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Meetings

Online Information 2009 – A Twitter Timeline

It was disappointing to miss Online Information this year, so I have been trying to catch up via the Twitter stream. Fortunately the #online09 tweets have been archived to Twapper Keeper (via @briankelly). This is great, as the site makes them downloadable.

To see them in the context of the conference programme, I converted the tweets and the event schedule to XML suitable for display in a Simile Timeline. Click the screenshot below to access the resulting timeline mashup (nb tweets take a few seconds to load).

tweetline_cap

What would have made this exercise easier, and the conference tweets easier to track:

  • If the conference programme had been published in a more mashable format eg iCal / XML
  • If there was a way to identify a particular conference track (a sub hashtag? – or is that overkill?)
  • A way to distinguish critical comments, reportage, and general flim-flam. Though perhaps that is part of the fun!

Discussion

4 comments for “Online Information 2009 – A Twitter Timeline”

  1. Very nice Paul! I wonder if you could optionally filter out the RTs What did you use to convert from the tweet stream to Timeline events?

    Posted by Chris Wallace | December 9, 2009, 8:06 pm
  2. Oh better still, count the RTs and annotate the original with the count

    Posted by Chris Wallace | December 9, 2009, 8:07 pm
  3. Some of the tweets from marydeeo in TwapperKeeper will link you to the infotodayblog.com posts about #online09.

    Posted by Marydee | December 9, 2009, 8:37 pm
  4. Thanks! Good idea on the RTs. To make the XML I used this python script on the TSV downloaded from Twapper Keeper:


    # Script to convert a twapper TSV to an xml timeline file
    import csv
    import xml.dom.minidom as dom
    twapFile = "../online09.csv"
    tlFile = "../online09.xml"
    twapReader = csv.reader(open(twapFile), delimiter='\t')
    tlTree = dom.getDOMImplementation().createDocument(None, "data", None)
    tlRoot = tlTree.documentElement
    for row in twapReader:
    tlEvent = tlTree.createElement("event")
    tlEventText = tlTree.createTextNode(row[1])
    tlEvent.setAttribute("start", row[9])
    tlEvent.setAttribute("image", row[8])
    tlEvent.setAttribute("icon", "http://www.menarik.co.uk/tweetline/twitter_icon.png")
    tlEvent.setAttribute("link", "http://www.twitter.com/" + row[3])
    tlEvent.setAttribute("isDuration", "false")
    tlEvent.setAttribute("title", row[3])
    tlEvent.appendChild(tlEventText)
    tlRoot.appendChild(tlEvent)
    tlOut = open(tlFile, "w")
    tlTree.writexml(tlOut, "\t", "\t", "\n", "UTF-8")

    Posted by Paul Matthews | December 10, 2009, 8:33 pm

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