Which gave me a daft idea: why not add a bit of colour to Twitter postings that way? As in:

emokid1982 Oh, woe is me, I am so depressed and everybody hates me #000

raspberryreichman Bruce LaBruce has a queer zombie flick at Sundance! http://tinyurl.com/2r7qun #ffc0cb

ecowarrior my new hemp trousers are just spiffy #008000

Then, some clever coding person could whip up a beautiful interface to Twitter, allowing users to browse tweets according to their hue. And another even cleverer coding person could write a thingy that analysed the text of colored tweets, matching words to their associated shades.

Wouldn’t that be fab? By which I mean spectacularly pointless.

Update: I’d forgotten that del.icio.us actually implements something akin to this, for folk who want to ‘bookmark’ colourschemes, though it’s quite tricky to use.

Hammersly is reporting on the run up to Turkey’s general election in July for the BBC, but rather than just filing copy for the web, audio for the World Service and video for News 24, he’s using a raft of web services to augment the more traditional media.

There are Flickr photographs, links on del.icio.us, status updates on Twitter, routes on Google Maps and, of course, a weblog. You can even add Hammersly as a friend on Facebook.

It’s an interesting experiment in newsgathering and alternative modes of broadcasting, but what’s really grabbed me is that Hammersly is not only providing new ways to follow a news story, but also revealing the processes which usually remain hidden from viewers or listeners, the nuts and bolts of producing a news item:

I probably shouldn’t talk about it in any detail yet, but by the looks of things I’ll soon be involved in a new web project that could learn a lot from the Turkish Journey experiment when it comes to arts reporting and reviewing, rather than news. More on that next month.

Save the following in a text file somewhere (I put it in /bin/ and called it twitterwakeup.sh), replacing the stuff in italics with your email, password and cheery waking up message:

#! /bin/sh

curl --user yourname@yourdomain.com:yourpassword -F status="Your cheery waking up message!" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

(That second bit should all be on one line.)

Make it executable:

sudo chmod u+x /bin/twitter.sh

Install Bernhard Baehr’s handy Sleepwatcher daemon.

Make a file called .wakeup in your home directory, and put the full path to your twitterwakeup.sh script in it.

That’s it.

Hyundai logo

Daniel Libeskind’s Gazprom building