Bill Wolff’s Composing Spaces

I am really enjoying the sharing of applications and sites on Twitter. A few have come across lately that I thought I would share here.

A few weeks ago Matt tweeted about Picnik, a free, robust online photo editing application that integrates with photos on Facebook, Flickr, myspace, photobucket, and many other applications. I showed it to my Writing, Research, and Technology students last night because many were having problems gaining access to Photoshop from home for basic photo editing work (creating banners, adding text to images, and so forth). They loved it.

Today Hannah (who blogs at Hannah’s Notes on New Media) pointed to Tweetdeck, which is in public beta. Tweetdeck “aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.” Organization is achieved by creating user-defined searchable groups.

The mining of tweets is already happening with some spectacular results. For example, Perspctv’s 2008 presidential election coverage mashed together data mined from tweets, blogs posts, news feeds, CNN’s national poll of polls, and other sources to create dynamic visual representations of election-related data in one easily navigated dashboard:

Perspctv has just released a search function that allows users to create their own dashboards based on individually-defined search times. It mines blog posts, tweets, Google search volume, and news mentions. For example, here is the visual representation for the search terms, Obama, media, and race:

I can see wonderful applications of these applications in Information Architecture and related courses.

And, for all us amature photographers out there who dream of one day making it, Melissa pointed to The Digital Journalist. It looks to be an outstanding resource.

I just heard on BBC Radio’s Newshour (which annoyingly doesn’t have individual story archives on their web site) that the social networking site, Bebo, is sending messages composed by users to an earth-like planet from a telescope in the Ukraine. According to Alexa, Bebo is the 102nd most visited site in the world, the 5th most visited site in Ireland, and the 10th most visited site in the United Kingdon.

Dan Cohen plots the over 500 edits to Sarah Parlin’s Wikipedia entry composed by hundreds of people. Fascinating example of distributed collaborative writing.