The morning after the mash before

· ostephens

Yesterday was Mashed Libraries UK 2008 – the first in what I hope might be a series of Library Mashup/Tech events in the UK.

The idea of holding the event germinated while I was at ALA earlier this year, inspired also by the Mashed Museums event. I blogged the idea, and before I knew it, had offers of rooms, sponsorship and quite a few people saying they'd like to come along.

Some questions, and answers about the event:

Did it go well? I hope so. It was a bit like hosting a party – you spend the whole time worrying if people are enjoying themselves, and then when its all over, you’re knackered!

What did we do? I’d worried quite a bit about the structure of the day. I knew I had a real mix of people coming along and I wanted to ensure that everyone felt there was something for them. I’m not sure I completely succeeded, but I think the mix was OK.

The day started with some presentations from Rob Styles (on the Talis Platform) and Tony Hirst (on mashup tools like Google Spreadsheets and Yahoo Pipes). A third speaker was planned, but unfortunately unable to make it, so a few people agreed to help fill (Timm from Ex Libris, Mark from OCLC and Ashley from MIMAS – thank you)

What surprised me (but perhaps was not really surprising) was the extent to which these presentations set the agenda for the day – people tended to look at the stuff covered in these presentations. This isn’t a bad thing at all, but worth noting when planning this kind of event.

After the presentations (done by about midday) we broke for lunch, and people chatted etc. After this, I really left it up to people as to what they wanted to get on with. I’d collected some ideas on the Mashed Library Ning  beforehand – but on the day the content of the presentations influenced what people did much more than this.

I wasn’t sure how to ‘manage’ the more free-form part of the day – how to make sure that people weren’t left thinking ‘what on earth do I do now’, while still ensuring that people could get on with what they wanted. I think it worked – but perhaps others are better placed to say.

Some of the things that people did on the day were:

Mash along with Tony Hirst – Tony conducted a Gordon Ramsay style mash along using Yahoo Pipes to pull data from different bits of the Talis Platform, and trying to output locations of books plotted on a map. There were some problems, and the limitations of Pipes become apparent (as well as issues with aspects of the data)

Rob Styles and Chris Keene (Sussex) were aiming at something similar, but with PHP and Javascript, and additionally pulling in data from another Talis source ‘Silkworm‘ – a directory of library information (including more detailed location information)

Matthew Phillips (Dundee) and Ed Chamberlain (Cambridge) played around with output from the Aleph API and Pipes (unfortunately some real challenges with this one), and Matthew also showed off his use of graphical bars to illustrate overlapping journal holdings – in print and from various supplier electronically.

A few groups messed with Pipes and locations – finding the nearest Travel Agents, Museums and Pubs to a specific location.

David Pattern (Huddersfield) messed around with usage data, trying to see if heavy use of one book today meant that another title would be in high demand next week, to allow planning of moves of titles into Short Loan etc.

Nick Day (Cambridge) used WorldCat to look up identifiers for citations he had coded up in RDF from some PhD Theses.

There was also the chance simply to soak up the atmosphere, wander round to see what others were doing, and generally chat and network.

Towards the end of the day Paul Bevan from the National Library of Wales talked about how they were engaging with Web 2.0, and the different challenges that they faced compared to ‘academic libraries’. (and sadly we were lacking attendees from the public or commercial library sectors)

A collection of pictures from the event is forming on Flickr, and I took some video footage on the day, which I hope to turn into something – I’ll post it here when it’s done.

What would you do differently? I’d remember that a room full of people with laptops needs lots of power points. The room we had unfortunately only had 6 – but with a bit of help from the local support staff, and a local Maplins, this was sorted out before people ran out of juice

I’d also remember that you need to order Vegan options for Vegans (I’m really sorry Ashley – hope you did get something to eat)

Thanks to? Thanks to Imperial College for letting me spend time organising this; UKOLN for sponsoring it (without whom, there would not have been cake); Paul Walk (of UKOLN) for encouragement and arranging the sponsorship; David Flanders (Birkbeck) for sorting the room, local details, and generally being helpful; all the presenters; and everyone who came along and contributed to the day.

In Summary? I didn’t really have any huge expectations of the day – I wanted it to bring together a group of interested people, and do some interesting things. I hope that the people who came along felt that in the main we managed this.

I can definitely see potential for different kinds of events that perhaps focus on more development, or on training – if you weren’t able to make it, then you might consider going to the JISC Developer Happiness days in February next year, which include an introductory day to develop skills, as well as a 2 day coding session (with prizes).

I think overall I can say Mashed Library ’08 was a success. I’d like to do another library tech event in the new year – so if you are interested, keep watching, or drop me a line.

 

Photos courtesy of Dave Pattern, via Flickr

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Infrastructure, Infra dig

· ostephens

Yesterday I attended the first meeting of the new JISC Resource Discovery Infrastructure Taskforce.

I enjoyed the day, and the Task Group is bringing together a great set of people who all had an incredible amount to contribute to the discussion.

The day was much about establishing some basics – like agreeing the Terms of Reference for the group – and also about getting some of the issues and assumptions out in the open. I'd been asked to prepare a 10 minute presentation titled 'What if we were starting from scratch'. Paul Miller from Talis also presented. Originally there had been a suggestion that Tim Spalding of LibraryThing would also present, but that didn't happen in the end (which was a disappointment)

My talk is available via Slideshare, but at last look, the speakers notes were not displaying properly, so I'd recommend using the 'download' option to get the powerpoint file, as the Speaker's Notes are essentially the script of the talk (although without my witty improvisations).

One of the things I struggled with as I wrote the talk, is that I knew what I wanted to say in terms of what a 'starting from scratch' approach might look like, but I had no idea of how this linked to user need. This may seem a bit backwards – perhaps arrogant? – in a world where we recognise that serving the user need is paramount, but even during the day we seemed to come up against this problem more than once – how does the infrastructure relate to the user? Are they aware of it? Do they care what it looks like? How do they inform it?

After researching and thinking, I eventually hit upon Ranganathan's 5 Laws of Library Science as a way of thinking about the user need and still relating it to the infrastructure. If you have seen (or remember) the 5 laws:

  1. Books are for use.
  2. Every reader his [or her] book.
  3. Every book its reader.
  4. Save the time of the User.
  5. The library is a growing organism.

Then I really recommend you read the full text of Ranganathan’s original book – as the thinking behind these laws are so much more important than this plain statement of them.

One final thing on the presentation – in it I describe a linked environment that I say is ‘not necessarily the web’ – I think this is true in terms of what I’m describing and for the purposes of the presentation. I want to state though that in reality, if we are implementing something along these lines the linked environment would absolutely have to be the web – there is no point in coming up with something separate.

Overall the discussions on the day were very interesting, and really just emphasised how much there was to discuss:

  • How does discovery relate to delivery
  • Are we talking about discovery via metadata or other routes (e.g. full-text searching)
  • What is good/bad about what we’ve got
  • Are we talking about any ‘resource’ or just ‘bibliographic’
  • What does ‘world class’ mean in the context of resource discovery

Some of this may seem trivial, and some fundamental, but I guess this is what happens when you try and tackle this kind of big issue.

However, the one thing that I came away wondering overall was ‘what do we mean by infrastructure’? (luckily I think I’m clearer on Resource Discovery, otherwise we’d be in real trouble!)

Dictionary.com has the following definition of infrastructure:

  1. the basic, underlying framework or features of a system or organization.
  2. the fundamental facilities and systems serving a country, city, or area, as transportation and communication systems, power plants, and schools.
  3. the military installations of a country.

Ruling out the last one (I hope) as not relevant, I think the first two definitions sum up the problem. On the one hand, infrastructure can be seen as the very basic framework. If you talk about Infrastructure in the context of Skyscrapers then you are talking about the metal frame, the foundations, the concrete etc. This seems to me like meaning (1) above.

On the other hand, in terms of urban planning infrastructure might refer not just to underlying frameworks (e.g. roads, sewers) but also basic services (e.g. refuse collection, metro system)

I think that when we talked about ‘resource discovery infrastructure’ some people think ‘plumbing’ or ‘foundations’ (this includes me), and some think ‘metro’ or ‘refuse collection’.

To take a specific example, is a geographical Union Catalogue like the InforM25 Union List of Serials part of a resource discovery ‘infrastructure’ or is the ‘infrastructure’ in this case the MARC record and ftp which allows the records from many catalogues to be dumped together, merged and displayed?

Going back to the question of how the user relates to the infrastructure – you can see how I (as a user) relate very much to the mass transit system that is provided where I live – but I don’t care about the gauge of rail on which it runs (perhaps I should, but I don’t)

The group is planning another meeting in the New Year, and definitions are one of the things we need to talk about – I think the question of what qualifies as Infrastructure needs to be close to the top of that list.

Doing the Library Mash

· ostephens

Registration for Mashed Libraries UK 2008 have now closed, and I’m really looking forward to the event next Thursday (27th November).

I’m really pleased that we’ve got about 30 people coming, from all over the UK (and a couple from further afield).

Although registration is closed, you can still contribute to the day, by joining the Ning at http://mashedlibrary.ning.com and posting ideas to the forums – you never know, someone attending might pick up on your idea and do something with it – and if not, then there is always the next Mashed Libraries event (I hope)

For those coming, I’m looking forward to meeting you all, for those not able to attend look for updates on this blog, on the Ning, the CILIP Update, and perhaps other places.

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Starting from Scratch

· ostephens

I’ve recently received (and accepted) an invitation to join a new JISC taskforce looking at Resource Discovery Infrastructure. The scope of the group (to quote from the draft Terms of Reference) is:

Serials, books, archives/special collections, digital repository content – we acknowledge that the group will have to prioritise areas of work because of their different levels of maturity. For example an approach might be agreed for books and serials and then later down the line repository content might come into play. The Task Force will discuss the scope and how best to deal with it at their first meeting.

  • Gain an overview of current activity and library infrastructure.
  • Identify the requirements for the UK further and higher education, in terms of current priorities and visions for the future
  • Articulate how requirements should be met.
  • To consider appropriate business models.
  • Oversee related studies and scoping work.
  • Identify how to take forward the implementation of an infrastructure to meet the future vision.
  • Work with key partners/stakeholders.
  • Develop a communications plan.

At the first meeting on the 25th November (which seems to be approaching rather quickly) I’ve agreed to give a presentation on What would we do if we were starting from scratch? I’m slightly nervous, as the others who have been invited to present are Tim Spalding from LibraryThing, and Paul Miller from Talis, and so I’m looking to say something appropriately visionary!

So, rather than rely purely on my own imagination, I thought I might as well ask the world – what if you were starting from scratch? Leave a comment, or trackback with your thoughts.

FRBRing RDA

· ostephens

There has been quite a bit of traffic on the RDA-L listserv which essentially became a debate on whether RDA was needed, and whether MARC was so bad after all.

I struggle with discussion about RDA and related areas of FRBR and FRAD, and have wished out loud (more than once) for a ‘Dummies guide’ that would explain it all in easily digestible chunks.

I’ve also struggled with the recent discussion on the RDA-L listserv since so much of it is along the lines of “There is nothing wrong with MARC – so what’s the point in changing”.

I have concerns about RDA, and about FRBR and FRAD – but I find the argument that we don’t need to implement them because MARC is fine just as it is depressing – if there is one thing I’m pretty sure of, it is that MARC is not OK. MARC is so not OK for where we need to be now with metadata that I don’t really know where to start. The issues with MARC have also been widely discussed on the NGC4LIB listserv, and rehashing the arguments again seemed pointless – so I didn’t bother joining in the discussion, leaving others to fight it out.

However, I did have a private correspondence with one of the participants, and I thought I ought to put some of the thoughts I expressed there into a blog post – both to air them publicly, and so I know where I’ve put them.

I should probably start by saying that I don’t regard myself as an expert in the area of metadata, so I’m quite happy to be corrected if I’ve misapprehended anything. I have to admit that I’m not even quite sure that my ‘problems’ with RDA are really actually anything to do with RDA, but perhaps more to do with how it is likely to be implemented.

I guess that the main issue that I have is that if we are really going to change the ‘silo’ nature of library data, we need a system of metadata that embraces linked data as a fundamental principal. As far as I can see, RDA does not do this. Although it does open up the possibilities of linking data, it doesn’t make it fundamental – and I believe it really needs to.

I can see that some of RDA – the work done by Diane Hillman, Karen Coyle et al on vocabularies – sets up the possibility of using linked data – but I just don’t think it is going to be enough. I’m very supportive of this work, and think it may be our best chance for RDA to realise some of its potential. However, the risk that I see is that RDA is implemented, but fundamentally not much changes.

The other problem that I have is that RDA is ‘based on’ FRBR and FRAD – and although I very much believe in the concepts behind FRBR and FRAD, I’m worried by some aspects of using them as the basis for RDA. For a start, I’m not convinced that having a conceptual model necessarily means we should bake the conceptual entities into our Resource Description rules

Secondly, I think FRBR and FRAD are OK, but I’m not sure they are really robust enough to base real world resource description on them. There are inconsistencies between FRBR and FRAD – see the discussion about ‘people’ from the DC-RDA listserv earlier this year. I think some of the things FRBR says about what counts as a separate Work are odd – e.g. two films of the same play are different works. I realise that others would disagree with me on this – which is fine, but seems an inevitable consequence of trying to apply a conceptual model in this way. Others have expressed their issues with the FRBR model in more detail and more eloquently than me – notably the work that Martha Yee has done.

I guess the way I would put this is that I believe we should create Resource Descriptions in such a way that it is possible to view them in a FRBRised way. I don’t think this is the same as starting with FRBR as a way of describing resources. I have to admit to being in two minds about this – sometimes I am convinced of the strength of the FRBR entities as fundamental to how we catalogue, and sometimes I feel that we should focus on FRBR at the presentation end, not at the resource description end. I guess that what I am sure about is that a Resource Description framework has to support the ability to display things in a FRBRized display (much more than the current situation), but I’m not sure that cataloguing in a FRBRized way is necessary to achieve this.

If these concerns all seem a bit hand-wavy and general, then I apologise – it is because they are. It could be that a good real-world implementation of RDA will overcome my concerns – but realistically I think we will see the minimum effort expended, with maximum backwards compatibility, and that will result in something that isn’t much more than MARC + AACR3 🙁

My own (vague and not at all thought through!) vision of how resource description should work is that it needs to embrace the concepts of ‘linking’ and ‘crawling’ (and is, I guess, semantic web-ish at heart). Always link when you can, and ‘crawl’ the data to build your catalogue and indexes. The way I think about it, library ‘catalogues’ would become a bit like the Google ‘copy’ of the internet – built by crawling a web of data – however, by taking advantage of the structured data available in catalogue records, it could provide more than just keyword searching.

I suspect that some of the ideas here need more thinking through, and expansion, but hopefully this is enough for now as a basis for more thought and discussion.

Send in the clouds

· ostephens

Cloud computing seems to be the buzzword of the moment, and there is currently a lot of media coverage – especially in the light of the recent Microsoft announcement of their own take on the cloud with Azure. I’ve also been following some less high profile, but nonetheless thought provoking, discussions about other aspects of the cloud such as the ‘data cloud’ on blogs and twitter.

Why cloud? At some point it became usual to represent the network as a ‘cloud’ in network and computing architecture diagrams like this:

(courtesy of stephthegeek AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved) 

The cloud represents the complexity of the internet here, but also says it is quite simple from the network point of view – stuff goes in one end, and comes out the other.

The concept of ‘cloud computing’ is that you can have services that sit on the Internet (i.e. ‘in the cloud’) and use them in the same way – push stuff in, get stuff out, don’t really care how it happens.

Examples of ‘cloud computing’ that are often cited are:

  • Google Docs
  • Amazon S3
  • Amazon EC2

The first is a suite of office tools that exist only online – you don’t download anything to your PC, and you interact with them via your browser.

The second two are services from Amazon – the first is a storage service, where you can use hard disk space on Amazon servers to store stuff, and the second is service which allows you to run virtual servers, on demand, on Amazon hardware.

This week Microsoft announced it’s own take on the cloud in the form of Azure – which will provide a way of synchronising between your desktop, your mobile and ‘the cloud’.

In a recent post to the ZDNet Semantic Web blog, Paul Miller goes on to talk about the possibility of a ‘data cloud’ – linking it to the idea behind the ‘semantic web’ – that is creating a web of data, all inter-linked.

Paul Walk argued (and I’m inclined to agree), that you couldn’t talk about data in the same way as computing power – as you cared about data in a different way to your computing power – you would never accept just ‘any old data’. In a comment on this post Chris Rusbridge suggests that what Paul is referring to is the provenance of the data – again I’m inclined to agree.

However, I’d say that actually this is as true of obtaining computing power as it is data. Although, as Paul Walk notes, I may not care about the particular hardware that I’m utilising, or where it lives, I do care that I’m being offered a robust service – and so I don’t want just any old computing power – I want  the good stuff! I personally use the Amazon S3 service to backup data – because I trust that Amazon is going to be pretty reliable – I wouldn’t trust the same data to some bloke running a ‘cloud computing’ service from his garage.

The difference for me between the Internet as a ‘cloud’ and the idea of ‘cloud computing’ is that when I transmit data over the Internet as a network I’m trusting not in a single provider, but essentially in a technical protocol and infrastructure to get stuff from one place to another – and although one part of that journey is governed by someone I’ve chosen (my ISP) most of it isn’t. When I choose a ‘cloud computing’ service I trust a ‘brand’ that provides the service – admittedly I don’t ask questions about how they provide the service (do they subcontract? how would I know?), but I not just throwing a task at a generalised technical solution and saying ‘store this’ or ‘process that’.

I would argue that peer-to-peer networks are much closer to the idea of ‘cloud’ computing than Amazon’s or Google’s services. If I upload something to a peer-to-peer network, then it is potentially going to be stored in lots of places, and I won’t know where it is. For some data this might work (stuff that I really want to share), but for others (stuff I want to keep but perhaps not share) it isn’t.

Skype also uses peer-to-peer technology to route Skype calls – and again, I would argue that this is much closer to a situation where you really “don’t care” where the processing takes place – as long as your call holds up.

So, I think that what is being called ‘cloud computing’ is actually SaaS – Software (or Storage I guess) as a Service. SaaS is a model where you obtain access to software that is hosted elsewhere – so typically via the Internet. When I use Google Docs or Amazon S3 this is really what I’m doing.

Several Library system vendors offer – although without incredibly enthusiastic uptake in the academic library sector (see the post from Dave Pattern and various comments at http://www.daveyp.com/blog/archives/303). I have in the past been a bit sceptical about the idea of SaaS, but as I note in my comment on the post above, I’m now much more convinced.

I think that Paul Miller’s arguments make more sense in this context – DaaS (Data as a Service) – that is getting your data that is hosted somewhere else makes sense. However, Paul is arguing for something a bit more than this – data that is hosted in a way that makes in it accessible and linkable – and this is something that I think libraries need to get to grips with – there is a lot of talk of ‘data silos’ and how libraries are guilty of perpetuating this – we need to break out of this paradigm. I was very depressed to see a comment on an email list this week that said ""There is something to be said for the library's catalogue being self contained and inhouse" – I think this is an attitude we have to change – although I understand the arguments about reliability (e.g. in the face of network failure) we can overcome these problems without having systems that are ‘self contained’ and if we are to have library data as part of the cloud, we need to.

5 Years, 2 days

· ostephens

That’s how long I’ve been blogging here. Looking back I’m relatively surprised that I’ve actually posted with reasonable consistency. If I’m at a conference or other event, I blog a lot – trying to capture as much from the sessions as I can, and otherwise I tend to post a couple of times a month.

I thought a Wordle of my blog would be a good way of celebrating 5 years, so here it is – this is based on all entries, comments and pingbacks from the last 5 years (but not this entry)

Mashed Library ’08 – Register Now

· ostephens

You know you want to.

Registration for Mashed Library '08 is now open at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/mashed-library-2008/

There is no charge for the day, thanks to my employer (Imperial College London), sponsorship from UKOLN (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk), and the donation of time and space from Birkbeck College London (esp. thanks to David Flanders for this).

In the first instance places are limited to 25 people. If demand proves
sufficient we'll look at whether this can be increased. Registration
closes on 14th November. Hope you can make it.

The date and venue for the event are as follows:

Mashed Library '08 (see how optimistic I am) will be at Birkbeck College in London on 27th November:

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps

As I've described previously, the idea is to have a reasonably informal event at which we try to do
interesting stuff with library technology and/or data.

The day will start at 10 and finish at 5, and there is a notional structure for the day posted in the Structure forum at the ning site (http://mashedlibrary.ning.com), and replicated below. If you can't use the ning site for any reason, feel free to leave a comment here, or drop me a line via email or twitter.

Notional Structure

10am Start
10-11 Dummies guide to … (some short presentations on some of the
tech/tools that might be of use during the day – post requests/suggestions below)
11-4 Mashup – work in teams or individually to do interesting stuff
4-5 Round up of mashups and close

I had initially thought that we could have a 'pitch' session where
people pitched ideas for development, but in order to save time on the
day, I suggest that any suggestions for projects for the day are
discussed beforehand – again you can leave comments here, or use the discussion boards at http://mashedlibrary.ning.com

I've had some interest shown in remote participation,
and I'm happy to see what we can do to support this, although I'm not
quite sure what form this participation should take – if you are
interested in this, please post at http://mashedlibrary.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=2186716%3ATopic%3A127, or leave a comment below, and I'll see what I can do (not promising anything at this stage though!)

The tag for the event is mashlib08 if you want to use on posts, tweets, etc.

Using Twitter to Live Blog ILI08 – some thoughts

· ostephens

Following some comments and feedback today on my live blogging from ILI08, I thought I’d post a few more thoughts on this.

I found using Twitter a pretty good way of posting to the live blog. When I lost wifi access on my laptop and switched to using my iPhone for a bit, there was absolutely no problem – I could just keep blogging.

Rather than using my normal twitter account to do the blog I setup a new account that was meant to be event specific. This allowed me to keep the live blog tweets discrete from my personal tweet, and meant I didn’t overwhelm my followers with tweets (except those who chose to follow the new account). However, I did find that Twitter expects a unique email address for each account – and the idea of setting up a new twitter account, and a new email for each event I want to blog is not appealing. So I suspect that I just need a twitter ‘live blog’ account alongside my personal one.
One final thing was that some of my existing followers sent comments to my normal twitter account, so I retweeted to my live blogging account – clearly there is scope for some confusion here, and another reason for not having more twitter account than absolutely necessary.

One of the other issues I wanted to tackle was differentiating between reporting what the speaker was saying, and my own comments on it. I had an idea that by using my personal account alongside my live blog account, I could differentiate between these two things. However, this felt a bit artificial, and I think risks losing the ‘voice’ from the blogging – I’m not sure I would use this device again.

One of the commenters on the UK Web Focus post that started me off thinking about Twitter for live blogging pointed at a service http://livetwitting.com/. I think this used in conjunction with a dedicated ‘live blogging’ Twitter account could well be a great solution – I’ll try to remember to give it a go next time I’m at an event – I especially like the way it supports annotating the blog with session and speaker names (and Q&A bits). The other thing is that since you are doing it via Twitter, even if livetwitting doesn’t work so well you’ve still got the twitter stream.

One of the other things I liked about the idea of using twitter was that it would be possible to manipulate the output, and this was true to a certain extent. My preferred way of extracting the liveblog was using the Twitter search API – I used a search for all tweets from the ostephensili08 account, and all tweets referencing the account – the syntax is extremely simple, and you can output results as atom or json. However, one issue is that you can output a maximum of 100 tweets at a time, and there doesn’t seem to be a way of knowing how many tweets in total have matched your search result – so when pulling these results together I have had to manually work out I have 4 pages of results.

I pulled together these 4 pages of results into a single RSS feed/JSON file of results using Yahoo Pipes. However, in some cases (see below) using the twitter search results in their raw atom format.

Chris Keene left a comment in my last post suggesting the use of FriendFeed – I need to have a look at this and see how it works. Chris also shows how Dipity can be used to display the twitter stream – so thanks to him I’ve setup an account and used the Twitter search api to bring in all tweets from @ostephensili08 and any replies sent to this account (which is mostly me talking to myself) – there seems to be a problem with Dipity consuming my merged results set via Pipes, so I’ve just used the raw atom feeds from the search api, giving dipity 4 URLs as RSS sources.

The Timeline is perhaps the obvious way of outputting the results – but, I found the map display very interesting as well, as although I only had a few tweets with places in them, I actually found it interesting to have these picked out and see what the context was.

If anyone has any other visualisation suggestions, or ways of displaying the output, leave a comment

Link to my dipity account dipity / ostephens

Timeline

Map (only Tweets mentioning places)

ILI08 Liveblog

· ostephens

I was at ILI08 today and decided to try out a live blogging experiment using Twitter (as described in this post).

I had some issues with the wi-fi during the day, and for a bit was reduced to blogging on my iPhone, but in general I was able to post to twitter quite well. Using http://search.twitter.com I was able to get the output in a few formats. At this point I was unsure the best way of actually presenting this on-screen as a live blog – I was thinking of something similar to the CoverItLive format, but wasn’t sure how to acheive it.

I fiddled around a bit with Yahoo Pipes to bring together a few separate searches from twitter search (because it limits the number of results returned in a single search to 100 tweets) and also used this to sort the tweets into the correct date/time order. Having done this I could get the results as a single  RSS (http://tinyurl.com/43glub) or JSON (http://tinyurl.com/4zeygw) – but I was unsure the best way to display them in an easily consumable format – I was thinking of something like the CoverItLive format.

I’ve tweeted for some help with this, and if you have suggestions, you could leave a comment here, but what my first attempt is using Grazr, and here is a Grazr gadget displaying the liveblog account, with any comments directed at the live blogging account by other twitterers using the @ostephensili08 syntax.

Grazr