It was only a few months ago that I was teasing Dan Chudnov for joining Twitter. Now I’ve gone and done it myself. I don’t expect to be using it much, but after observing the “Falls Church, VA” incident yesterday, I thought it would be an useful tool to have at-the-ready. Here’s the story of what inspired it.

Someone on the Code4Lib IRC channel (was it ‘lbjay’?) asked if anyone knew about an explosion in the Falls Church, VA, area after reading a report about it on Twitter. I ran a search in TweetScan for “Falls Church, VA” and was able to watch the event unfold as the “DC emergency tweet network” fired up. Eventually it was determined that it was indeed an earthquake event, but the discussion of the event via Twitter was enough to catch the attention of at least one media blogger.

It reminded me a great deal of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California. Many of the landlines were down or jammed with too many people calling, but the internet stayed up and an IRC channel was set up so that reports of the earthquake effects to be broadcast from the region. If the same thing to happen today, Twitter — through the internet or through mobile devices — would likely be the tool used to track the event.

Now, back to Twitter, here are the parts that I can’t figure out. Almost immediately after I registered for the service and signed in for the first time, I was automatically following betseymerkel, someone who appears to be working with open source software in a Cleveland-area library. I don’t remember doing anything to cause me to start following her, although I suppose it is possible I made a stray click somewhere. And through the first 24 hours with the account, four people are following me. I didn’t tell anyone else about my activities — the only two tweets I’ve posted dealt with setting up the account. I don’t think I know any of these people (betseymerkel is one of them), so I don’t get why they would spontaneously start following me. Thoughts?

Oh, and you can start following me, if you want. I’ll probably follow colleagues during library conferences, but then use something like TwitterSnooze to turn off the chatter in-between events.

Next Day Follow-up

The text was modified to update a link from https://twitter.com/DataG/friends to http://twitter.com/#!/DataG/followers on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/V/VA_RICHMOND_LOCKDOWN_VAOL-?SITE=VASTA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/Quakes/ld1022071.php on February 12th, 2011.

DLTJ now uses reCAPTCHA on comment forms. reCAPTCHA is an enhanced version of CAPTCHA (an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”) and like the original it is a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether there is a human user at the other end of the browser or if it is a software agent (such as a SPAM robot). And like the original it asks the user to type in recognized words from an image or a set of numbers from an audio clip.

Help with reCAPTCHA

	Refresh the word images. If you are unsure what the two words are, select this button to receive a new pair of words. (Alternatively, just try to guess what the two words are; if you are wrong, you’ll get a new pair of words automatically.)
/	Alternate between the Audio- and Text-based challenges. If you cannot see the word images, select this audio button to hear a set of digits among random noise that can be entered instead of the visual challenge.
	Get help from the reCAPTCHA site about this human detection scheme. Also includes introductory information about the reCAPTCHA service itself.

What’s Special About reCAPTCHA

In the original CAPTCHA scheme, that work is wasted on deciphering random strings of letters and numbers. The researchers at Carnegie Mellon realized that they could harness that work to resolve ambiguities in deciphering scanned text from books. As with the original CAPTCHA system, there are some blocks of scanned text that computers cannot decipher yet are easily readable by humans. reCAPTCHA pairs a known word with one of these unknown blocks of text. If the human types the known word correctly, the reCAPTCHA system tells the DLTJ system that the comment is coming from a human. And if enough humans type the same response for the unknown block of text, the reCAPTCHA system can be pretty sure the word has been deciphered.

So by commenting here on DLTJ you are helping make the world a better place by aiding in the digital conversion of texts from the Internet Archive. This is a bit of an experiment, so if it is not working out, please let me know.

Update 19-Jan-2011: I’ve decommissioned this service. Talkr seems to be unavailable, and I haven’t had time to find a replacement.

If reading the thoughts of the Jester via this blog wasn’t enough, you can now hear this witty (witless?) insights read to you through your favorite podcast player. I’ve been messing with some technology this weekend for a mashup of my own.

First, start with the Talkr service, which will take the text of your RSS feed posts and convert them to an audio file of a computer generated voice speaking the text to you. The audio file is included as an attachment in a new RSS feed of your post content. In the sidebar of DLTJ, you can subscribe to audio version of this blog using the “Subscribe to Postcast” graphic.

But wait, there’s more! A second graphic leads to a magic iTunes URI that will add the audio version of the Jester as a podcast in your iTunes setup. That one was a little more difficult in that the RSS coming out of Talkr doesn’t have all of the necessary iTunes markup (and in some cases, the markup itself needs to be futzed with). So a quick pass through an XSLT script gives Apple the feed that they need to make this work in iTunes.

You might ask “Why iTunes?” followed closely by “Don’t they represent the new evil empire by the way they lock subscribers into using their hardware only?” and ending with “Do you really want to encourage that?” First, as an aside, I’ve already sold part of my soul to Apple — I’ve been sold on their operating system and portable computer hardware for years. But that is really okay because I own a piece of Apple’s soul — 96 pieces to be exact (unless the stock has split again since the last time I checked). Secondly, and more relevant perhaps, is a pragmatic belief to meet the users where they are. If there are potential listeners of DLTJ using iTunes and I can make it easier for them to listen to this blog on the platform of their choice without impacting those who don’t want to make iTunes their choice, then that’s fine. I had this discussion with a fellow librarian about making the OhioLINK Digital Video Collection visible through iTunesU; as long as it is not an exclusive arrangement and the no-iTunesU users are served just as well as those who access the content through iTunesU, then I don’t see a problem with “meeting the users where they are.” (Oh, and yes, I still do not own an iPod — I have a generic MP3 player that suits me just fine.)

By the way: “Can You Hear Me Now?” refers to the tagline for Verison Wireless commercials, a wireless carrier in North America. I’m not sure how well that translates outside this region.

Update [20070330T1030]: Along with the WordPress upgrade, I tweaked the RSS feeds so that the version that Talkr sees does not have the FeedBurner FeedFlares in them. The flares were coming across in the audio as “The original story included an image at this point.” Repeatedly. Quite annoying, I imagine.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://talkr.com/ on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://dltj.org/audio.rss on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.apple.com/education/products/ipod/itunes_u.html on January 19th, 2011.