One of the reasons I love RSS (and other) feeds is that they effortlessly alert me when someone I follow posts something. So it was this morning, when James Morley published Collecting and displaying contextual tweets for cultural heritage records. I've known James a long time, and admired his approach to gathering and visualising data, and this was his first post in almost two years.

It's about automatically harvesting Tweets using a tool called TAGS – Twitter Archiving Google Sheet, and he shows in detail how useful it can be. I might even find a use for it myself. But here's the thing. James recognises some "potential issues," among them this:

There’s more ➢

Chris Aldrich has a long and throught-provoking piece asking How to follow the complete output of journalists and other writers?. It drew an interesting comment from Alexandra Samuel, putting the case that publishers who have paid for a piece have no interest in an author building her own audience...

There’s more ➢

I'm enjoying a certain amount of schadenfreude at the antics of Yahoo group members who simply have no idea what is happening to them, why it is happening, or what to do about it. I raised the imminent shut-down a couple of months ago, and got not a single reply from any group member. It is now obvious that the moderators long ago abandoned ship. But the pain continues.

There’s more ➢

I really wanted to post this 3 days ago, on January 10th. That would have been one year since I started recording the amount of spam I was getting over on my micro-site. I first noticed the problem in November 2018, and in January 2019 started keeping track.

This graph shows all the data from...

There’s more ➢

At the Casa Marina gardens in Key West last week, I was quite surprised to see orchids mounted on slabs of what looked like cork oak bark. My surprise, I later learned, was the result of my own ignorance, as it seems fairly common to attach orchids to a support and let them get on with it. I res...

There’s more ➢