If your natural reflex when the weather gets rough is to tweet about it, that reflex can now help the National Weather Service do its job better thanks to a new Twitter storm reporting program . The NWS has always solicited severe weather reports from the public. After all, no amount of technology can ever be a substitute for an accurate report of what’s actually happening on the ground. Because of the new Twitter geolocation API and the increasing number of applications that support it ( TweetDeck for iPhone is the latest to add geotagging support ), it’s become very simple for the public to submit severe weather reports and for the NWS to pinpoint where they happened. Sponsor How does it work? According to the program’s documentation , a system monitors Twitter for tweets starting with the hashtag #wxreport . These tweets are then plotted on a Google map using the tweet’s geolocation information, or in cases where the geotag data is not available, an approximation of the reporter’s location within the tweet using the format WW [location] WW . Finally, the report is relayed to the appropriate NWS field office for use by the office’s meteorologists in a variety of ways, including possible inclusion in an official storm report. It’s not just the NWS that could benefit, either. The public already will be more informed simply by watching the #wxreport tag, regardless of whether one of those reports is released in an official storm report. Sites such as Weather Underground , which already hosts an extensive network of citizen-owned weather stations, could further integrate these reports into its own products. Media outlets monitoring Twitter for storm information can use the tweets in their own reporting; The Weather Channel already does a good job of this. You can see some of these reports in action today. Check out the Twitter search for #wxreport to see how much snow fell from a winter storm that’s hit much of the U.S. We can’t help but wonder what this search will look like once spring rolls around and the severe weather season kicks off. Hopefully, the NWS has the tools in place to handle a high volume of tweets and an effective way of dismissing hashtag spam and other Twitter nuisances. The National Weather Service program demonstrates how powerful geolocation on Twitter can be, and we can’t help but wonder what else will be created with geolocated tweets . Look for even more creative uses of geolocation throughout 2010. Discuss

The rest is here:
Wanted: Your Weather Reports, Geotagged and Tweeted

This Monday we’re releasing our latest premium research report, entitled The Real-Time Web and Its Future . You can pre-order this in-depth report for just $200 . One of the 50 interviews we conducted was with Ted Roden , a Creative Technologist at The New York Times. In this post, an edited extract from our new report, we explore how Roden works with real-time data at The Times. We also discuss the creative real-time development he’s doing on a side-project called EnjoysThings . Pre-order now: The Real-Time Web and Its Future, $200 if you order before 30 Nov ; check out the Table of Contents (PDF) and a sample chapter (PDF). Sponsor The primary contributions Ted Roden makes to understanding the real-time web include articulating: the material benefits of going real time the importance of user experience the changing landscape in analytics and advertising We had a conversation with Roden about what happened after he added a real-time feed to EnjoysThings; he articulates well some of the biggest advantages of a real-time infrastructure. EnjoysThings is a visual bookmarking site, like Delicious for images and other media. Even text snippets bookmarked are highlighted visually. User experience is a key consideration in all the site’s developments and the service is a lot of fun to use. This summer Roden added a premium subscription option to the site, called Joy accounts. Joy accounts cost $20 per year for access to all the current and forthcoming premium features, or users can pay $5 for a single premium feature like disabling ads on the site or being able to view NSFW content. One of the features Joy account holders get is access to a real-time view of new content shared. That real-time stream can be viewed in any browser but may be best served up via a Firefox sidebar. A real-time feed as up-sold value add? That’s remarkable and Roden says the response has been positive. The sidebar is simple but compelling. New content is pushed live into the side of the browser as soon as it’s shared on the site, including images. At first Roden said he used AJAX set to poll his site every few seconds. Then he switched to a Comet implementation. He says he’s using the open source infrastructure Tornado , from Facebook, for his real-time prototypes at the Times. EnjoysThings is still very small but the implications of adding real-time to this site could likely be incurred by sites of any size. 1. INCREASED TIME ON SITE “People leave it open all day long,” Roden said of the sidebar. “Time-on-site has seen a huge increase. It’s like when the new content comes in on the Facebook Live Feed, if you know it’s about to pop in 5 seconds you’ll stick around.” There are a number of different factors that are making time-on-site an increasingly important metric on the web, compared to pageviews. Increased consumption of video is the best known, but as real-time streams of aggregated content become increasingly common, increased time-on-site will be an important measurement of how successful an implementation is. 2. DECREASED SERVER COSTS After implementing real-time infrastructure, Roden reports that “my site runs a lot more smoothly, I’ll probably move the whole site to that technology because deep down it’s much easier on the database for me.” “I used to get hit by Stumbleupon and [the site] would start to crawl. Then I changed to some of this real time stuff and I’ve reduced the number of servers. Instead of the users sitting on the page and refreshing, I push it out to them. My EC2 bill has gone way down.” Roden’s experience compliments the story that Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick told us about using PubSubHubbub push feeds to deliver shared items in Google Reader to FriendFeed. Changing from polling to real-time push cut traffic between the two sites by 85%. Likewise, magazine-style feed reader Feedly says that the part of its service that now consumes PubSubHubbub from Google Reader has seen a 72% reduction in bandwidth. …(continued) To read the rest of this sample chapter, see the PDF download . You can also check out the Table of Contents and pre-order the full report at a discounted price of $200. Discuss

See the rest here:
Case Study: The Real-Time Web at the New York Times & EnjoysThings