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/​2​r7qun #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.

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Daniel Libeskind’s Gazprom build­ing