Science Library Pad

Twitter retweets - how to drink less from the firehose

Twitter has a rather well-buried feature that lets you control the retweets that you see in your twitterstream.

As far as I know this can only be done through the GUI, I don't see it listed as a Twitter command.

You can disable retweets per-user, that is, if you want to see text directly entered by someone, but not anything they just retweet, you can block seeing their retweets.

Login and go to the user profile (you can only do it per-user, not globally).

UPDATE 2012-02-20: How to do it in the updated Twitter interface...

On the profile page for a user, click the "head" icon (next to the Following button).  Select menu item "Turn off Retweets" (indicated with red arrow).

ENDUPDATE

For the old Twitter interface:

Find the small circle with "retweet cycle" arrows and click it (indicated with red arrow in image below).  Retweets done by this user will no longer show up in your timeline.  In the example below, if you clicked the circle, anything retweeted BY @scilib (me) wouldn't show up in your timeline any more.

There are also some search commands you can use with retweets.  Unfortunately there is almost no documentation.  Some appear to apply only to RT style retweets, some to both Twitter retweets and RTs.

You can try these parameters in a twitter search:

filter:retweets (show ONLY retweets)

-filter:retweets (everything EXCEPT retweets)

exclude:retweets (everything EXCEPT retweets)

include:retweets (include retweets)

Internet & social media - Official Languages examination - Senate Committee videos

The Senate Official Languages Committee is conducting an "Examination on the use of the Internet, new media and social media and the respect for Canadians’ language rights".

There have been two meetings so far and the next is scheduled for October 31, 2011.

The first meeting was on October 24, 2011.  Video and audio are available from ParlVU.  This meeting was with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages.

Video format is Window Media Video (WMV).  In order to view this video on a Mac you will need to install Flip4Mac WMV (free).

Transcripts have not been posted yet.

The second meeting was on October 27, 2011.  Video and audio are available from ParlVU.  This meeting was with Treasury Board Secretariat.  Notably, President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement.

The discussions included social media, the Digital Economy Strategy, and open data.

iPolitics.ca did an article based on the meeting and post-meeting interviews: Twitter, Facebook and social media ‘critical’ to government, Clement says.  Some quotes from the article:

"It would be quite bizarre if we’re trying to hire the best and the brightest young people with great vitality coming into the public service and they’re used to having tethered tablets and instant social media feedback and they can do half of their work at the coffee shop without any difficulty and then suddenly they are transformed into a public servant and none of that is available. That would be a bizarre situation." - Tony Clement

...

Corinne Charette, the government’s chief information officer, said 66 federal government institutions now have bilingual twitter accounts and official government communications are presented in both official languages.

It’s also popular with government employees, she said.

“Social media is an exciting development. It is widely requested by public servants..."

...

Clement told senators he is also pushing ahead with his open data initiative, to get more raw data out of institutions like Statistics Canada and make it public.
“The more data we can get out there, the more applications can be thought of by brilliant people, entrepreneurs.”

The next meeting will be on October 31, 2011.  Live video and audio will be available from ParlVU.  The meeting will again be with Treasury Board Secretariat.

Witnesses

Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

- Corinne Charette, Chief Information Officer of the Government of Canada

- Sue Lajoie, Senior Director, Community and Collaboration

- Ryan Androsoff, Senior Policy Advisor, Web 2.0, Community and Collaboration

- Marc Tremblay, Executive Director, Official Languages Centre of Excellence, Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer

The Senate tweets at @SenateCA / @senatCA

Hashtags (as declared in the Senate video stream) are #senCA and #OLLO

Twitter accounts:

• Tony Clement @TonyClementCPC
• Ryan Androsoff @RyanAndrosoff
• iPolitics.ca @iPoliticsca
• Elizabeth Thompson @LizT1

Previously:
October 19, 2011 Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government at GTEC
January 28, 2011  open government in Canada [ETHI committee]

Here's a Storify of some of the Twitter traffic from October 27, 2011

Google data visualisation contest for French 2012 election

Concours Google de Dataviz

Tous les jours, un milliard de recherches sont effectuées sur Google, 140 millions de messages sont envoyés sur Twitter et 70 000 heures de vidéo sont mises en ligne sur YouTube. Vous croyez encore que les médias traditionnels suffiront pour vivre l'élection présidentielle ?

Libérez la puissance des données de Google et Twitter en développant une application web innovante pour suivre l'élection présidentielle française. Proposez un nouveau regard sur la campagne en réalisant une interface intelligente de visualisation de données.

La meilleure application sera intégrée à la chaîne YouTube dédiée à la campagne présidentielle.

https://sites.google.com/site/concoursdataviz2012/ - short URL goo.gl/N2i2E - hashtag #googleviz

Date limite: 07 décembre 2011

8. Critères d’admissibilité/éligibilité
Les critères d’admissibilité d’une Application sont définis comme suit. L’Application doit

•  Être une application interactive
•  Utiliser a minima un jeu de données provenant de Google ou de Twitter.
•  Éclairer de façon perspicace et originale la campagne présidentielle 2012
•  Rester en ligne et pertinente jusqu’à la fin de l’élection présidentielle 2012
•  Être au format 960 x 785 pixels maximum
•  Être en langue française
•  Etre portée par une équipe comportant entre 1 et 4 personnes

from Le règlement

Contest is open worldwide but submissions must be in French for a French public.

@dataveyes is organising the contest.

Here's a Storify of a few related tweets:

CISTI / DataCite Canada - presentations for Open Access Week 2011

Two presentations for Open Access Week 2011:

Introduction to DataCite Canada

Karen Morgenroth (CISTI) & Wendy Watkins (Data Centre- Library); Monday, October 24, 2011; 2:00-3:00pm; Room 235 Library [Carleton U, Ottawa]

...

Karen Morgenroth will discuss DataCite Canada's technical solutions for registration. It will also look at DataCite Canada's beta project with several Canadian data centres, including Carleton University.

Carleton's pilot involves the Millennium Scholarship Foundation Research Data holdings, a unique and valuable collection rescued by the Data Centre. Wendy Watkins will provide an overview of the resource, its importance to scholarlship and the progress of the project to date.  Assigning persistent identifiiers to this collection will mean that scholars and students will be able to find and use the resource in the future.

from Carleton Library - Scholarly Communications: OA Events

Also see this document (PDF) from CARL with information about registering for in-person or webcast.

Open Access to Data: New Initiatives and the Challenges of Data Management

Date: Thursday, October 27.   Time: 1:00-3:00

Location: Ante Chamber 3129DV,  U of T Mississauga.

Join us for a panel presentation and discussion of new initiatives and challenges associated with opening access to national, regional, municipal and research data.

...

Panel members: 

• Steve Czajka, OLS, OLIP, Supervisor, Information Planning, City of Mississauga Planning and Building Department, Policy Planning Division
• Ron Jaros MES, MCIP, RPP, OLS, OLIP, Planning Manager, Information and Intelligence Team, Region of Peel
• Diane Carley, Digital Initiatives Analyst,  Project Manager - DataCite Canada, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
• Andrew Nicholson, GIS and Data Librarian U of T Mississauga Library  
• Berenica Vejvoda, Data Librarian, Data Liberation Initiative Representative, Map & Data Library University of Toronto Libraries.

from University of Toronto (Mississauga) - Join Us for 2011 Events

For other events from Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) members, see 2011 Events @ CARL Libraries.

Twitter:

• Karen Morgenroth @kmorgenroth
• Diane Carley @dianecarley
• DataCite Canada @datacitecanada
• DataCite @datacite

datacatalogs.org - one (data) catalogue to bind them all

I wrote in January about the problem of a proliferation of different sites with inventories of open data catalogues, each site with its own omissions and issues: open data - who shall catalogue the catalogues?

Via the open-government mailing list I learn there is now a comprehensive effort to unify this information on a single curated site:

http://datacatalogs.org/

for example, here's the entry for the City of Ottawa: http://datacatalogs.org/catalog/ottawa_ca

You can also see the list of site curators at http://datacatalogs.org/about

Ottawa cycling map open data

The good news: the City of Ottawa has been steadily increasing its support for cycling, including a dedicated bike lane trial downtown.

The bad news: the official cycling map site, http://www.capitalcyclingmap.ca/ is awful, with incredibly awkward pre-GoogleMaps navigation and no real interactivity.

The good news: the city has released its bike routes data on its open data site, so now anyone can make a better map, apps, and integrate the cycle map info onto websites.  (There was an initial glitch with the release, but the files are now up.)

Ottawa Open Data Catalogue - Ottawa Cycling Network

formats available are KML (Google Earth format), SHP and DWG. 

Here's a wide view of the KML data (the cyan grid lines and other colours layered around Ottawa in the centre - Ottawa covers a huge area):

Ottawa's Mayor, Jim Watson, is a cycling supporter and does a good job of interacting on Twitter. Here's a little Storify of how things spread through Twitter:

Canadian G4 open data cities presentation at GTEC

Just a quick Storify of my livetweeting of a GTEC panel

Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government at GTEC

GTEC is a big annual IT tradeshow/conference for the federal government in Ottawa.

Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board, did the opening keynote.

I like to tell people that when I was Industry minister, I was responsible for Canadian innovation. Now that I am President of the Treasury Board, I want to champion innovation in government.

...

a government that takes on the challenge to be a global leader in openness, transparency and security.  We have already taken some steps towards making that government a reality. But there is much more to do.

...

We can transform the way we do business by harnessing IT in new ways—including

• An understanding of the value of social media tools, as a way to bridge the distance between government and Canadians; and
• A further commitment to all three streams of Open Government—Open Data, Open Information and Open Dialogue.

Our Government is committed to offering Canadians greater opportunities to learn about and participate in government, in the economy, and in our democratic process. They will have greater access to data from federal departments and be able to find, download and use information they want more easily.

Our Open Government activities are detailed at www.open.gc.ca, where we describe actions to strengthen Open Data, Open Information and Open Dialogue. We will post information about new activities as they are undertaken.

As announced last March, starting in 2012, all departments and agencies subject to the Access to Information Act will be required to post summaries of completed information requests on their websites.

Canada will soon have the chance to step on the world stage as a leader in Open Government. We were one of the countries to signal our intent to participate in an international Open Government Partnership.

As part of our leadership role in increasing governmental transparency and accountability, Canada has joined the international Open Government Partnership. This important initiative was launched by the United States and Brazil and aims to secure concrete commitments from other governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

Having joined the partnership, we will be delivering an Open Government plan informed by broad consultation by March 2012.

Being part of this partnership will offer Canada a means to connect internationally through its Open Government agenda. This will be an opportunity for Canadian companies to showcase their innovations.

In the long term, open governments and economies will pay dividends for our business sector. They also stand to have an impact on Canadian society in general: increasing transparency, accountability and citizen engagement.

from Notes for remarks by the President of the Treasury Board - Speech for GTEC 2011 Canada's Government Technology Event - October 18, 2011

Notable is his specific committment to an Open Government plan for Canada by March 2012.

This is a reiteration of our existing commitment to the Open Government Partnership - the country page for Canada has a letter of intent from Minister Baird and the text "Country Action Plan coming in March 2012".

Tony Clement tweets at @TonyClementCPC

The Open Government Partnership is @opengovpart

and GTEC is on Twitter @GTEC and hashtag #gtec

Here is a Storify (my tweets along with a couple from Tony Clement):

Previously:
June 3, 2011  open data in 2011 Canadian Speech from the Throne
June 1, 2011  open data statement in Canadian Digital Economy Strategy update
May 20, 2011  open data supported by Treasury President Clement