Salmans' work to make up for this loss of time and we really like his technique of combining frames with timelapse and music as the first example below of Toronto demonstrates:

Downtown Toronto from Fotografic Memory on Vimeo.

The technique and concept can be adapted to any situation - below is the 'memory' of a bus ride in London comprised of 738 photographs:

BUS RIDE from Fotografic Memory on Vimeo.

Finally, Building and Clouds - Dubai:

BUILDINGS + CLOUDS from Fotografic Memory on Vimeo.

For more memories and information see fotograficmemory.com, it is well worth taking the time to explore the other work and clips on the site.

Fiverr - like Etsy, but for services

Fiverr is a new open marketplace for buyers and sellers of services.

Sellers offer a particular service that they will carry out for $5.

Examples include anything from proof-reading a CV, to creating a simple website, to creating an 'Avatar' style pic from a photo, to help in filling out immigration forms, to burning an effigy of your enemy.

I imagine that if you had a particular skill like photoshopping, and some creativity in selling a specific task you could make a reasonable amount of money. (Last night there were some 'nude photo' type offers, but they seem to have been removed now. The site owners need to police it to keep these sorts of listings off it. Although no doubt an Adult services version would be phenomenally popular)

It's effectively like Etsy, but for services. The idea that everything costs $5 is inspired, because it's a good way to get a taster of whether someone is genuine and does a good job. Once you're in touch with them after the first job, I'm sure more complex projects can be discussed.

It's also a bit like Mechanical Turk, Amazon's crowdsourcing platform, where you can recruit people to tasks like tagging huge numbers of photos, but more fun and interesting.

Update - and here's an 'Andy Warhol' version of a picture of me, made by Shirley for $5.

MGMT stream leaked album

It's one way of dealing with piracy... Since discovering that their new album, due for release in mid-April, was widely available on torrent sites, MGMT have posted it on their site for people to listen to, making it clear that the version for sale have a much higher sound quality.

Listen legally here.