I write this as I wait for a late train - the perfect time for a bit of Twitter action - but the service is down once more.

Sure, their actual uptime rating might not be so bad, but it is one of those services that people (including me) really miss when it isn’t there. Like a comfy pair of shoes, we don’t appreciate it enough when it’s here, but can’t walk properly when it’s gone. Or something.

In any event, while I’d love to switch to a service with 100% uptime (which probably doesn’t exist), I really do love Twitter. When it’s good, it’s good.

Schmap.com, a local city guide and travel information provider, is all set to launch a very sexy looking iPhone interface in public beta on Monday. The Schmap iPhone interface encompasses the company’s City Guides and Local Search services, plus a unique feature that auto generates maps when the iPhone is turned sideways.

The Schmap guys were nice enough to pass on to me a code that will let you access the Schmap iPhone interface before it launches on Monday. To get a sneak-peek, browse to http://schmap.com/iphone on your iPhone and enter the access code 724627.

Just a quick note to let folks know that I have just licensed contributions from ObsoleteSkills.com to be turned into a weekly cartoon series by cartoonist Greg Williams of the Tampa Tribune. The series will take skills added to the site for the inspiration of each cartoon, similar to Greg’s previous work on a comic called ‘Blogjam,’ which draws from several online sources. Greg also produces WikiWorld comics for Wikipedia’s Signpost online newspaper.

The cartoon series, which should debut in mid-June, will appear both in the print edition of the Tampa Tribune, and on the newspaper’s website. I will post a link to the cartoon when it is available online.

I have been using the new Brightkite location-aware social network (invite-only at this point) a lot over the last few days, and one of the very common questions I hear is how I do check-ins from my mobile phone, since at this point only U.S. carriers are supported for their SMS service. The (not so) secret is you can send MMS messages to email addresses with most Australian carriers (Vodafone seems to be only exception here), and Brightkite gives a personal email address for every account to send commands to.

Once you have an MMS compatible handset, simply:

1. Log in to Brightkite and select Account settings from the left of the screen
2. Click the Mobile tab
3. Scroll to the bottom and find your unique account email address, program this into your phone or remember it
4. On your mobile phone, create a new MMS message
5. In the To field, instead of putting in a phone number, put your Brightkite email address
6. Put the standard SMS commands into the body of the message. These can be found in the Brightkite help, but the basic ones are:
   • @placemark or @full address to check-in
   • !message to post a message and attach it to your current location

Using this method also means you can post photos to Brightkite from your phone. To do so, just add the photo in the body of the MMS message, and the text you want to go with it in the Subject field.

Enjoy, and feel free to add me as a friend over on Brightkite.

The general response to my hesitation on the release of my Twitter timeline export tool was that I should, indeed, release it. So I have.

The tool now carries one of the most attractive names around: TweetDumpr. With it, you can export your entire Twitter timeline to a CSV (comma separated value) file, which can be read by any spreadsheet application. To get around the lingering privacy issues, the tool now requires you to authenticate to Twitter first, which makes sure you are only dumping your timeline and not someone else’s.

Currently, the tool only works on public timelines, but a new version is already in the works that handles protected users. Feel free to give it a go and report back on bugs that you encounter - it is still in the early stages of development.

As part of developing the Twitter Stats application, I created a standalone script that will dump a user’s entire Twitter timeline to a CSV file (comma separated value, readable by spreadsheet applications such as Excel), including the tweet text and the post time.

Initially, it was my intention to release this script to the public. I had several requests from people that wanted to have a record of all their tweets, which I kindly provided for them, and in my opinion the tool would prove quite useful.

After mentioning this to a couple of very smart people, they raised privacy concerns and suggested I keep the code to myself, which I have done thus far. These concerns stem from the fact that the tool can dump any user’s entire non-protected timeline, not just your own. Personally, I don’t really think this is a huge problem - if you have an unprotected timeline, all your tweets are public record anyway, the tool just makes it easier to extract and save these tweets. On the other hand, someone having a local copy of your stream does sound like a worrying proposition.

Clearly, there are far larger privacy issues associated with all of this, but I wanted to open up the floor and find out what other people think of the possible release of this tool. Should I put it out there, or keep it to myself?

Note: This is skewed toward computer science courses. I’m interested to see if it is the same in other subjects.

I have long had a belief that universities are, by and large, completely out of touch with the real world. This may not count for all universities/colleges or their staff, but in my experience most work given is largely pointless and taught by lecturers that have never been out of the academic environment - meaning they have no idea how things happen ‘out there.’

As I said, this probably doesn’t count for all lecturers and professors, but most that I know have finished high school, gone straight to study in a university, perhaps undertaken research, then right on into lecturing. It is this lack of real-world experience that prompts them to issue work that does not help prepare students for the outside world.

There are certain things that I believe that all students should learn, and while they might not be used generally in the workplace, they are things they provide a solid grounding for future thinking. This kind of work is fine, but there is so much pointless work that doesn’t fall into this category, and I honestly feel sorry for those students that leave university with no concept of the workplace. I have spoken to several students in this exact predicament recently.

I have with me an assignment that was issued in an Australian university just a few weeks ago, one which I believe perfectly highlights this point. I will not reveal the university it was given at, nor will I reproduce the content in it’s entirety, but I will highlight a few points that I feel are, quite frankly, ridiculous. Read more…

In the month-and-a-half since I started the wiki at ObsoleteSkills.com (thanks again for the idea, Scoble), it has been linked to from a whole bunch of blogs and websites, generating almost 3 million visits. Big name sites including BoingBoing, Slashdot, and Daring Fireball have all given me the privilege of a link. What really surprises me, though, is the percentage of traffic generated from each of these sources.

Above is a graph compiled from the top referrers to ObsoleteSkills.com. Looking at this graph reveals a few surprises: most notably that the majority of visits didn’t actually have a referrer, meaning people are just typing the domain into their browsers or using bookmarks, etc. This would imply that a lot of the traffic is from returning users, which is great.

Slashdot and StumbleUpon were, predictably, the next biggest referrers. I was surprised to see how little of the traffic came from David Pogue’s blog, which would seem to be a fairly high-traffic blog, and from BoingBoing, which is one of the most popular blogs around. It is also worth noting that Daring Fireball only linked to the site two days ago, so this won’t be representative of the actual percentage of referrers it might send.

Just so that there is a bit of scale to the graph, the lowest referrer to ObsoleteSkills.com shown on the graph (Gamespy Humor) represents a little over 32,000 visits, and there are obviously a bunch more referrers not showing on the graph.

Note: I’ve mixed the spelling of referrer on purpose, see Wikipedia for details.

Yes, I’ve been at it again and developed another Twitter bot. What makes this one special, however, is the fact that it is my first interactive bot.

So, I would like to introduce you all to @weatherbot - the interactive on-demand Twitter weather service. While it is still very beta, I think it is at a point where it is quite stable. To use it, all you have to do it follow the bot, then send it an @reply with the location you want the weather forecast for. In a few minutes, you should get a direct message from @weatherbot with the forecast for the rest of the current day and the next day in the city you asked for. The bot will report the temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius appropriate for the requested location.

For example, if you are interested in the weather in Sydney, follow the bot then simply tweet “@weatherbot sydney australia” - without the quotes, of course. As long as you follow the format “@weatherbot city country” it should be able to work out what you want, though for the more generic named places, it might help to put your state/province in as well. The service should work for almost any major city in the world.

For those interested in the technical details, every few minutes the bot grabs its replies timeline using the Twitter API, then creates a queue of requests. From those requests, it will grab your search string and through some special sauce magic figures out the location ID for your request, then grabs an XML packet of the location’s weather forecast using the Yahoo! Weather API. It then parses the XML, extracts the needed information, and forms it into a string which it then sends back to you using the Twitter API as a direct message. The bot manages its queue so you don’t get your weather multiple times from the one request.

Feel free to give @weatherbot a try, and get in contact with me if you get any odd behavior.

Inspired by an interesting blog post from Robert Scoble (yes, he does have them every now and then), I purchased the domain ObsoleteSkills.com and set up a wiki for people to document all those skills that the latest technology really makes obsolete. So far, skills that have been added to the wiki include things like adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV, dialing a rotary phone, and churning butter of all things. That is all great, and I hope that people enjoy it, but to register the domain I had to pay over four times more than I usually do, and in the process I had my eyes opened to a very dodgy system from Network Solutions.

I am coming into this on the tail end, as apparently Network Solutions had been called out on this previously, but the company undertakes a poor practice when a user searches for a domain: the company effectively registers it, and enters it with the status ‘clientHold,’ even if the user doesn’t actually register it. This DNS status usually means that there is a legal issue involving the registrant or a service on the domain, and it causes the domain to still be registered but not resolve to a server. The end result is that anyone wishing to register the domain, not just the person that originally searched for it, must go through Network Solutions to do it, and they can charge whatever they see fit.

This is exactly what happened with ObsoleteSkills.com. Someone, presumably also having seen Scoble’s post, would have searched for the domain using Network Solutions, but didn’t go through with the registration. When I went to register the domain with my normal registrar, it said it was taken, but I was able to register the domain through Network Solutions, albeit at a severe premium.

All this has been detailed quite well by Todd McKinney in his ‘Evil Still Lurks‘ post and a follow-up post.