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.

Below are the left over slides for my twenty slide talk. I like them but they are trying to be too clever and they take way too long to read. Wanted to put them up anyway because I like them!

Smart Meter

Smart Appliances

Demand Response

Lord Kelvin Kool-Aid

Smart Meter

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.

Our first bear experience out in the country, they must be wandering around, stocking up for the winter. We came back to western mass to find our shed door wide open and Anna’s work kit upturned. We’d assume it was a vandal, we’re city people after all, but we noticed the hook was bent out of shape and covered in scratch marks. The shed wasn’t locked, all a person had to do was lift up the latch.

Then we noticed the scratch marks at the top of the door, someone was trying to rip the door off and then managed to get the latch open.

We went over to ask our neighbors and they said the bears go for the birdseed, some of which we (think) we had in the shed. Unless it was some other edible we forgot about. Or don’t consider an edible, like makeup from Anna’s kit.

My company, GroundedPower announced the release of snapshots yesterday. Our customers are using snapshots to take notes on their energy consumption, compare their usage with others and submit interesting data sets to experts for review. It’s a really neat way to keep track of how far you’ve come in energy savings and see how your appliance usage changes through the seasons. Does the fridge cycle less when there’s more food in it? Does your water heater cycle less in the summer? Does your water heater use more or less energy than other people’s? What’s that weird spike at 4 in the morning? All of these questions and more are being answered using the snapshot tool. Here’s one of mine:

These are the kinds of interactions that are possible when real time consumption data is available. For example, uou can turn on all of your lights in the house, take a quick snapshot and then send your family members a bill for how much they are costing you when they don’t turn off the lights A level of timely interaction is lost with day behind or even 15 minute interval data.