Now I get twitter
After being registered for a year and using it actively for a few months I now get twitter. Two recent uses have twigged me to twitter’s terrificness.
This month when the roads on Bowen Island were slippery and dangerous a group of us worked over twitter to create a road status tool that uses crowdsourcing to report on road conditions on our island. Road conditions are incredibly variable depending on the altitude of the road (from sea level to 500 feet and more) and so it’s not enough to say “Grafton Road is clear” because it might be snowchoked up the hill from you. So twitter was the way we connected and did real time updates to the tool.
Then today, I read a quick entry on Rob Paterson’s blog about Iceland’s government collapsing and I went to search for more. I checked Google first, but it’s a firehose of content, tried searching for blogs on Google, but that isn’t satisfying. Finally went to twitter, searched for “iceland” and got a slew of great articles and even a timely podcast.
So hooray for twitter.
Almost finished the road status tool, just waiting on the go-ahead and SC was going to add in a couple more road segments still missing:
http://onedaybowen.ca/maps/roadstat3.htm
Yay! Glad to hear it, Chris. And I love what you and your network pulled together over Xmas re. road conditions on Bowen ”” an excellent example of what’s possible with free web 2.0 tools.
Yeah, we’re pretty excited by that piece of work I think. Hoping that the municipality will receive it as a gift and that citizens will own it, which I think they will after the month we have been through.
Mark Groen up there was one of the codemonkeys that did the hard slogging on it.
Flock O’ Tweets is also an interesting way to stay in touch with a chosen-by-you CoP (if you want to think of it that way).