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Twitter “hashtags” (such as #www2008) have given users an easy way to tag Twitter messages or “tweets".

“Hashtag” convention has emerged from the Twitter user community and is not yet supported by Twitter itself (this was the case with @replies - a way to address other users and engage in conversations with them - which also emerged from users’ behaviour and only later was granted special handling by the microblogging service). This creates an opportunity for external services for using Twitter APIs to create websites for tracking conversations that use “hashtags".

#www2008 is a tag used by many participants of the WWW 2008 conference to tag their short messages. See below for some of these services which will show you twitter conversations and reports from the conference.

Hashtags: www2008 => http://www.hashtags.org/tag/www2008/

This site provides real-time tracking of Twitter #hashtags. It includes a nice “sparkline” showing the history of popularity of the given tag. This is an opt-in service and in order for your messages to be shown on it you must add @hashtags user as your contact on Twitter.

Summize Twitter conversation search => look for keywords www2008 and “www 2008″

Summize lets us perform keyword searches on Twitter conversations, updated almost in real-time. Using it you can find conversation missed by hashtags search. For example, when someone just used a phrase “WWW 2008″ or did not opt-in to hashtags search service.

There must be other services like this. It was interesting to follow conversations on Twitter and occasionally bump into other authors of short messages seen on Twitter. What someone could do now with these conversations (apart from reading them and maybe finding something interesting) is extract and visualize a community of Twitter message authors at WWW 2008.

“Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF” - XTech 2008 - Friday, May 9 at 9:00

XTech 2008 conference will te taking place in Dublin, Ireland next week (May 6-9, 2008). This XTech talk will describe how to combine lightweight Semantic Web vocabularies - SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) and FOAF (Friend of a Friend) - to enable data portability between social media sites.

In order to let users become owners of their own data hosted on multiple sites, portability between social media sites is required in terms of both (1) the personal profiles and friend networks and (2) a user’s content objects expressed on each site.

The Data Portability initiative, which outlines the main priciples behind such portability, lists RDF as one of the open standards that can be used for porting users’ data and social networks. But this is a very general claim since RDF is a flexible, low-level data format that can express almost anything and you still need to choose [a small number of] vocabularies that can describe the domain you are interested in. This is where SIOC and FOAF come into play:

• The FOAF vocabulary allows us to represent people and their social networks, providing the social network component of data portability. It can be used in a combination with the the OpenID identity system.
• The SIOC vocabulary is an open format for expressing information about user-generated content in an interoperable way. It provides the content object component of data portability. The SIOC Types module can be used to further specify different types of Social Web / Web2.0 objects that we may want to describe.

As an experiment you can try importing data created by one of SIOC export plugins (look at a list of over 45 SIOC-enabled applications to see what tools are available for your social media platform) with the SIOC import plugin for WordPress. In order to make it more interesting use a social media site other than WordPress as a source of SIOC data. See you at XTech!

More information:

• XTech 2008 - Dublin, Ireland - May 6-9, 2008 (registration still open)
• Data Portability initiative
• Great videos: John Breslin on Data Portability and “Get Your Data Out” song by Danny Ayers

Dict: Sweding (swē-ding) = To re-make something from scratch using whatever you can get your hands on.

Recreating movies from scratch with whatever we can find, we bring the joy and hilarity of movie magic back to life.Born out of the mispronunciation of “sueding” (as in fake leather) by French director Michael Gondry, sweding’s roots lie firmly in the movie industry. …

This is a beautiful Torchwood episode 2x13 “sweded” by a group of geeks during the “Over The Air” conference in London in April 2008.

Film and actor crew consists of people such as Ewan Spence, Matthew Cashmore and Tom Morris (also seen at other cool events, e.g., HackDay London or BlogTalk Cork). Great work! And very entertaining.

The “swede” is very much inspired by the movies “Be Kind, Rewind” and “Son of Rambow” (and also had a Monty Python reference). One of pages on the web mentioned that all this “hack” was created within 1 day (or 24 hours?) but I can not find that web page any more.

There’s more information about sweding and this particular hack on Torchwood Swede blog. A HD version and outtakes from the production process can be found here: http://www.vimeo.com/sweded

Related news:

The next episode of Doctor Who (which Torchwood is a spin-off of) will air on BBC 1 today at 18:45 (a little more than 45 min from now, since time zone of this blog is +2h). One could just wish for it to be available on BBC iPlayer outside the UK too.

Space Shuttle can get very hot during re-entry into atmosphere. So hot (almost 3000 F or 1650 C) that the air around the orbiter is turned into glowing hot plasma.

Here’s how it looks from inside the Space Shuttle during re-entry (see the video). At start it is too bright outside to see any colors - they are washed-out, then at ~1 min into video you start to see orange-yellowish color of the glow:

On Flickr you will find a computer generated image of how an orbiter might look when coated in plasma - see “Shuttle returns” (flickr.com).

It points to some more YouTube videos such as this: “NASA Shuttle Endeavour Re-Entry Video”. Those Shuttle cockpit view videos rock!

Drew McCormack writes in “The Ideal Software Bundle for Scientists?”:

“Software bundles like MacHeist have become a regular feature of the Mac landscape of late. There are plenty of good deals to be had, and plenty of discussion about the ethics of such bundles. But leaving all that aside, what would be your ideal bundle for science?

Here’s the list I came up with: OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, Bento, TextMate, Papers, DataPlot, GraphClick, Scrivener

That comes to a total price of around $400. Give me that for $50, or even $100, and I would be a very happy — and productive — scientist.”

(see comments to Drew’s blog post for more suggested applications)

I would love to see such a bundle. Currently I am still exploring what software to use on a Mac, and trying to use open-source and cross-platform software, but there are some Mac-only applications that are hard to beat.

My bundle wishes include: OmniGraffle, DEVONthink Pro (plus DEVONagent), reference management software (Bookends or Papers), a text editor (TextMate, also wondering about Mellel), an outlining application (Process³ or OmniOutliner), Scrivener.

Some other interesting software yet to explore: EagleFiler (archive and search mail, web pages, PDFs, chats, and more), Curio (note taking, mind mapping, brainstorming, and project management), CopyWrite (a project manager for writers of all kinds).