I should really be telling you about Oxfringe 2010, shouldn't I? The programme is all online, and you can download a PDF of the brochure there (or pick one up around Oxford - garish yellow and pink, you can't miss it, and there should be some ads on buses this year). Things some of you might be interested in are:

• theatre show about Borges
• a talk by ( Read more... )

It’s Burns Night tonight. I’ve dredged this up from my files for 2002:
Address to Burns

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face
Great poet o’the chieftain race
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place:
Wordsworth, Shak’speare, Scott.
Yon Sassenachs cannae cut your pace -
Ah love them no’ a jot.

In Alloway ye wis a bairn
Your pa a gairdner in Ayr’n
Ye met your ( Read more... )

Here’s the final part of my short series on mining data on around 50,000 Twitter accounts, as recorded by Twanalyst. Previously:

• Part one looked at user profiles. Generally, the more you fill out your profile (description, avatar, background image etc), there seems to be a correlation with increased number of followers; and high-status description ( Read more... )

For the last decade I’ve been following the fascinating work of Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues (especially Dan Goldstein) - as briefly as I can state it, he has identified a number of very simple heuristics which outperform far more complex models for decision-making processes or making predictions about certain kinds of data (this stuff has partly ( Read more... )

I’ve been analysing data from 50000 Twitter accounts, recorded by my Twanalyst tool (tracks your Twitter stats over time, and analyses your tweeting style and personality). In Part 1, I looked at how people’s profiles might correlate with their number of followers, and a few trends emerged.

This time I’ve been looking at the relationship between ( Read more... )

It's traditional in Bot circles at this time of year to post the first sentence of the first LJ post of each month. I give you the first clauses ( Read more... )

Running Twanalyst has given me access to large amounts of data, which I’m slightly-too-addicted to crunching. Inspired by this post at Social Media Today, which analyses the popularity of Twitter users according to the words they use in their tweets, I realised I have a large database of people’s Twitter biographies. Do the words people use in ( Read more... )

I’ve just launched a new tool at Hatmandu.net, a text content and keyword analyser - in theory useful for search engine optimisation, but also to get the general gist of a text.From the notes:

This text content and keyword analyser is intended to give a more precise indication of a text’s most important words than other tools available. Most ( Read more... )

So, yesterday I was felled by illness. The night before, I lay wake hour after hour, aching and uncomfortable with stomach pangs. As the day went on, I felt worse, with hot and cold flushes, more pangs, total exhaustion, and I crept back into my bed for much of the day for further fretful sleeplessness. Even one of usual salves - watching one of ( Read more... )

As usual, everyone’s talking about how publishing can survive, and how to make money on the internet. Paul Graham has written an excellent essay, Post-Medium Publishing, where he observes that it is wrong to think publishers sell ‘content’ - rather, they sell a means of distribution, and prices are dictated by that (ie, historically, the price of ( Read more... )