After a brief "retirement" of two weeks -- spent painting and rearranging the bedroom to make room for, you guessed it, more bookcases -- I am about to become a real 2.0er at last.
Haven't made much headway on more Things, but found this marvelous post about Twittering Antarctica on Mr. MacGeek's science writers' listserv.
Mary Miller of the Exploratorium, who was explaining Twitter's possibilities to the perplexed/unenthusiastic science scribes, noted that NASA had the Phoenix Rover tweet about its Mars meandering as a way to connect people in real-time to the mission.
And the Exploratorium, "a museum on the web," is using Twitter to update the public on what its scientists are doing in the field.For example, Miller wrote, geophysicist Robin Bell was about to go to Antarctica and would tweet from "her camp near the pole of inaccessibility . . . about her work coordinating airplane surveys of the mountain range under the ice sheet." This week, Bell arrived; here's one of her tweets:
still waiting for the research otters to arrive. ours was stuck on the sea ice last night. the british are still in south america.... 8:38 PM Nov 19th from web
If, like me, you find vast frozen terrain and the people who explore it endlessly fascinating, you'll love the Exploratorium's Web site for International Polar Year from which the above map was, um, borrowed.
Had enough of Twitter? Meet the New Twing.
My brother passed along this posting from Duo Consulting about Twing.
It describes itself as a search engine that mines the "content-rich discussions found only on forums and online communities," rather than on Web sites. Or, more technically: "A Twing search collects the various parts of a forum post (topic information, subject, text, number of replies, etc.) and analyzes each piece of information to provide highly relevant search results that more closely match the term(s) for which a user is searching. As a result, a Twing search brings closer matches presented in a more highly indexed order."
I had in here a Twing search Widget or, heaven help us, "Twidget," but it didn't work and then it quit altogether, so now it's gone.
If it can truly drill down in a site, Twing might prove a useful research tool. After a quick browse through the site, though, I think its other community features could use some more time to mature -- although I did find among its forums one that allows you to "Discuss cockroaches and interact with cockroach enthusiasts."
Which is enough to make me head to the pole of inaccessibility.
