TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

Track your Memes on Twitter!

Here’s some fun news: this afternoon I decided to figure out how to use the Twitter API, which is decidedly simple and functional. Anyway, if you’re a twitterholic, you can now get your dose of technology, automotive, environmental, or sun microsystems news via twitter - each of my memetrackers now merrily posts all of its front-page updates to a twitter account for your enjoyment!

TechWatching (tech and web): http://twitter.com/techwatching
SunMeme (sun micro): http://twitter.com/sunmeme
WheelScore (automotive): http://twitter.com/wheelscore
PlasticBasket (environmental): http://twitter.com/plasticbasket.net

On a sidenote, I’m appreciating the utility of Twitter more and more every day as a broadcast medium and selective news filter.

memetrackers, plasticbasket, sunmeme, techwatching, twitter wheelscore

Follow Stories with Cluster Permalinks

I just rolled out a minor but important new feature across the memetracker network that I’m building (TechWatching, Wheelscore, SunMeme, PlasticBasket) - story cluster permalinks.

For background, a “story cluster” is a group of stories around a certain topic - a “meme” or summary of a blogosphere discussion. A story cluster permalink gives you a permanent URL for viewing story clusters - so if you’re following Cadillac’s hybrid motorbike or Fred Wilson’s views on Triangulation, you can follow that story today, tomorrow, a month from now, a year from now - whenever, not just when its still on the front page.

To get to a cluster’s permalink, just look for the “PERMALINK THIS CLUSTER” link at the top of each cluster.

So - enjoy!

plasticbasket, sunmeme, techwatching wheelscore

Experiments in Corporate Intelligence: SunMeme

Sun Microsystems is if not unique then at least rare in the robustness of its internal blogging community, and the willingness of the corporate legal department to make that community public. Indeed, Sun has almost 5000 publicly readable blogs - from the CEO to the developers in the trenches, from all around the world.

I think its great - I’ve been a long term advocate of internal blogging and the knowledge sharing and growth spurs. There’s more though: a corporate blog community as robust as Sun’s presents a great opportunity for aggregation and memetic analysis: so, I copied and pasted TechWatching onto SunMeme.com and pointed the system to Sun’s blogosphere and let it off its leash.

So far its tracking 683 Sun blogs, of which its actively processing stories from the 182 most active. From what I can tell, it starting to produce some good output - story clusters building around the new UltraSparc processor, for instance, or a NetBeans talk that took place in SecondLife.

There are challenges in tackling the Sun blogosphere too, however; keyword analysis is difficult as some keywords (”java”) are omnipresent, and can’t be used to link together stories. I’m convinced that there’s workarounds though, and the deeper SunMeme gets into the Sun blogosphere, the better the output is looking.

Anyway, enjoy. And if you work at Sun, please feel free to share your thoughts!

memetrackers, sun sunmeme