Posted: March 13th, 2010 | Author: mattsly | Filed under: wacky interwebs, work stuffs | View Comments
One of the projects I’ve been working on at Microsoft FUSE Labs over the past few months is Bing Twitter Maps – showing geolocated tweets as they happen. (It’s one of the applications inside the beta versoin of a new Bing Maps, which you should check out, if you haven’t already). We’ve just released a new version of Twitter Maps that includes the ability to embed a custom Twitter map into your site.
Just like with the main site, there are all sorts of options – your map can be scoped to a @user or keyword, and show results from anywhere, or keep the viewport fixed on a location. The Tweets shown will always be the most recent that match your criteria. If at anypoint someone viewing the embed badge gets sufficiently intrigued to check out more about a location, @user or keyword, clicking any of those buttons links to the full experience at Bing maps. The embedded map will show Silverlight (cooler) if it’s installed, otherwise it will show a JavaScript version.
Being a California kid, who has since been dragged voluntarily moved elsewhere, I’m always curious to see if there’s anywhere in the world that can match the San Francisco Burrito. So here’s a Bing Twitter Map showing the most recent Tweets containing “burrito” anywhere in the world, as part of that elusive (and probably futile) quest.
Here’s the iframe code for this embed:
<iframe src="http://www.bing.com/twitter/maps/embed?version=1.0&eid=785005709&keyword=burrito" frameborder="0" height="350" width="590" scrolling="no"></iframe>
Check out http://bing.com/twitter/maps and the embed wizard will help you make your own map chock full o’ Tweets!
update!: pitchfork + coachella + twitter + bing = hipsters on a map! pitchfork, the quintessential indie-rock hispter music blog, has (of course) a site up following coachella, the quintessential indie-rock hipster music festival. to give their readers a chance to follow the action live, they used the bing twitter maps embed functionality to provide a live geo-stream of all the action. nice! (looks like Beyonce gave a surprise performance w/ Jay-Z?)
Posted: March 9th, 2010 | Author: mattsly | Filed under: tech-biz | View Comments
I went to college at Williams in the late 90s, when Mark C. Taylor was a professor there…Mark is a dynamic, passionate and thoughtful teacher, and I dove head-first into the murky depths of psychoanalysis and post-modernism theory through his inspiration. I wrote a paper, called (I kid you not): “Addressing the Threat to Dialectical Structure Posed by the Female Cyborg.” And got an A.
To be honest, this stuff was pretty much over my head, and now I reflect back on it with a wry chuckle. But several themes resonated, including those presented by Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, in which he discusses how modern media society has replaced reality with symbols – the Simulacrum. Some of his most seminal writing is about the First Gulf War, and how the images of war (broadcast via CNN) came to supplant the reality of war.
Um, OK. So what does this have to do with the modern Internet? “The Link Economy“ is a term coined by Jeff Jarvis, a professor of Journalism at NYU. Jarvis is bearish on paying for content (to put it lightly), and instead of thinks that monetizing links is how “content creators” can make money. In his own words: “Let’s say that the real value in this equation (meaning journalism on the Internet) is not content and information – both of which are now quickly commodified – but links, which are the new currency of media.”
When I read this, I thought: “How Baudriallardian”
Jarvis’ argument calls for prioritizing the signifier over that which is signified (to indulge in a little wordplay.) It is not the “real stuff” that is important, but the links to that “real stuff” The problem here, as Baudrillard laments, is that real meaning (or value) starts to fade. When A links to B links to C links to A…we have just closed a loop without creating any value other than the perception of value which never arrives. (Totally could have written that line in college paper). Simulcra FTW!
To translate this into more stark business terms: where’s the money? If everyone just outsources value capture to the other then nobody gets paid: you circumvent any real value. (And as Dave McClure says, “the Internet wants to get paid on f-inFriday.” And for that to happen, at some point, somebody needs to deliver value, in order to anchor the entire system. Otherwise it’s nothing more than one big pyramid scheme…or maybe in this case an “infinite loop scheme” is a more apt term?
p.s. I still have that crazy paper on the Internets!