blacksundae

This got me thinking about the data that is hidden in various social network information streams - Facebook & Twitter updates in particular. People share a lot of information in their tweets - some of it shared intentionally, and some of it which could be uncovered with some rudimentary searching. I wondered if it would be possible to extract travel information from people’s public Twitter streams by searching for the term ‘Just landed in…’.

Link. Via http://waxy.org/links/

The campaign didn’t customize heavily and it didn’t look for bleeding edge technology. It used the same stuff the rest of the blogging world does–Movable Type, PHP, MySQL with a dose of community. The competitive advantage came from using social networking to “empower a highly decentralized, largely self-organizing, network of volunteers,” reports Carr.

[...]

Can these systems hold up in a general election? Carr noted that data management will become a problem for Obama now that his campaign will have to hook up with the Democratic national campaign. One software and quality assurance pro said that she sees flaws in the Obama systems that could become a problem in the general election. The biggest issue: The campaign switches between two or three different systems to track voter contact. Bottom line: Data integrity will be an issue.

But like any other startup, Obama’s campaign will have to figure out how to scale quickly and handle peak loads.

Obama: the Twitter of candidates? Read on. [via YatPundit]

This is just about the only way I could ever keep plants alive (I have what you might call a black thumb). [via osen]