ISMB coverage on Twitter? It’s possible there was…

Peter writes:

I wonder if part of the drop off is live bloggers moving to platforms like Twitter? I can tell you it seemed like there were almost as many tweets for one SIG (#bosc2011) as for the whole of #ISMB / #ECCB2011, and I personally didn’t post anything to FriendFeed but posted lots on Twitter.

Well, there’s a problem with using Twitter for analysis of conference coverage. Let’s try searching for ISMB-related tweets using the twitteR package:

library(twitteR)
ismb <- searchTwitter("ismb", 1000)
length(ismb)
# [1] 30

If we can't archive, how can anyone else?

30? Are we using twitteR properly? Running the same search at the Twitter website gives roughly the same results, plus this unhelpful message.

I like Twitter – as a real-time communication tool. As a data archive? Forget it.

Twitter Friends: statistics and visualisation from your network

Twitter Friends FOAF view

Alan says:

I’m liking TwitterFriends

I agree. Finally, social network visualisation that tells you something useful; e.g. well-connected people = useful to know. All without asking for your password too.
TwitterFriends.

Two great open science resources

The Twitter + FriendFeed combination is proving to be a very useful information stream; not just from other people but as a reminder of what I thought was worth sharing. Two links from there that I think deserve wider attention:

• One Big Lab proposes that we become, well, one big lab – and has some ideas as to how that might work.
• From the OWW wiki, an excellent article on python in computational biology. This has been presented at Pycon 2008 and is also a companion article to a paper in PLoS Computational Biology. Imagine if everyone described their methods in this detail.

Deepak has some commentary on what we’re now calling the “bio-twitterverse”.

What does it all mean?

My Tweet Cloud is probably trying to tell me something important. But what? Thanks to Attila for pointing to the resource.

More social web snippets

Busy. No time for real posts. Brief updates:

• Attila is set to resume the great live thesis online experiment
• I have succumbed to Twitter, woe is me
• On a related note, Firefox extension Shareaholic is a nice idea, if a bit rough round the edges just now