In any event, it is still possible to construct RSS feeds for Twitter users, lists, and searches. Dave’s piece and a few questions I’ve received recently inspired me to document those methods. These instructions are intended for savvy web users who don’t want to mess around with code. In all cases, replace stuff like {username} to suit your needs.

RSS feed for a Twitter user

There are at least two ways to generate an RSS feed for an individual Twitter user, and I’ll document both on the assumption that they won’t work forever. The easiest method is as follows:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name={username}

The other method is slightly more complicated:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/{userID}.rss

You can find a user’s ID most easily with this tool. If that tool ever goes away, you can also find a Twitter user’s ID in this XML feed: https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?screen_name={username} The ID is at the very top of the feed in the <id> tag.

If you generate RSS feeds for several Twitter users, you could bundle them together as an OPML file, and you’ve got yourself a Twitter list. If you go that route, you might also be interested in Dave’s River2, which would help you elegantly display the list (and put it on the web). But if you prefer Twitter’s native support for lists, keep reading.

Atom feed for a Twitter list

Twitter lists don’t support RSS at all, as far as I can tell, but you can consume them as Atom feeds, which are recognized by most RSS readers, including Google Reader. Here is that method:

https://api.twitter.com/1/{username}/lists/{listname}/statuses.atom

For instance, to generate the Atom feed for The Wall Street Journal’s list of staffers on Twitter replace {username} with wsj and {listname} with wsj-staff (the list’s official name, found in its URL).

RSS feed for a Twitter search

For some people, the most useful type of RSS feed to generate from Twitter may be a search — for mentions of a Twitter handle, perhaps. Any search can be consumed in RSS as follows:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q={query}

If your search is simple, replacing {query} will be easy. But if the query is complex, you may first need to encode it to get a useable URL. This tool ought to help in most cases. You could also perform the search on twitter.com and see how Twitter encodes it in the resulting URL. For instance, a Twitter search for example search with #hashtag ends up looking like: http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=example%20search%20with%20%23hashtag

In a pinch, you might prefer to turn to a third-party search engine such as Topsy, which exposes an RSS feed for pretty much any search you can perform there, just as Twitter used to do.

The Wall Street Journal seeks a social-media editor to join its growing team of journalists responsible for engaging users on new platforms. We’re looking for someone who thinks creatively about the social web and how the Journal fits within it.

Based in New York, the job requires real-time analysis of traffic and trends to inform our efforts across WSJ.com and quickly capitalize on new opportunities. As part of a multi-skilled team, this editor will focus, at least initially, on managing and expanding the Journal’s institutional presence in social media; training and advising Journal staffers; and generating new reporting projects built for the social web. Our intent is to experiment quickly with new tools, repeat what works, and share what we find with the rest of the newsroom.

Social media is a growth area for the Journal, touching much of the organization. Candidates for this position should have a good feel for a broad range of news and be able to spot the tweet or Facebook question in any story. Ideally, many of these attributes describe you:

• has strong journalistic instincts and experience
• lives on the web with a feel for how people use it
• works effectively with large online communities
• is experienced in web analytics and project management
• spins a good story with text, data or otherwise
• writes web apps and scripts at the speed of news
• knows CSS, JavaScript, and other client-side languages

The editor will be part of a team of diverse talents. Therefore, development and design experience is desired but not required.

In a cover letter, please specify which of the above and other skills you would bring to the team and include at least five links to any material we should see (articles, websites, videos, apps, social-media profiles). Bear in mind that we’re more concerned with how you think about Twitter and whether you can hack the Twitter API, for example, than how many followers you have. And, most of all, we are looking for strong journalists. Please also attach or include a link to your résumé.

Click here for the official posting and to apply.

Sparklines, according to Edward Tufte, who invented them, are “small, high-resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images.” Among designers, there’s general agreement that sparklines are fantastic for conveying time-series data, particularly financial and economic information, in primarily text-based media like stock tables.

Several weeks ago, my colleague Brian Aguilar came into work with an idea: what if we embedded a sparkline in a tweet? He had found a blog post by Alex Kerin that explained how to generate a bar chart with Unicode characters like so: ▁▃▆▃▁▅▆▆▃▆▅▃▂▁▁

So we gave it a shot, using Kerin’s Excel workbook to generate the appropriate Unicode for a dataset of new claims for unemployment benefits. Reaction was generally positive, but there were deficits to the approach, most notably that some of the blocks didn’t align along the x-axis on Macs. I also placed the blocks after six words of introductory text, which meant they split over two lines in some contexts like mobile Twitter clients. And it turns out that Unicode characters don’t display on TweetDeck by default. Still, we were thrilled with version one.

On Friday, we tried again, this time relying on a web-based tool by The Data Collective, which was inspired by Kerin and discovered by Albert Sun. It was the morning of the monthly jobs report, so we visualized the unemployment rate over the past 12 months. That’s the tweet above, which has been retweeted 249 times amid an enthusiastic reception.

Some people observed the sparktweet — if it’s OK to call it that — may suggest unemployment in April 2011 (9%) was a third of the rate in August through November 2010 (9.6% – 9.8%), when that’s hardly the case. Certainly the y-axis does not begin at zero. Charts built with Unicode block elements will always be rough, but I’d be interested in ways to improve their resolution. (There’s a lot to work with.)

In the meantime, here are some observations and best practices:

• Place the chart at the beginning of a sparktweet to minimize how often it breaks over two lines. You might even try a line break after the chart, which will render in some Twitter clients.
• Six unique values can be visualized in a sparktweet. because the current iteration makes use of these characters: ▁▂▃▅▆▇ Any more than six and the differences begin to blur.
• It’s possible to view Unicode in TweetDeck: Go to Settings > Colors/Font and choose International Font / Twitter Key. Almost no TweetDeck users enable this option, however, so it’s worth writing sparktweets to be legible without the visual.
• People really seem to like sparktweets, but it’s unclear how much of the reaction is due to novelty. Like Facebook profile hacks, Twitter art succeeds by expanding the creative boundaries of a medium while adhering to its strict rules.

And if you create one yourself, why not hashtag it #sparktweet.

P.S.

P.P.S.

Most of the reaction to this post was positive, but some folks fairly focused on the accuracy issues I also flagged. The best discussion is in the thread below a post by Than Tibbetts, who called sparktweets “junk.” He’s right to be concerned, but my favorite comment there is:

140 characters isn’t high resolution *period*, as far as information conveyance is concerned. Sparktweets are an amusing hack, are I would argue higher density than a raw Tweet in many cases (one I made has two time series that could not fit in 140 characters summarized).

Dr. Drang, who wrote a Python script to generate sparktweets, has a similar take: “Lighten up, Francis,” is how he puts it.

This is Twitter we’re talking about, not an article for an ASA journal. Sparktweets are just a fun way to show data—data which may well be properly analyzed and presented in a linked article.

The question, in their minds and mine, is how much resolution one should really expect from a tweeted chart. And in that respect, Drake Martinet points to a good standard: “Sparktweets give me nothing that a good sentence can’t.” If that’s true, then, yes: “Easy on the sparktweets.” But I think there are signs of something more than novelty, of sparktweets that pack more punch than a sentence.

On May 26, we tried another sparktweet, and it was our most successful yet: the y-axis at zero, text providing context, and a link to a more-detailed chart.

I recently placed Emphasis on this blog. It’s a fantastic deep-linking tool by New York Times developer Michael Donohoe. Installation was easy, thanks to a WordPress plugin by Ben Balter. Now, anyone can link to a specific paragraph of my blog and highlight any sentences.

To get started, hit shift twice. I love that. Ryan Sholin noted today that he had also installed Emphasis, and it occurred to me that as the tool spreads, double-tapping shift becomes a sort of shibboleth: Are you enabled for deep links? And if the answer is yes, pilcrows appear.

At that point, you can link to any paragraph by clicking on its pilcrow. Highlight by clicking on a paragraph and then any sentences within it that you wish to emphasize. Your new URL awaits in the address bar.

Emphasis is the coolest development in networked reading since the Open Bookmarks project. It was helped along by Dave Winer, who has enabled paragraph-level links on his blog since 1999; Jay Rosen, whose adoption of them last fall seemed to give the form new life; and Daniel Bachhuber, who created an early WordPress plugin. Companies like Diigo and ShiftSpace have made progress with Web highlighting.

In open-sourcing the JavaScript code for Emphasis, Donohoe hinted at one direction in which this could go: popular highlights.

You may know I’m obsessed with the passages that are frequently highlighted by Kindle users. There’s an RSS — or, ahem, any interested developers, JSON — feed for that. Lately, it’s been surfacing passages from The 4-Hour Body and an intense, World War II yarn. Stuff like:

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer.

Now, yikes. These popular highlights are not generally my favorite reading. But the presence of this agonizing sentence in my feed indicates that some large number of Kindle users — hundreds, it seems — were motivated to highlight it. That’s cool.

What motivates a user to highlight? When I last wrote about this in 2009, I said, “I’m not sure precisely what that’s measuring, but it feels like engagement.” Well, sure, but it also feels like importance.

Before the holidays, I lent out a few Kindle books because now we can. But I wished the loaned books I got in return came with the owner’s highlights and annotations (on toggle, of course). Couldn’t Amazon facilitate a secondary ebook market in which the used goods, along with their insightful notes, are actually more expensive than the originals?

All I mean is that deep links and highlights are value-add features. As users highlight the Times, they suggest what they find important, what piques their curiosity. Apture is also doing good stuff in this space.

Robin Sloan sees a comeback narrative:

And it seems to me that it’s actually an argument, in code, for the good ol’ fashioned open web—the web of pages and links. It’s like: “Slow down, App Store! We’re not done with this thing over here. We still have work to do.” Maybe it’s a futile argument—maybe the era of earnest linking is waning, and that’s just the way it is. But you never know. The web has surprised us before.

Just tap shift twice.

Really, though, I’m linking to the post for his long list of Mac software, much of which I’m downloading right now. It reminded me how much I now rely on web apps for work that used to start in the Dock. But native software is cool, too, and maybe this shiny new laptop — and, of course, the Mac App Store — will inspire me to dot-dmg.

So here’s some of the non-system software I use every day:

• Mailplane ($25 app for Gmail)
• Fluid (to create an app that houses Google Reader)
• Cyberduck (for FTP’ing without Coda, which I also use)
• TextWrangler and Bean (never use Microsoft Word again)
• Skitch (for visual lulz and quick sketches)

Many other of my mainstays — Photoshop, Dropbox, Skype — are also on Chimero’s list. He says he doesn’t really use iWork; I decided to forgo it entirely on this machine, though I’ll probably end up buying Keynote for $20 now that Apple’s productivity software is a la carte.

If you have Mac software you think I’d like, too, please let me know.

I thought of those bulletins as I followed Twitter for accounts of the attack on Rep. Gabby Giffords. Uncertainty governed the dramatic tweets, which said the congresswoman had died before she emerged alive. The UPI wire in 1963 initially reported that John Connally had been slain along with Kennedy, when the Texas governor actually survived.

The Gifford tweets rendered the unfolding scene like another of Josh’s examples: the MetaFilter thread on 9/11. “This string of comments,” Josh says, “completely evokes that moment in a way that many book-length treatments would not.” And this, even though most contributors this weekend and on 9/11 were just watching on television.

Real-time narrative journalism is sloppy and uncertain, which is to say, realistic, and that roughness is what’s compelling. It gets you on a perfectly genuine level because the narrative is genuinely unresolved; all possibilities exist. The notion of a wire endures beyond the telegraph because it still captures the kinetic energy of a breaking-news story.

Below is the five-minute slice of Josh’s talk that deals with the UPI wire copy and MetaFilter thread. The whole thing is worth watching.

I ended the year subscribed to 806 RSS feeds and following 832 Twitter accounts. I sent 2,387 emails from my personal address in 2010, 39% of which were to the same three people. At work, I received 39,677 emails, or 109 a day. I performed 7,939 Google searches, and my third-most-frequent query was “em dash.” I tweeted 1,781 times.

On 125th Street, a basket of goods — two loose Parliaments, a Citarella fruit salad, tickets at the Apollo, and an egg sandwich — cost 24% more at the end of the year than at the beginning. A new Target opened over the summer at the eastern end of the street, but I haven’t been.

I went down the data rabbit hole in 2010, and one result was my blog post for the Journal, “Everything the Internet Knows About Me (Because I Asked It To).” Earlier, I analyzed a dataset of passwords chosen by Gawker Media users and revealed the contents of private Facebook messages misdirected to my inbox. My beat was secrets, I guess.

But most of my writing in 2010 was in the form of memos, comments, and random side projects. I left my review of The Social Network on Jeff Jarvis’ blog, and I acknowledged a mistake on Felix Salmon’s. My charitable contributions are in the comments of a Matt Cutts post.

I taught a course on social media at Columbia Journalism School. Throughout the year, I gave talks on social-media metrics at News Foo Camp, on social-media storytelling for the Online News Association, on geosocial news at the Community Managers Meetup, and on the economics of journalism at ASNE’s annual conference.

Lately, I’ve been playing around with the Google Books Ngram Viewer and created a Tumblr to collect top-notch ngrams. There’s a post still to be written on that. (Among other Tumblrs in 2010, some friends and I compiled a list of TV Shows That Are Sentences, and another season of Mad Men aired without my doing much with dickwhitman.com.)

I did not miss an episode of the following television shows in 2010: Friday Night Lights, Gossip Girl, Lost, Mad Men, Treme, which I blogged for the Journal, and True Blood. The Kids Are All Right was my favorite movie of the year. The best blog I discovered in 2010 was booktwo.org.

My favorite book was Freedom, which I read on Kindle for iPad and recently lent over Twitter. Which reminds me, I created an RSS feed that surfaces passages that are popularly highlighted by Kindle users.

The personal highlight of my year was the wedding of my friends Sarah and Simon. At the very end of 2010, I bought a 13″ MacBook Air.

Additional theories? Drop them in the comments.

As Clay Shirky wrote his new book on distributed information systems, he joked about calling it LOLcats as Soulcraft. That was a play on Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, which argues for the intellectual value of manual labor. Shirky’s point seemed to be that captioning cat photos with pidgin English — or, just as likely, editing Wikipedia — is enjoyed as a collective act of creation akin to an Amish barn raising. Yes! Then again, he was being facetious.

I spent the past week in Phoenix, Palo Alto, and San Francisco.

Phoenix

is the fifth-largest city in the United States, situated in an uninhabitable portion of the country with no natural water supply. Its existence feels stubborn, arbitrary, and ingenious: urban design as a pure and unchecked market force (see also: Abu Dhabi). The rash of empty real estate speaks, crucially, to the city’s character.

Bringing me to Phoenix was an unusual conference of thinkers and practitioners in online journalism. We spent forty, over-saturated hours grappling with concepts like friction, attention, context, measurement, curiosity, and reading. It was wonderful, and afterward, I went for a hike outside the city with more inspiration than I had synapses to inspire.

In the Phoenix airport, a woman leaning against a GoDaddy promotional display read aloud a magazine story about Saddam Hussein’s capture from her Samsung Galaxy Tab. I remembered — how do we forget these things? — that there’s video of Hussein’s hanging on the internet.

Palo Alto

is named after a tall, double-trunked tree on the banks of the San Francisquito Creek; one of the trunks was felled by a storm in 1886, but the other is still there, and you can go look at it, though I did not. Instead, on my first night in Palo Alto, I caught up with an old friend over beers, deviled eggs, and fish and chips. He’s an engineer who once studied jet engines and now, as a doctoral candidate at Stanford, “fucks around with stuff for the enjoyment of myself and others.”

His research group is called Imaginary Labs.

At the table next to us, a group passed around a wheel with lights between the spokes that illuminated as it spun on a short axle. Over at the bar, the object of fascination looked like a Quidditch snitch, but I couldn’t discern its function. “Turn it waaaaaaay up,” someone said.

My friend — his name is Greg — shares a house with two other mechanical engineers, who are good people, and a “nerdy computer scientist,” who never materialized while I was there. (This was the first time in years that I’d heard “nerd” or “geek” used in a genuinely derisive context.) The place is filled with gadgetry, from the platform bed Greg constructed during a carpentry kick to the garden called Superbia to the fish-tank sound system for manifesting audio from the charged pulses of an electric eel.

Whoooooooooooommmmmmmp!

Sometime later that night our conversation turned to the dichotomy between ideas and materials, which isn’t a dichotomy at all but often gets framed that way. Crawford, among others, worries about “a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.” W00t?

My job is fun and satisfying, but the products I help create are intangible, constructed with notions and not nails. Which is not to idealize one or the other; I’m lucky to work on the Web. It’s just that sometimes I envy our mobile team because they can hold their craft and crack it open and think about the space between seven inches and ten.

Even within my seemingly limitless medium, I’m bounded by an inability to create what I conceptualize. I know HTML and CSS and can understand your PHP, but I can’t spin a database into an app or make an API call. Well, I did once, and it was totally my hello world.

In time, I’ve been inspired by co-workers who code, friends who learned to code, meetups like Hacks/Hackers, and posts like “Why Attend a Hackathon,” by Chrys Wu. (Hello, New York!) So while I’m not big on new year’s resolutions, I told Greg, in January I plan to take my first course in computer programming since I was in elementary school. I want to learn a data-visualization language called Processing.

“Have you ever seen an Arduino?” is how Greg responded to all that.

I had not, and the hunt was on to find one. A workbench in the living room was stocked with LEDs and hinges and books by Edward Tufte — but no Arduino. “There must be dozens in this house!” Finally, one was located in the frame of a Wink, an orb Greg created that “allows two people to share a moment of synchronicity across great distances.”

An Arduino, I learned, is a simple microcontroller with inputs and outputs, and that’s pretty much it. It’s a tiny computer and, loaded with code, can control traffic lights, musical instruments, or fairly complex robots. Greg had hooked up two Arduinos to encased lights that communicate with each other over the Web. This was the Internet of Things I’d been hearing about. Back in New York, my Internet of Things consisted of devices capable of adjusting themselves for Daylight Saving Time. With the Wink,

you just pick it up to communicate. The coupled device emits a light pattern, and the recipient picks up his Wink to respond. It is a state machine for presence; immediate yet implicit, meaningful yet ambient.

The Arduino’s software is based on Processing, Greg explained, which was the whole point of introducing me in the first place. This language I want to learn could not only visualize a large dataset but empower my relationship with the physical world. On a nightstand, I spied a copy of Shop Class as Soulcraft, and I purchased it on Google Books.

Walking home through downtown Palo Alto, I passed the offices of First Virtual Group, “a diversified holding company…with global interests in real estate, agribusiness, philanthropy, and global financial asset management. We consist of over 50 individual corporations.”

San Francisco

was ostensibly where I spent my vacation, insomuch as it’s easiest to say, “I’m vacationing in San Francisco.” One day, I walked around the Mission. Mostly, I hung out in South of Market, which somewhat sheepishly calls itself SoMa. (My friends in New York just moved to SoHa.) The wide streets reminded me of Seattle and everything felt

own, it ended up in a converted warehouse in SoMa. (That interlude was Robin Sloan’s brilliant novel set amid a realistically quasi-apocalyptic San Francisco in HD.) Formerly industrial neighborhoods seem to attract internet startups as abandoned beaver dams nourish wetlands.

Beaver dams can be disruptive… beaver dams along a stream may contribute to denitrification… Each time the stream life cycle repeats itself another layer of rich organic soil is added to the bottom of the valley.

I surfed around SoMa, firing up Twitter Inc., searching Google Inc., checking the Wikimedia Foundation, blogging about it with Six Apart Ltd., embedding myself at Scribd Inc. Their lofts encourage the sense of navigating a network not a neighborhood. Even the coffee houses appeared to brew according to an algorithm.

Last.fm Ltd. thinks I’m a 23-year-old female. Intuit Inc. says I spent too much on uncategorized last month. The blog post I meant to write on vacation would have ruminated on a new study of American browsing behavior: “Comparing the homogeneity of websites to zip codes, we find that websites tend to be more racially diverse.” W00t?

Another evening in Palo Alto, a patent lawyer hanging around Greg’s house picked her head up from a pile of documents and asked, “Is a circuit a physical object?” You know a conversation will be fruitful when it begins with disambiguation, and, oh man, did I learn about circuits.

—without something along the lines of this:

Felix Salmon predicted it two years ago:

But here’s the problem: the very posts which will help bring in new unique visitors (Denton wants Gawker to be “a national media gossip and pop culture site, which is based in new york, but can attract a national audience”) also risk being the posts which alienate Gawker’s core commenter audience.

And it’s more or less what happened to newspapers in the 19th century:

These pressures pushed papers to try and attain sufficient scale to lower production costs and attract both local and national advertisers. The number of party stalwarts placed a boundary on the potential circulations of strongly partisan papers. If a paper adopted a nonpartisan take on political news, it could draw on a larger segment of the population if readers from either party could be attracted to the outlet.

The cultural equivalent of bipartisanship is clearly evident in Gawker’s 20 most-popular posts of 2009 (with 9 million pageviews among them).

None of which really explains Nick Denton’s acquisition of Cityfile, except that you can only wring so many pageviews from the same type of content and the same type of readers. Search traffic to Cityfile’s topic pages will help achieve Denton’s new focus on unique visitors.

But where there’s mainstream media, there will always be alt-media:

P.S.

I went back and read the first mention of Gawker in my inbox, April 19, 2004. It was a link from a friend with a note, “This site is amazing!”