The Internet

The Retweet Correction

December 18th 2010, 10:12am

I’ve got an idea for how Twitter should fix the reweet.  Currently there are two ways to reweet (ie repeat a twitter message to share it with your followers) and both are widely used.  This post is not about my personal preference (though for the record I agree with this) but about how to fix the problem that using two different systems amplifies the disadvantages of both.

Briefly, the advantages of the old style reweet is that you can edit to add your own comments.  The advantages of the new style reweet is that you can see the provenance (seeing exactly what was originally said, and when).  You can see who has retweeted you either way (through @replies for the former, through a less obvious dedicated “your tweets, retweeted” page for the latter).

The old style reweet is low-tech: stick RT @originatorsname in front of their tweet, or have your favourite client do that for you.  The new-style was developed by Twitter supported by dedicated API methods.  There’s no way of stopping people using the low-tech old way (and quite right too, since I prefer it) but equally Twitter are unlikely to remove their new version and it’s when both are used that you get the kind of compound disadvantage that is greater than the sum of its parts – for example, a tweet new retweet of an old retweet cannot be traced by the original tweet’s author.

Twitter should evolve their new retweet “feature” into a successor to the old manual retweet which delivers the benefits of the new – essential combining them.  They should do this in much the same way they’ve evolved the user-generated @reply functionality, where building on the convention that replies begin with @usernames they also allow the reply to include a reference to the tweet it is a response to.

Allow us to do an old-style retweet in the sense of quoting the text (allowing us to edit and augment) but include a reference to the original tweet.

Developers would be able to build on the API to allow users to see both the edited and the original tweet, allowing the conversation to develop whilst revealing its provenance. Rather than just seeing a list of who retweeted, originators would be able to see a timeline could showing how the conversation had developed.  And by combining this with the conversation threads the extant reply links allow, developers could present visualisations that map an original tweet with both all the retweets, and the conversations they developed.  This would unlock the value in the connections that retweeting creates.

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Macintosh, The Internet

Add Geotagging to Your Non-GPS Camera

March 5th 2009, 08:03am

Once in a while something comes along that is so cool that you can’t believe it.  When Martin Varsavsky blogged about an SD card that included wi-fi I was impressed, but when I read that it can also add geotags to your pictures using wi-fi skyhooks (as the iPhone does, when not using GPS) I had to check the date.  It’s not April yet. How do they get all this functionality onto such a small card?  (It can also upload to photosharing sites via hotspots.  Oh yes, and it has up to 4gb of memory.  Currently pre-ordering at $99.)  

There’s a rumour of an Apple iPhone service that will pass iPhoto your movements and sync those with your pictures to add geotags taken on cameras that don’t support them; iPhoto ’09 and its Places features makes whichever solution actually materialises first something of an essential upgrade for your kit.

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Macintosh, The Internet

Sync Apple Address Book With Googlemail (and no iPhone)

July 31st 2008, 06:07pm

I’m late to discover this, but those lucky iPhone users have not only got that gorgeous hardware to play with, they can also sync their address book contacts with gmail while the rest of us can’t.

Well, actually we can, though it needs a bit of fiddling in terminal as described in this useful hint. But I mean, really, Apple, what the hell?

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The Internet

Weirdness at Amazon.co.uk

April 15th 2008, 06:04pm

I could swear earlier today it had changed to the style of the American site. I could swear because there was a little link advertising the site redesign and offering a tour. I took a little look round, and decided I like the old UK version better.

That version is now back, it appears to me. What’s going on?

Well, it seems a new version has been appearing intermittently since at least October – see here – but that’s even more odd. What are they doing, why are they waiting, are they going to think better of it? Or is there some preference I can (and have inadvertently) set to see the old version?

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News and Current Affairs, The Internet

Open Source Nonsense

February 17th 2008, 03:02pm

I know these are two-a-penny, but… A well respected journalist of many years’ standing wrote last week in the Guardian that “as we all know, many Wikipedia entries are just rubbish”. I won’t dispute this (though “as we all know” is lazy). What tickles me is the implication that whilst it is “grappling with an underlying and often inflammatory problem…that of quality control” papers like the Guardian have got this sorted, and would never allow a journalist’s ignorant assertion that “the best known Linux application is Wikipedia” to go to print.

Oops.

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The Internet

iTunes vs. Play

February 13th 2008, 08:02pm

I’ve been waiting patiently (well, almost patiently) for Amazon to launch UK downloads without DRM. Given that they’ve done it in the US and got all the major labels on board, it looks like they’re going to get there ahead of iTunes (whose interface I like, but Amazon’s better on DRM and price). But maybe it won’t be Amazon who get there first…
play.com is now offering EMI downloads at 65-70p per track (generally undercutting 7 digital which also offers the EMI tracks) and, according to Guardian Technology expect the other three labels to join within the year, which may give them the edge on iTunes (and Amazon haven’t even left the starting blocks).

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Macintosh, The Internet

BBC Radio Shows on your iPod

October 7th 2007, 10:10am

The BBC’s selection of Podcasts is growing (slowly), but if you want to listen to most of their shows you’ll be glued to your computer because they’re still only streamed in Read Audio.

Unless you know a way to grab Real Audio streams and stick them on your iPod. I’ve used the following method to get “listen again” streams for shows I’ve missed. It’s a two step process: you need to download the Read Audio stream and then convert it.

  1. Grab the stream with the nifty CocoaJT. Go to Recorder>Record A Stream. You can find the address whilst listening to the programme by using the Real Player application rather than the browser plugin (click the “Listen using stand alone Real Player” link in the BBC Radio Player window) and then going to Window>Clip Info.
  2. Encode the stream to an iTunes format with ffmpegx, having followed the preliminary steps (needed to get it to handle Real Audio correctly) as outlined in this handy macosxhints.com hint.

Happy listening.

6 Comments »

Doctor Who, The Internet

Internet Time Travel

May 9th 2007, 11:05pm

Episode 8 of the current Doctor Who (ie. the one after next, which itself is almost two weeks away because of pesky Eurovision) is called Human Nature, rather like the book by its author, Paul Cornell. Even though I’m steering clear of spoilerous forums, I have concluded there is a possibility that the episode may be an adaptation of the book (the first such Doctor Who adaptation, as far as I’m aware).

The BBC have published several Doctor Who ebooks on their website including Human Nature but it’s gone! There’s a message: “Human Nature will return, in more ways than one, in a few weeks… “ which rather confirms the adaptation theory, but is driving me up the wall!

I have a general principle with adaptations that I will read the original first (thus a film of a book I like to see after I have read the book). I might have let this one go, had I not had the opportunity to read it, and then had it snatched away. If only I’d saved the files to disk when they were available. So I begun to search… Maybe someone else had, and would be offering them for download? I tried to use Google’s cache (but it wasn’t complete). Eventually, thankfully, I found an old web archive: effectively the internet’s time machine allowing you to go back in time to when they were available and get them again. So I will get to read it before it’s on the TV.

On the internet, then, everyone can be a Time Lord.

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Technology, The Internet

eMusic vs allofmp3 vs iTunes

August 14th 2006, 11:08pm

Legal free music download service eMusic launched in the UK last week, offering tracks free of digital rights managements (DRM). I don’t know what will happen to allofmp3.com in September so I thought I’d take advantage of eMusic’s free 25 track trial. Although eMusic is pricier and almost certainly has a smaller catalogue, I searched for a couple of moderately popular jazz musicians as a test of the kind of music I’d want to buy.

iTunes allofmp3.com eMusic
Price per track 79p $0.05 approx 17p-23p
No of Stacey Kent Albums 5 2 5
No of Humphrey Lyttelton Albums 3 0 1
Format 128k AAC Almost anything VBR MP3

iTunes has the edge still in terms of ease of use, but has two drawbacks: price and DRM. 79p per track for downloads still makes lots of albums more expensive than buying on CD, and although the DRM is unobtrusive, and fine if (like me) you have an iPod, music you buy you should be able to keep when you move to different hardware/software.

eMusic is still easy to use with a nicely designed website and (this is where it has an edge over other competitors) it has a download manager available for Windows and Mac which is easy to install, configure and use. And although its subscription model is expensive for the occasional buyer, with albums costings around £3 the prices will suit regular downloaders.

I don’t know whether I will subscribe after the trial, but on first showing I’m tempted. Incidentally, if you are considering joining, email me and let me recommend it to you. I’m wouldn’t actually recommend it (yet), but if you’re going to join anyway, there’s 50 free downloads in it for me, so why not? And, incidentally, if you do get some Humph, the album common to both eMusic and iTunes, Georgia Mae, which I hadn’t heard of, has a distinctly groovy New Badpenny Blues, guaranteed to annoy the traditionalists and very enjoyable.

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Macintosh, The Internet

Picasa Web

August 11th 2006, 02:08pm

To friends who are trying to use Windows as their primary operating system, owning a digital camera can be a pretty unrewarding experience if you rely on the software that comes with your camera (using a Mac with iPhoto you’ll never get round to putting the Camera manufacturer’s CD in your machine). To them, I recommend Picasa, an reasonably good iPhoto clone which comes free from Google.

Now Google have launched Picasa Web and even better an iPhoto plugin for the Mac users. This is Google doing it right: at Google labs there is a Linux beta version of Picasa which has been developed using a customised version of Wine and offers almost all the features of the Windows version. They’re making sure they are including users of all platforms.

So, I thought I’d install the plugin and give it a try, and in so doing I’ve posted half a dozen pictures from my trip to Scotland last weekend:

Aug 11, 2006 – 6 Photos

Uploading was extremely slow, but the web albums look really good (far better than the static pages iPhoto posts to .Mac, if you have it). You can resize and zoom in on the photos, there’s a slick slideshow function and an RSS feed. And as well as uploading from iPhoto, you can fully manage your albums through the web interface: uploading, reordering and reorientating. Very promising.

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