Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey conceived and executed a project to assemble 2000 human voices to sing “Daisy Bell”. Tasks were distributed using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and samples were assembled and animated using the Processing language.

“Daisy Bell” was composed by Harry Dacre in 1892 and begins with the line “Daisy, Daisy/Give me your answer do/I’m half crazy/all for the love of you”. The song itself is significant since it was the first song a computer was taught to sing at IBM labs in 1962. The song received further geek credibility when it was performed by the fictional computer HAL 9000 in Arthur C. Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The musical result is less joyful than strangely haunting. The technical result is an interesting illustration of collaboration and aggregation.

(See also: Bicycle built for 2000)

The Social Collider maps cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

The Social Collider is meant to be an instrument which can make visible the creation of memes and their propagation.

Get project status updates on Twitter: @socialcollider

(See also: socialcollider.net)

I’m playing with a simple PERL script to post updates to my Twitter account.

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use LWP::UserAgent;
 
my $output = shift @ARGV;
my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json';
 
#print "Verify Credentials\n";
$browser->credentials('twitter.com:80', 'Twitter API', 'TWTR_ACCNT', 'TWTR_PSWD');
$response = $browser->get("http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.json");
 
#print $response->code."  ".$response->message."\n";
#print "Update\n";
 
my $response = $browser->post($url, {status => $output});
#print $response->code."  ".$response->message."\n";

The only magic is the LWP::UserAgent module.

When you run it from the command line, the only argument is the status update to Twitter. This could be useful for programatic updates to Twitter from devices or monitoring services. The script is easily modified to support account information from the command-line, but this would appear in a process list on a shared machine and would be a security risk. Industrial strength applications would require connection validation.

% tweet.pl tweet_message_of_140_chars_or_fewer

I’m writing a home security application based on this idea.

What will you do with Twitter on the command-line?

(See also: twitter.com)
(See also: Twitter API Wiki)
(See also: perl.org)

Barbara Brown Taylor’s talk was an unexpected pleasure in the midst of a harried day. She spoke before a live audience at Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis, MN. Her speech was titled, “Downtime: The Sacred Art of Stopping”. What happens when my normal operating system isn’t available?

What do I do with this wild and precious life? Her talk hit me right between the eyes. I needed to hear this today. It is often in the wilderness when we are most open to change, when our customary ways of coping have broken down.

(See also: MPR: Barbara Brown Taylor live at the Westminster Town Hall Forum)