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Marshall Kirkpatrick

How One Advanced Search Operator Just Made Me Jump for Twitter JoyToday

“-source:Twitterfeed” Those were the magic characters. My longtime RSS mentor Marjolein Hoekstra told me about it tonight. From now on, the Twitter search results page I keep bookmarked and camp on day will be results for the search “benbarden OR qthrul OR marshallk OR rwwmike OR RWW OR sarahintampa OR chcameron OR fredericl OR curthopkins OR alexwilliams OR audreywatters OR adrjeffries OR klintron -source:TwitterFeed” (Those are my co-workers.) Ohhh, yeah!

I like Twitterfeed, but there are SO many spammers who use it that search results get pretty messy. I can deal with weak signal to noise ratios (I do it for a living, in fact) but if there’s an easy way to improve it, I’m pretty excited.

I Wrote the Forward to A Really Good (Free) BookYesterday

Last month I wrote the forward to a new book called The Shift: The Evolving Market, Players and Business Models in a 2.0 World and it’s now available – for free! It’s essentially a marketing vehicle for the very large telecommunication infrastructure provider Alcatel-Lucent, but it’s marketing 2.0 of the best kind: the book makes almost zero mention of the company at all. It just talks about how changes in society and mobile internet devices are combining in such a way that network service providers should offer application programming interfaces to a wider developer community. It’s a really good real, actually.

My forward isn’t my best writing, but I was proud to have been given the opportunity. I wrote a better article, one I’m quite proud of in fact, this week about an acquisition the company made: Acquisition Aims to Change History for Mobile Apps & Data.

I recommend reading the book if you’re into thinking about these kinds of topics. You can read selections online and if you want, the company will send you a free paper copy in exchange for your contact info. They may or may not call you, I’m guessing, to discuss whether you’d

A Startup I’ve Now Used Every Day for the Past Week: NsyghtSeptember 1

Nsyght is a clever service with a terrible name (it’s hard to remember) and stock photo on its home page, but don’t be fooled – it’s really useful. I wrote about it on ReadWriteWeb last week under the title How to Search Inside Twitter Lists, and that’s just what it’s for. After a few minutes to index your stream, Nsyght will let you search inside tweets from your friends, inside particular lists or your own archive for months back in history. It’s awesome. I’ve been using it to filter for images shared by friends on Twitter (great for quick little posts) and to find old Tweets of mine that I can’t find nearly as quickly in any other way. And searching inside a Twitter list of topical experts for their opinions on a particular matter? So hot. It’s like a Custom Search Engine for twitter lists, which is incredibly powerful.

I think of things like this as curating my existing community resources, an all-too under utilized strategy I believe. That’s the kind of thing I’m likely to bring up as a guest tomorrow on Tummelvision.tv, which I cannot recommend highly enough that you check out.

Why Aren’t More People Excited About Government Data Stories?August 27

Government data as a platform for innovation is something I find exciting. Unfortunately, every time we write about it at ReadWriteWeb, very few people read our articles. Consumer data from private companies, be it Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, for example, finds far more interested readers.

Both have a few things in common: they are stories about data that you and I produce being leveraged by independent developers to build new services and ways to make use of that data. I love EveryBlock and the way it shows me the 911 calls, restaurant reviews and news stories about the area I live in. It uses mostly government data. I really liked the story I wrote about it (“The Day Everyblock Came to Town“) but it got far fewer pageviews than the equally local story Boom! Tweets & Maps Swarm to Pinpoint a Mysterious Explosion.

Maybe that’s because it was about an explosion, and maybe because it indicated some fulfillment of the promise of data exploited. But I think it’s in part because it’s about Twitter data instead of about public data in the traditional sense of the word. Readers just don’t find government data very interesting. It’s a part of a larger problem I think: people don’

I’d Like to Stop Writing Mediocre Blog PostsAugust 26

Nate Silver, author of the political stats blog FiveThirtyEight, is now writing for the New York Times. That’s very cool. It’s an inspiration to try and write better blog posts and fewer mediocre ones. ReadWriteWeb is syndicated by the NYT, but that’s different. You’ve got to be pretty consistently awesome, I’m guessing, for the Times to say “hey, come put your blog on our site.” That level of consistent awesomeness is an inspiration, for any blogger, anywhere. I feel a long, long way from so consistently awesome right now. I’d sure love to grow as an author to feel like I wrote fewer mediocre blog posts than I do today.

One step I’d like to take is to learn to stop before publishing and ask myself: how could this post be better in a big way? What fundamental insight can my noggin’ churn up with just five more minutes of slowing down from the perpetual mad dash of blogging? Publishing immediately is hard wired in my brain now, though, and it’s going to be easier said than done to change that habit.