From the monthly archives: April 2011
By Josh Davis
A couple people asked who was behind @Lblogs, so I thought I would use this post to lay out my thoughts behind why I created the account, and since I can’t keep anything short, a couple thoughts on curation.
For those who aren’t familiar with this Twitter account, Lblogs uses RSS feeds to post to Twitter the title of the blog post, a link to it and an @ reference acknowledging the author. All the blogs included are published in Lawrence.
Example tweet from LBlogs. Click on image to check out the hilarious Sandbar blog post referenced here
Twitter as RSS reader
Lblogs came out of my experiments with posting RSS/Atom feeds to Twitter. I have long looked for an RSS reader that would act like Twitter and show the most recent titles with links across all my RSS feeds as they are posted. I never found software that would accomplish this. But in the process I realized I could actually do better than what I originally wanted. I could feed all of the blogs I follow into Twitter.
I created a separate Twitter account, made it private and my main account @lawrenckslive was the only account that followed it. I then used external software to route all the RSS feeds I follow into this new account. In the two months I have been using this system, this RSS system has published over 7000 tweets, but I am the only person who views them.
RSS > Dlvr.it > Tweeted by Private Account > Viewable by @lawrencekslive
In the process of using this RSS system, I realized that curation can take many forms. The best is when someone is looking at information, chooses the the highest quality and shares it. But curation can be done on a less effective, but still useful level. That level is choosing blogs that have related or high quality content and them grouping them together on one account and publishing it.
By Josh Davis
Most of us know Moore’s Law: the number of transistors on circuit board will roughly double every 18 to 24 months. While this number has not held absolutely firm, it is the fulfillment of this prediction that has led to the exponential increase in processing power and storage of our computers. These computers have led to an increase in the amount of data that can be processed in any set period of time, but perhaps as importantly, it has led to the ability to create a small enough computer that it is always with you . . . the phone.
Online communications isn’t new, but the ability to never be more than a few seconds from the network has made it so we can communicate and express ourselves at any time.
If you are active on Twitter, you are likely to create in the range of 1000 “what’s happening” tweets or more appropriately “what’s happening, interesting or valuable” data points a year. Those 1000 tweets result in over 10,000 words. Those words can be linked to the time posted. If you include where you are tweeting from or use a social check in service like Four Square, your location is thrown into the equation. Even if you don’t share this information, there are ways to track locations in the photos you share. Follows, followers, retweets and @ messages then produce a social graph of who you are connected to.
With just those data points, the who, what, where, how and sometimes why, can all be determined. Every tweet might not provide that information, but with a click of a button and less than a second, all your Tweets can be examined with modern computers.
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