Four short links: 28 September 2009

Science Blogs, Concussion Games, Packet Sniffer, and an Astonishing Product Name

1. Sci Blogs -- aggregated and hosted blogs from New Zealand scientists and researchers. A planet aggregator has become a key part of building a community, even outside programming.
2. Super Better, or How To Turn Recovery Into a Game -- Jane McGonigal had a concussion, and created a game to keep her doing things that aided her recovery. Interesting discussion of how to build a game around a serious real-life problem. And honestly, people: if she can make concussion into a game, surely you can make your crap websites suck less?
3. Justniffer -- packet sniffer that identifies HTTP requests and emits an Apache-style logfile showing what was requested. (via Simon Willison)
4. Vegemite Names New Spread -- the original name was crowdsourced in 1923. They decided to repeat the process for their new product, a spread made from Vegemite and Cream Cheese. The winning name came from an Australian web designer: "Vegemite iSnack 2.0". This does not appear to be a joke (no mention that the commercial will use music from Rick Astley). Unsure which will make Americans more ill: the name, the idea of eating Vegemite mixed with cream cheese, or the idea of eating Vegemite at all.

Four short links: 12 Jan 2009

Brace yourself: kids, design, newspapers, and robots. It can only be another collection of four tasty links (or the key elements of the least successful Disney holiday movie ever).

1. Our Work So Far This Year - amazing blog entry about St Pauls high school in England, which has had exceptional technologists come to speak to their ITC class. Who? Oh, only the CEO of Arduino company tinker.it, Steven Johnson, Cory Doctorow, Gavin Starks, Phil Gyford, Tom Armitage, .... They recorded the talks and are building their own YouTube channel. The really interesting bit is at the top where they talk about the skills that their 13-year olds are coming into their ICT class with: last year they were teaching tabbed browsing to the first years, this year the first years are coming in with Firefox on a USB drive so they can keep their bookmarks wherever they go ....
2. Infinite Zoom Into Milk - a glimpse at a delectable series of books that drill into everyday items to reveal manufacturing and design decisions, materials, etc.
3. Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet - a very classy compilation of favourite blog posts and Tweets, assembled into a tabloid-sized newspaper with tastefully typesetting. Are there sufficient numbers of offline people left that it's worth producing a mainstream magazine compiled, like this, from online material? If so, how long until those economics no longer apply?
4. Anybots Launches - congrats to Trevor Blackwell, whose presence and work have graced several Foo camps. Anybots, his telepresence robot company, revealed their products at CES last week.

When Micro-blogging Grows Up

Will Twitter and other micro-blogging services start resembling the blogosphere down the road? We are in the early days of micro-blogs and I still remember when Twitter was used mainly for "status" reporting. But more people are using Twitter instead of blogs, following links from trusted sources essentially using Twitter as a highly filtered blog reader. Just like the early days of blogs, the most popular Twitters are heavy on technology and "personal" micro-blogging. On the other hand, given that blogs are perfect for short opinon pieces, politics was and remains popular among bloggers.

The chart is the result of quickly categorizing the Top 100 blogs and Twitter users with the most followers. I used Twitterholic's data from June 7th. Technorati's authority is a social network metric, Twitterholic measures "popularity". The top blogs are heavy on tech, politics and news, with "personal" blogs less popular than their micro-blog counterparts. The more mature blogosphere is definitely dispersed across more categories. A casual glance at the oldest copy of the Technorati Top 100 available online indicates that back in June 2005, technology and politics dominated the list even more. "Personal" blogs were also more common in June 2005. The current top 100 has its share of blogs from traditional media: Wired magazine alone has 5 blogs in the most recent list.

Three categories (technology, tech/personal, personal) accounted for 56% of the total "subscriptions" to the top 100 Twitter users. Compared to the blogosphere, politics is less represented in the Twitterholic Top 100. The top Democratic presidential candidates were it as far as politics. In contrast, more than ten political bloggers made the Technorati Top 100. Of the three, Obama dominated, accounting for 80% of subscribers in the politics category, with Edwards and Clinton splitting the remaining 20%. Looking beyond the top 100, Obama alone has more than nineteen times the combined subscribers to the different John Mccain users. The analogous Democrat/Republican split, using the Technorati authority of the top political blogs, is 2 to 1. In terms of location, over 70% of the Twitterholic 100 are based in the U.S. Blogs are popular worldwide with some of the biggest blogs based in Asia.

Once more stable services and business models emerge, I still think micro-blogs will evolve to share some of the properties of the blogosphere described above. Micro-blogs from traditional media sources will be among the most popular. The liberal vs. conservative split will be less pronounced, with conservatives narrowing the micro-blogging gap. The top micro-blogs won't be as dominated by technology, although I'm not sure the format is really ideal for political topics. OTOH, I'm surprised gossip isn't as big - at least not yet. The top micro-blogs won't include as many "personal" ones. Micro-blogging will be just as popular overseas. We definitely will have several micro-blogging services and not be as dependent on the pioneering folks over at Twitter. More likely, micro-blogging will be just one component of broader platforms like FriendFeed. As always, spammers and phishers will try to ruin everything.

A post that was meant to highlight some of the differences between the two top 100 lists has led to forecasts - definitely not my original goal. What are your predictions?