(iverson's) currentbuzz

TechCrunch blogger M.G. Siegler was at SXSW and reports on something I experienced too at SXSW. “Check-in fatigue” happens when you are trying to use location-based software to let your friends know where you are in real-space. So in theory, you arrive somewhere, and quickly “check-in” via your smartphone. You can see if any of your friends are nearby. You can leave a review or message about the location. Some services have other frills, like maps, badges, and virtual gifts. At SXSW, I used check-in tools to find where @kdc was sitting, so we could talk, and also to choose bars and restaurants. BUT, if you try and check-in to each place you visit even on one service, it gets tiresome, and since there are a host of these services, including Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, Burbn, MyTown, CauseWorld, Hot Potato, Plancast, and (at certain places) Foodspotting, you end up spending your waking hours and expending your best attention stream, in geo-locating.

The SXSW parties I attended were outdoors, on star-lit nights, with loads of interesting people, lots of libations, but everyone was spending face time reading by the glow of their handhelds, giving only cursory attention to the live humans all around them. You can read what the TechCruncher says here:

this would take a solid 10 minutes or more to check-in to all of them. And it took even longer when I’d have to pause to explain to my friends what the hell I was doing on my phone all that time.

via Check-In Fatigue. Or, Why I’m Rooting For An All-Out Location War..

This new feature is a nice fillip on Twitter, but it could be better. If it automatically located you, so you always got what was happening around you instead of what you said your home city was, it might be a very valuable ad-hoc guide to wherever you're opening your laptop. That would require the browser return you location. HTML 5 has geolocation reporting, but support for HTML 5 is only beginning to roll out. Fortunately, some mobile Twitter apps, like TweetDeck, already allow you to see Tweets that are geo-tagged as near you. Also, Twitter would be wise to put this feature on the Twitter.com pre-sign-in home page, to make it more clear to new users what Twitter has to offer them.

via Twitter adds local trends to Web site | Webware – CNET.

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• TweetDeck for iPhone Now Supports Lists and Geotagging (readwriteweb.com)
• Twitter launches Trends for YOUR Area. (thenextweb.com)

Originally, Breaking Tweets was to be nothing more than a personal blog, telling a few major stories around the world every day through the use of Twitter.

It blossomed into something so much more.

It’s been 750 posts, 6,000 featured tweets, and 150,000 unique visitors (320,000 pageviews) from 194 countries since then — and more than 100 news organizations around the world have visited the site since it began, including Reuters, Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times — but none of this has gone to my head.

via Letter from the editor: Breaking Tweets turns six months old | Breaking Tweets.

From Politcs Online comes this cool heads-up. Now, if only our local pols would do this when they have information to share. What have Illinois pols got to fear from this? Let them answer that question. Mr. Mayor? What about transparency like this in the City?

In preparation for the President’s trip to Ghana, the White House is providing a well organized media sources page to allow all citizens a consolidated page of where to find the many media outlets that the White House will be using to broadcast Obama’s speech.

via PoliticsBlog: Obama in Ghana.

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• Networks Headed to Ghana (mediabistro.com)
• Excitement on streets of Ghana for Obama (cnn.com)
• Thousands send text messages to Obama before Africa visit (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Obama Ghana Trip: No Speech (huffingtonpost.com)

I updated a Poynter E-Media Tidbits story about BreakingTweets last week, and now BreakingTweet’s founder and editor, Craig Kanalley, reports that it has been blocked in Iran. As I’ve written, BreakingTweets is a great combination of human and computer to produce news from Twitter that you can see at a glance. The BreakingTweets editor does the time-intensive searching and verification among the many, many tweets out there with #iran, etc.

On Wednesday, we had our usual hits from Tehran University and other places throughout the country, per host network stats and other information from Google Analytics.

But Thursday, our usual visitors via Google, Twitter, and other sites — none could get through. The bounce rate all of a sudden began appearing at 100% and time on the site showed as 0:00. This was in contrary to stats for previous days, when the bounce and time numbers were wide-ranging.

via Whirlwind: BreakingTweets.com blocked in Iran.