see a puffin eat a fish

Twitter has personal/social/networking uses but lately i’ve been really digging its real time news and information capabilities. Simply put, if I want to know what is happening I type it into Twitter. Very quickly, with low overhead or commitment on my part, I find out what’s going on.

Case in point, i’m biking home late at night and find a 4 block perimeter around BAM surrounded by cops. Is there some kind of self indulgent awards show going on or did something awful happen that I should know about? The cops aren’t going to tell me, they’re all self important and coy. I ask Twitter by getting tweets referencing BAM within a 1 mile reference and immediately find out it’s the former. Tracy Morgan is hosting the hip hop honors. I move on.

Tonight, I hear explosions outside. We look out the window, fireworks in New York in the fall. What’s up? Again, I ask Twitter and find out the Manhattan bridge is 100 years old. Now I know why the fireworks are going off + I know a cool fact.

Before, what would I have done? Well I might have typed my keywords into Google news, but there’s lag there and a crazy amount of duplicate content from people cutting and pasting the AP news wire. Google news worked ok for big news stories but not much else. Or more recently I would have tried Google’s blog search, counting on reporters on the ground, but that was always tenuous at best. I’d rarely get the answer I was looking for and i’m a little unclear about Google’s indexing lag.

With Twitter I find out instantaneously what is going on. With so many people using Twitter my question is part of the minutia of someone else’s life. This is why Twitter works as a news source. When people ask ‘why would I care what some stranger had for breakfast?’ the reason one should care is aggregated and indexed, some stranger’s breakfast is some other stranger’s news source.

So here’s my new Firefox toolbar with Twitter search. From now on when I want to know what’s up, it’s up there in the right hand corner.

I’ve also wanted to use Twitter not only to find out ‘what was that explosion?’ but to also find out ‘what is the thing to do today?’ I don’t feel like those kinds of more open questions are as easy to answer, yet. There’s just too much noise and no clean way to segment the data to my preferences. Apps like foursquare are trying with their tips feature and that’s the right direction but there needs to be more there. Right now that kind of manual mining is too much overhead with very little reward. I’m sure it’s coming. For now i’m really excited about getting my news from Twitter. Out of all the social media noise, this is something that I find actually useful.

I’m doing a Pecha Kucha talk on GroundedPower for ITP’s 30th celebration (yay Red!). Pecha Kucha is a presentation format where you have 6 minutes and 40 seconds to show twenty slides. The slides auto advance every twenty seconds. If you fall behind, there’s no going back. For the presentation i’m doing next week, I found out that we’re going to be getting 15 seconds a slide, not 20! I’ve never put one of these together but it has been a really interesting learning experience.

I started out just putting a deck of slides together, keeping it to 20 and cramming as much information as I could in each slide. I did a run through and if a slide took too long, i’d shorten the amount of information on it until it took about the right amount of time. It was still a little frantic but I managed to say everything I wanted to say so I was happy.

Then yesterday, @faludi came by and I did a run through with an audience. From his feedback and suggestions I came to realize that although I was getting all the words I wanted into my deck, I was actually presenting a number of super complicated concepts without the time to provide them with the right context. So although I was finishing in time, I wasn’t being very effective and I was going to make people’s brains hurt.

There isn’t enough time with Pecha Kucha to tell a complicated story. We’re used to a slide having a lot of bullet points, but in fact with Pecha Kucha each slide should have one single, simple idea. The idea can be presented in a timed reveal to help you with pacing.

My new technique is to tell a very simply story with 10 slides instead of 20. Knowing myself and my tendency to cram as much as I can into a slide even when I consciously try not to, making only 10 slides gives me the wiggle room to expand upon each slide with 10 extra slides. Instead of feeling constrained by the format I found the 20 slide format liberating. I can concentrate on telling a simple story really well because there’s no room to do anything else. The power of limitations.

I’ve been going to the the various Web 2.0 Expo events happening around New York City this week (the Expo, Ignite, etc.) and yesterday I went to check out Fred Wilson’s keynote about the history and growth of New York’s web industry. Who should be his first slide but Red from 1979, launching ITP! Go Red!

My friends over at Botanicalls have been getting a lot of press including a very nice piece in Reuters. Recently there was also a writeup in a Russian paper which I attempted to translate. Here is a link to the original article. I want to thank my dad for helping me with the hard words. He said the words I didn’t know were old ones no one uses anymore. That was nice of him.

Flowers Tamagotchi

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Frequently during vacation season, when the wives leave for a week to visit the relatives, their loving husbands forget to water the flowers. And if the much loved matriarch returns from her vacation to the sight of the dead flowers, a fight is unavoidable. To help the very busy husbands not forget about their daily chores, the american company Botanicalls has developed an electronic system with which the flowers can themselves call the head of the house to remind him that it is time for the flowers to be watered.

The system is made up of several components that are either placed in the soil or on the leaves of the sensitive flowers. During this period it is important to tell the Botanicalls System which flowers it will be caring for. With the help of computer sensors that measure ground and air moisture and compare those values with expected values. All this information is sent to a single computer processor. If the computer decides that the flowers needs some attention, it will call on the designated phone number of the flowers’ owner. If the owner does not answer the phone, the flowers’ computer sends an SMS message and an email message to the owner.

Over time these communications will become more insistent and it will become impossible to overlook the flowers. After the flowers’ owners finally waters the flowers, he will receive a thank you call from the flowers. Watering flowers becomes a game similar to the Tamagotchi. The Botanicalls system will soon be available not just for one flower but for a whole winter garden or green house. Furthermore the system can be used on small farms to control soil temperatures in greenhouses. The price of the product and when it will come to market has not been announced.

Our spring show project, Distributed Surveillance Company, got a mention on NewTeeVee. We’re going to refine it and see if we can get it into a couple of festivals, I feel like it really has some legs. After all (according to Clay), Mark Cuban did suggest that we use public webcams to monitor nuclear reactors. Nothing like feeding off the irrational vigilantism that has permeated our paranoid culture willing to give up its rights for the illusion of safety. How about this for a tag line:”The distributed surveillance company. Think of it as SETI for your safety!”