Archive for June, 2010
Culture Grid and Open Data.
Jun 30th
Last night I attended the monthly Dorkbot event at the Centre For Life. As usual there were lots of fascinating talks about a range of subjects, from building a virtual model of Newcastle and Gateshead in Second Life to modeling the Tyne & Wear Metro system in real time in Google Earth. Geek cool at it’s very best.
One particular topic was especially interesting. John Coburn and Mike Hirst presented an overview of “Culture Grid”, a project designed to open up data held by museums and archives across the North East. They were interested in what people might be able to come up with given free reign to search through what data has been made available so far.
My interest was piqued.
So this morning I fired up PHP and pointed it at the Culture Grid API. Easy stuff really, Culture Grid uses an SRU mapping over Apache SOLR so it’s all fluffy and standards compliant. Only… no. Things are never that straightforward.
The first problem is a woefully bad set of documentation. There’s a single PDF that essentially just lists the available fields that the API can return. A couple of example URLs are included, but they’re obvious. That’s all the help you’re going to get. There are no code samples, no libraries for common languages, and apparently no forum or community to turn to to access what’s been worked out so far. Admittedly the service is very new so there’s been little time to build up any following, so perhaps that’s forgivable at this stage in the project.
That wouldn’t be such an issue if the data that’s returned by the service worked with the tools we have available. The XML returned by Culture Grid won’t parse with LIBXML (eg PHP’s SimpleXML wrapper). This is a significant problem for anyone either relatively new to coding or who doesn’t want to dedicate a some amount of time to coding something that will work with it. It is accessible in a very basic way by stripping out the “:” namespace separator in all the XML tags, but the resulting XML tree isn’t very useful either. The API accepts an XSL stylesheet, so it should be possible to write a set of transformations that will massage what comes out into something that can be parsed by PHP, but that’s not going to be much fun.
I think it’s unlikely anyone is going to bother unless they can think of something that’s important to them. Playing with the data just isn’t going to happen unless it’s presented in a better format to start with. As it is, because I’m interested in using the data, I’ve cobbled together some code to parse one of the examples into a standard PHP array; http://www.usrlab.com/code/culturegrid.phps . Note that this is a very rough and ready script. It’ll need a lot of work before it’s actually usable. Feel free to build on it.
This case highlights the biggest problem facing all Open Data initiatives. If the data isn’t in a format that someone can easily access then it’s going to lie fallow, unused and unexplored. As part of Compare The Members I’ve seen lots of mashups that use some of the data sets opened up by the government as part of the push towards a move transparent government. It’s notable that the more accessible the data is, regardless of how interesting or controversial it is, the more people will make something out of it. Ease of access is paramount.
One Month Until Webdurance
Jun 15th
There’s just a month until the North East’s first charity web hackathon, Webdurance. The anticipation is building. If you’re not aware of the event, it’s a 24 hour website building challenge in which volunteers, including myself, get shut away in a big room and produce complete websites for 6 local charities. And we drink lots of coffee. And eat cakes.
Almost without exception charity websites are a dreadful mix of application produced HTML (eg Frontpage) that’s completely opaque to search engines, poorly executed and illogical navigation, and “clever” features that don’t actually work. Consequently the mentality of charity organisers has often been a combination of fear and trepidation when they’re tasked with redeveloping the charity’s online presence. With a tiny, often non-existent, budget it’s incredibly hard to get the most out of what the web can potentially bring to a good cause.
This is what Webdurance is going to change.
Organised by the brothers behind the brilliant North East time and expenses tracking start-up 1DayLater, Paul and David King, with help from PR whizz Ester Laverick et al, I think it’s going to be a turning point in the online life of the charities involved. There’s no good reason why the North East’s pool of very capable web talent can’t create some amazing software in a day. I’m excited.
The event itself should be an interesting exercise too. Being thrown into a new team, developing your communication and team working skills, and showing off your coding, illustration or copy writing skills sounds brilliant to me. I’m sure management theorists would throw terms like “adhocracy” out to describe what will result. Will it be that organised? It’s going to be a laugh finding out.
If you haven’t signed up already please do. It’s a worthwhile way to spend a day. Plus, there’s cakes.
Hashtags – A short user guide.
Jun 11th
Hashtags, those words on Twitter preceded by a ‘#’ symbol, enable all of us in the Twitterverse to organise and categorise our tweets in to neat folders of related content. They’re used for all sorts of things, from current affairs to talking about important issues to discussing a television show to, well, anything really.
They’re very handy indeed.
So how do you, the Twitter user, use hashtags? They’re simple, but as with everything simple, they’re quite easy to get wrong. And the penalty for getting it wrong could be disastrous. You might annoy your followers, you might look rather silly, worst of all, you might be labeled a spammer and get your Twitter account blocked. So here’s a short guide to using hashtags.
- Search before you create.
Anyone can make a hashtag. Just think of a word or a phrase, pop a ‘#’ symbol before it, and tweet away. There are a couple of rules about the tags themselves; they can’t have spaces or punctuation marks in them, and it’s best to keep them reasonably short so they don’t waste valuable characters, but other than that the world is your oyster. But make sure you search for the hashtag before you use it. If someone else is using the same tag for a different subject people are going to get confused.
- Don’t make too many new tags.
Hashtags are useful for organising tweets into logical groups so that people who aren’t following one another can see all the tweets about that subject. That means they’re only really useful for tweets that will be of interest to a wide range of people, and that will get a response from that group. While it might be fun to have a hashtag of your very own that you use in every tweet, it’ll annoy your existing followers. That’s not what you want.
- Keep it relevant.
When a hashtag gets popular, perhaps even to the point of becoming a trending topic, it’s tempting to add it to all of your tweets so the group of people who’re following it see all that you’re saying. There’s a problem with this. Someone searching the hashtag timeline will see Tweets that have nothing to do with the hashtag topic. That makes your tweet look like spam to someone who doesn’t know you – it’s not a relevant tweet so you must just be spamming the trending topics. People may be tempted to hit that “Report as spam” button.
- Move at the pace of the hashtag.
When an interesting topic pops up in your timeline with it’s very own hashtag you might be tempted to tweet about it quickly. Perhaps you’ve got lots to say. But check the hashtag timeline first. Some tags have lots of people tweeting about them so they move very quickly. If that’s the case then you can use it as often as you like. Other tags move much more slowly though, and if that’s the case you should beware of using it too much. Someone searching for the tag and seeing lots of tweets from you in the last hour and none from anyone else won’t join in the discussion. Over using the tag will kill it.
This short guide springs from the use of, and subsequent complaints about, the #NEFollowers hashtag. The tag was started to bring together Twitter users around the North East of England. After a couple of days of explosive growth it was one of the top 5 trending topics for the UK, and a very useful way of finding interesting local businesses and individuals to follow.
Sadly though, it fell from grace when some people added it to everything. People started using it just to try to get followers rather than to find people they’re really interested in. Trawling through the timeline to find new Twitterers went from being fun to being a chore.
So please, take care with your hashtags. They’re ace, but use them wisely.
