Web Forum: Internet news

Jan 15 2010 by Andrew Jackson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

TWITTER isn’t just about what people had for breakfast. It also turns out to be quite a neat way of visualising the weather.

For those of you just emerging from 100 years of enchanted slumber, Twitter is the US-based microblogging service that lets you share with friends and strangers short (140-character) updates about what’s going on in your life.

It lets people join their posts (known as tweets) together using something called ‘hashtags’ and one of the big hashtags in the last couple of weeks has been this one: £uksnow.

Hashtags are flighty things. No-one’s in charge of them and anyone can make up any hashtag they like. But some of them catch on very fast and £uksnow had an added extra – people could add their postcode and a mark out of 10.

One of the nicer things about Twitter is that it has a nerdy thing called an API. This is a gateway for other services to talk to Twitter and extract data from it.

So a bright spark called Ben Marsh wrote code that hunted for tweets hashtagged £uksnow, a postcode, and a score. Then it worked out what was where and posted the whole thing on a Google map. Like this: uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk

What you see there is a pretty much live, real-time summary of where snow is falling right now.

Ben himself did such a good job of it that he was asked to make a similar map for UK holidays (ukholsmap.com) and another one for the Real Time Top 40 (realtimetop40.com). So there – more than just breakfasts.

WHAT’S NEXT FROM APPLE?

RUMOURS are reaching fever pitch regarding Apple’s mythical new gadget. The company stirred things up even more when it announced an ‘event’ on January 27. Everyone thinks it will be a new tablet computer, like an iPhone but bigger. Apple, as always, is staying silent. But, as with the Mac, iPod and iPhone launches, the wise thing is to expect the unexpected. If the tablet really does exist, it will probably have something about it that’s totally new and unexpected.

BROWSING ... SNOWY STUFF

Extraordinary satellite photo of snowy Britain on: bit.ly/6jiIoJ

Thousands of snowy photos at Flickr

www.flickr.com/photos/tags

The astonishing Digital Snow Museum

wintercenter.homestead.com/photoindex.html