Awesome: 1. Real-time radiation levels, Twitter heartbeat & BBC #fail

An introduction

This is the first in a new series of blog posts I will be writing about the cool things I discover in my travels around the web.

Twitter provides a wealth of wonder every day, RSS provides regular treats & the cool people I work & play with are always digging up treasures. I often forget about the amazing things I discover on the Internet - they get lost in the endless stream of starred articles, favourited tweets & unread emails. So I thought I'd experiment with sharing this info in short blog posts with little or no commentary.

Each "Awesome" blogpost will contain one or more items I've recently discovered. I'm not going to set any expectations for frequency, or even the currency of the information, I guess it all depends on how Awesome the internet is being!

So without further ado...

Pachube - Real-Time Radiation Monitoring in Japan

Given the recent events in Japan, the fear factor, public health risk and disinformation from the government, this to me is the perfect example of Internet Awesome. This clever use of the Pachube real-time data monitoring service is crowdsourcing at it's best. Also, it turns out the Pachube offices are just a few doors down from the MOO offices in London where I work *waves*.

Does Twitter have a Heartbeat?

Some very clever research on twitter sentiment analysis being carried out by my very clever friend Rob Hawkes has turned up this intriguing graph. There's no proof it's consistent and not caused by a bug as yet, but it caught my eye nonetheless. If it turns out to be relatively consistent, I think it will end up being one of life's little mysteries. The answer is 42 I guess!

BBC Fail - WiFi in Speed Shocker

Seems to me that whoever wrote this article needs to check up on the Three Rules of Wireless Networking.

Let me know what you think of these little treasures :)