[caption id=“attachment_1066” align=“aligncenter” width=“740” caption=“Some results from earlier today”]
[/caption] Generated by Twitalyzer If you were thinking of following me on twitter then this may help change your mind, or on the contrary encourage you. You may notice my generosity is zero. That’s because I don’t like RT as I think they pollute the timeline. By the same opportunity I have stopped following over 150 people on twitter.
Snowboarding is a fun and safe sport as long as you know what you’re doing. Occasionally of course we push the limits. A few years ago whilst snowboarding with someone around La Dole we decided that rather than go back down via St Cerque we would snowboard home by passing over the ridge and down the other side. For decades both us had hiked those slopes so we knew them well. I took one step and felt myself falling. I was face down in the snow and I called to the person I was with to know whether he could see me. He could, so I knew there was no problem. We both strapped our snowboards on and from that point we snowboarded down the slope. In Verbier a 29 year old Entrepreneur lost his life after falling from a cliff into a rive below, from a few articles I’ve read. The conditions are unclear at the moment. What is clear though is that the people did not have a proper contingency plan or experience of the mountains. If the conditions are adverse the last thing you want to do is go off piste, especially when you’re not with a local guide who knows the mountains. The reason I’m speaking about this particular story is that these people had some of the latest technology at their disposal. GPS enabled iphones and twitter, as is written in this article. If you’re lost in the mountains with this type of device you can get a geo loc within twenty meters of where you are. You can see a satellite view of where you are and you can see which way would be the best to get home. You can also stay put and let rescuers find you rather than attempt to make it back down. If your GPS location is within 20 meters it’s not that complicated to find two people. The other reason I’m speaking about this is that some of those who were part of the group were tweeting the adventure. One tweet speaks about the great time they were having and how they “finished the ski day due to complete whiteout”. The next is about the 2 people missing. Screen grabs of the tweets are here. This demonstrates the weakness of the iphone and the GPS functionality. With my phone whenever I go outdoors the GPS tracks my exact location within 20-60 meters. What this means is that if I go missing within a minute you’ll see exactly where I am if you’ve added me on Google latitude. On that note I’ve invited a few more people to follow me on google latitude. If you have an S60 Symbian phone maybe you could do the same, just as a backup. It’s a shame it had to happen to anyone, especially since that type of accident is easy to avoid. It’s even more of a shame that Hermioneway, whom I met at LeWeb in Paris is one of those that had to go through the experience. Switzerland is a beautiful country for all those that enjoy outdoors sports and beautiful landscapes so it’s a shame that it’s overshadowed by that event.
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var so = new SWFObject(‘http://www.main-vision.com/mediaplayer/player.swf','mpl','480','289','9'); so.addParam(‘allowscriptaccess’,‘always’); so.addParam(‘allowfullscreen’,’true’); so.addParam(‘flashvars’,’&file=http://www.main-vision.com/richard/video/nyonfeb500.flv&stretching=fill’); so.write(‘player’); Today I went down to the Nyon Lakeside to play with the camera to try it out. I watched the video playback and it looked fine. I saw some pixelation between a girl’s face and her hair when she was walking and some artefacts just around the people’s bodies as they move. That’s at 1440*1020, not full resolution. I’ll have to find time to do test at full HD quality during my days off. Please note that for monitoring I was using a 40" Sony Bravia and standing a few centimeters away. From a few meters back it looked fine. Videos in Nyon
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var so = new SWFObject(’/jw/embed/player.swf’,‘mpl’,‘640’,‘352’,‘9’); so.addParam(‘allowscriptaccess’,‘always’); so.addParam(‘allowfullscreen’,’true’); so.addParam(‘flashvars’,’&file=http://www.main-vision.com/richard/video/Nyonfeb.flv’); so.write(‘player’); Today I went down to the Nyon Lakeside to play with the camera to try it out. I watched the video playback and it looked fine. I saw some pixelation between a girl’s face and her hair when she was walking and some artefacts just around the people’s bodies as they move. That’s at 1440*1020, not full resolution. I’ll have to find time to do test at full HD quality during my days off. Please note that for monitoring I was using a 40" Sony Bravia and standing a few centimeters away. From a few meters back it looked fine.
Alex Leonard - Mar 0, 2009
I think the time sensitive point is a very valid one. Mico-blogs, whether twitter or Jaiku etc do not exactly lend themselves to ‘catching up’ and nor would you really want to, being that so much is relative to a particular moment in time.
You know me. I would rather read your blog and participate there, where it’s not time sensitive rather than on twitter where people don’t seem to have the time anymore.
As you know I’ve been working on unfollowing more and more people over the past few weeks because I felt I was missing the tweets by those who want to participate actively with me. The consequence is that I’ve found twitter to be more sociable once more. According to a recent article what I felt was the case has been demonstrated through research.
the number of total posts eventually saturates as a function of the number of followers. This implies that users with a large number of followers are not necessarily those with very large number of total posts.
Bernard Goldbach - Feb 3, 2009
I am waiting for the upgrade that lets me mark myself as a point of interest, then let the POI become a contact in my address book that can be texted to someone’s GPS unit and appear as a valid navigation destination.
Couldn’t you send a kml with that data?
Yesterday I met a friend in geneva. The one that uses Google Latitude. I used my mobile phone to see where he was and just using cell towers I got a pretty good fix on where he was, within just a few hundred meters. When I called him to get a more accurate fix, i.e. for him to input the address as his latitude position using the power of Google maps, latitude and 3g it took just a minute to find the actual address. For this reason I love google latitude. When you’ve got technologically savvy users it makes being geo-loced twenty four hours a day extremely useful.
Twitter is a multiplatform social chatroom that allows you to converse with people around the world from anywhere in near to real time. It is knowing a rapid growth and so here are a few guidelines to getting started. 140 Characters If you thought 160 characters for SMS were limited then this limit will be even more of a challenge. That’s nothing to worry about yet, for now all you need to do is create an account and tell us what you’re doing. Don’t make it to personal. Character building You can’t tell us everything about you in 140 characters so please don’t try, there’s no point. Instead tell us about something you’re enjoying right now. If it’s a nice sunny tell us something you like doing. A walk is enough. In a few hours time come back and tell us something else you’ve been doing. If you met someone interesting tell us broadly why you enjoyed meeting this person. This will help us establish whether we’re interested in following someone with your character traits. Don’t worry though, you won’t give that much away anyway. Who to follow Do you know any bloggers or personalities that you enjoy reading about? If so then add them but not too many. It’s fun to know what they’re doing but you won’t get much of a conversation out of them. Take a look at the timeline. Who is talking now. Who is having fun, who is doing something that you find interesting? If you find three or four people that you think may be interesting click on their name and look at their twitter timeline. Are there a lot of @ messages or a lot of links. If there are a lot of @ messages then this may be a good sign. It may mean this person is open for conversation with someone like you. If all they do is link to content then I would think twice about following them. There’s a good chance they are not passionate twitter users. They are simply feeding links without paying much attention to what is being said. For that you might as well use an rss aggregator and get their information that way. Are any of your friends adopting technology that you enjoy. See whether you can get them to join twitter with you. If you exchange messages with real life friends there are two benefits. The first is that you may be able to trust them. The second reason is that you can plan events with them, see what they’re doing without having to call them to find out. Another effect is that if groups other than just your friends do this there’s a chance several communities can emerge, and occasionly get together for meetups. Of course this means that you can plan on meeting certain people during events. If you know you’re going to a conference then see whether there’s a twitter stream, see if you can find out who’s answering to the stream. You may find some more interesting people. Applications to use There are three methods I would recommend using for accessing information on twitter. These are the web interface for when you’re on any computer other than your own, simply because it’s a fast and efficient way of getting to see what’s happening. When you’re not following that many people it also means you can watch the public view, scouting for new friends.The drawback is that this takes a lot of time. That’s where certain desktop apps come into play. One of those I recommend is Twhirl, and it’s not just because I’m a seesmic user whose met Loic several times by now. It’s because it fits in well when you’ve got a laptop. You can go about all your work whilst twhirl checks every three minutes whether there are new messages. It only tells you when there’s a new @reply. There are two benefits to this. The first of these benefits is that your mind is at ease, you’re not worrying about missing who wants to reach you because the software will fetch that automatically. The second reason is that you can quickly skim through the conversations that are taking place in real time. It’s not per keyword but don’t worry about this. Some people like to use tweetdeck but I do not recommend this solution. When you’re new to twitter you may only be following three or four people who are active at a time. As a result it’s very easy for you to keep track of conversations, even if six hours have elapsed. For more frequent users though they’ll get confused. Confused people are lazy. They won’t bother asking you what you were refering to. They will simply not answer. At first you’ll tell me that doesn’t matter, that you don’t care about not getting answers. Don’t worry though, after a while, and through personal connections being formed you will be dissapointed when friends don’t answer. Trust me, a lot of people feel that. Dabr.co.uk is my favourite mobile application and it works on all 3g phones. it’s a quick and easy way to keep up with all conversations and replies. I’ve already sent thousands of messages with it, still happy :-) Spring cleaning People’s tweeting styles change with time, and so do your expectations on what to get out of twitter. As a result you may be following twenty people who are local to you. When you move though your associations with them decay and after a while it may do you some good to unfollow them on twitter. you’ve still got facebook and their blog to keep up to date. Find new people that are active. As I said earlier if you see that some people are too self promotional then unfollow them, especially when they don’t respond to your replies. It makes a lot of noise on twitter if we have three hundred replies sent without conversations actually taking place. It’s frustrating for those that follow you. No automation On twitter automation is your enemy, never let anything be automatic. Remember that there are real people giving their time and attention to read your stream. If all you do is send links then they will lose their desire to interact with you. This includes Last.fm lists, google likes and dislikes and more. If you write a blog post a day then rather than send a link tell people you’ve just written a post because you were inspired by that topic. If they’re active at the same time as you they go to your profile and find the link. If they’ve been following you for a few months they type three letters and your blog will appear quickly. Conclusion Twitter is a conversational tool. The more time you put into being conversational with fellow users the more friendships you will establish. With these friendships you may gain from professional and personal relationships. When you trave you may find people to meet without being in solitude. You’re free to do what you want with twitter but the more of your personality you put forward the more you should gain.
International World Water Day is held annually on 22 March as a means of focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.
“After the Twestival hangover, how much money was raised for charity:water?” Source There are some events I don’t feel are really as chartable as they sound and twestival is one such event. I have absoluetely nothing against the charity they are raising funds for but I do question the ethics behind the events. Can you spot the word that I find is unfortunate? Hangover, that’s the word I think should never be used in this context. Here you are stating that you want to help a charity to raise funds for a charity but you do so through music and other events. Problem is you’ve got people drinking alcohol at the event.If they woke up the next day with a hangover then what value and what message did they get from the event? If I were to organise such an event, especially in London, then I would go to the Frontline club and see whether they know of any documentaries on the topic. I would attempt to get some people whose job it is to study the problem of water and get them to speak. In particulr I’m thinking of a session like the one concentrating on water at the World Economic Forum in Davos. They are specialists in relation to this topic. As a result they know what figures are important. How many litres of water does it take to produce one litre of biofuel for example. I don’t have the numbers on hand but they are impressive. For More information