flex your info

Update:  This post describes the initial proof-of-concept work to develop the event tracker with information from the SLA conference, but soon after the ALA 2009 Event Tracker became available.  See this post for more information.

The purpose of the event tracker is to see what’s going on–or what happened–for a particular event.  Conferences, for example, often have a lot of online information spread in many different places, so this is an attempt to bring some of it together into one place, while also trying to make some of the information a little less ephemeral.

Recently, conferences and other events have used twitter to share information, in particular by using what’s known as a hashtag to track it.  In these cases, a hashtag is essentially a shortcut that allows a user to search twitter so they can find all the information about a particular event.  The midwinter hashtag was #alamw09, but if you follow that link you’ll see that no search results are found by twitter. This is because twitter only allows access to updates within the last 1 1/2 weeks, noting that the number may shrink as more tweets happen each day.

Is it even important to save tweets? Some may argue that because of their very nature tweets aren’t very useful, but they do provide some insight into activities, people’s thoughts on how something is happening, and even suggestions for improvements.  Time at a conference is busy, and you may not be able to keep up with everything–so it’d be useful to have a place where it’s easy to see both what’s happening and what has happened. Something that can be revisited in the after-conference relative calm.

The Shifted Librarian discusses Twittephemeraliness, pointing out that months after ALA’s midwinter conference it’s pretty much impossible to find all the tweets.  There are sites which partially address this issue.  Twemes provides access to #alamw09 tweets as well as pictures from Flickr and links from delicious. However, there are only 360 tweets available from tweme, and certainly there were more tweets than that at midwinter.  #hashtags tracks tweets as well, and their list for #alamw09 is extensive (I didn’t count it).  But it’s missing other information like pictures, links, blog posts.  Plus, there’s no telling how long it will be available.

Jenny’s blog post talks about possible ways to save tweets, including subscribing to a hashtag RSS feed, and there are some other ideas in the comments.  After reading her post, I had the idea for the event tracker and finally had a chance to work on it this weekend.  It’s still an in-progress thing, so I’m not going to link to it just yet, but I’ll share some screenshots.  I can’t access the midwinter tweets through twitter search and ALA Annual hasn’t happened yet so I can’t use information from that.  However, two friends recently went to the SLA Annual conference and it occurred to me that it might be a nice test case to try out.

This is a Flex app that will try to give you a snapshot of what’s happening (or what happened) at an event.  First, I wanted to include multiple types of information.  For now it’s just photos from Flickr and tweets, but I’m planning to add more. I also wanted it to be easy to see the progression of the conference, so that you can see what happened on the different days of the conference.  It currently just shows a small description for each day; ideally, it would show more details about the events.

For photos, it’s simply searching flickr for photos tagged with sla2009 on a certain date.  I’m not currently caching any of this, and I need to decide if that would be a useful thing to do. (Any thoughts?) When you hover over the photo it shows you the tag; when you click on it, an in-window popup shows the larger picture, and you can also navigate between pictures from the pop-up.  I’d also like to show in the pop-up additional information (username, tags?, link).

For the tweets, the way to get around only having limited access is to put them into a database. I set up a little webservice that can be called by the Flex app when you click on a particular day. It checks the database to see if the information for that day has been updated recently; if not, it grabs information from twitter.  It stores the info in the database (with some optimizations for stopping when it comes across information already there), then generates XML that is return to the Flex app. In turn, that’s displayed in the tweets section.

Here’s a view of what it currently looks like all together (click for larger image):

Things that I’d like to do with it:

• pagination of the tweets
• archive/show hashtags other than the main conference tag
• show additional information about current events
• add other types of information: blog posts, friendfeed, maybe others (delicious? technorati?)
• narrow the tweet/flickr display to a particular time (Sunday 8:30-10:00, so I can see if anyone said something about a specific event)
• export information to an XML file for a day, a particular time, or a particular hashtag

It’s been fun to put this together so far, and I’m looking forward to doing some more work on it in the next few days.  Once I’ve made the changes, the plan is to turn this into something usable to track information for ALA 2009. If you have any suggestions or ideas, let me know.

And, just for the record, as of last night there were 4658 tweets with the tag #sla2009.