I’m trying to find news about the Wall Street occupation, so I decided to follow the #occupywallstreet hashtag, and I have to say, it is pretty useless. Most of it seems to be retweets and nonsense, and it scrolls by so damned fast you can barely make anything out. Very difficult to separate anything useful from just garbage. I’m wondering if there is any way to make the information more usable.
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Samara Morgan
follow #anonops and #AnonymousIRC and #anonops_live.
#occupywallstreet is oversaturated now.
Samara Morgan
i also recommend #democracynow.
arguingwithsignposts
Sadly, no. there isnt once a hashtag blows up.
Trinity
I think the official OccupyWallStreet twitter feeds are @OccupyWallSt @OccupyWallStNYC
You could follow those as well.
Cat
Who would have thought a system with millions of actors producing information would ever lead to an over saturation of information.
The horror!
Morbo
Something other than Twitter.
Corner Stone
You’re trying to find “news” in 140 characters or less?
Why does that not surprise me.
monkeyfister
Get all the latest at the originating website: http://www.ampedstatus.org
Live feed starts there.
Corner Stone
@Cat:
“Hep! Hep! I’ve caught the twitters!”
FlipYrWhig
Strange. That’s so uncharacteristic of Twitter.
Shinobi
I think I watched their live feed for like 2 hours yesterday and got very little out of it. Did someone already link this epic Fox interview with an Occupier? Shockingly they have not yet aired it. Awwww.
Elizabelle
I say “send Kay and a digital camera.”
Worked for NetRoots.
(Or mistermix or Tim F — with or without Max. Or whomever you select.)
On the ground reporting, by smart folks.
Remind the Villagers how it’s done.
EZSmirkzz
Vibe may help. More here.
matryoshka
I recommend that we go see for ourselves, and maybe join in.
Walker
This is an activity area of research in the SIGMOD community, so no.
TooManyJens
Van Jones is giving a great speech at the Take Back the American Dream conference right now:
http://www.livestream.com/newchannel/popoutplayer?channel=freespeechtv
Marybdvm
Check this out. The Marines are Coming.
http://antinewworldorderparty.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/the-marines-are-coming-to-protect-the-protestors-of-occupy-wall-street/
singfoom
I wouldn’t try to follow it on twitter, too many people tweeting too much at once..
anonops.blogspot.com
occupywallst.org
http://nycga.cc/
Those three sites do a pretty good job of getting the information out there….
Villago Delenda Est
@Elizabelle:
Unless there are tables upon which there are chafing dishes of cocktail weenies set up with a very short stroll of the events, the Villagers cannot be bothered.
Corner Stone
@Villago Delenda Est:
I don’t know if anyone else caught Chuckles Todd this AM on MSNBC, but they actually did a brief in person report on Occupy Wall Street this morning.
It was horribly slanted, and left the actions in a negative light, but they did cover it for one and a half minutes.
beltane
#OccupyWallStreet is swamped in the same way that #Jan25 was swamped during the height of the Tahrir Square protests. I do enjoy reading the occasion wingnut contribution to the discourse because it has taught me that these people are forever stuck in 1968, where everyone who is not them is a hippie, and hippies are dirty people who need a haircut.
CaptainFwiffo
Good: They’re angry at approximately the right people.
Could be better: How about some specific policy remedies or goals?
Although incoherent rage got a nice tongue-bath for the tea party – maybe it will work out after all.
birthmarker
@Marybdvm: This is a beautiful thing and actually brings tears to my eyes, but..are active military members allowed to do something like this? I just fear for them.
Dave
Why not create an automatic post which goes up once a week with a title like, say, “Words” and an observation like, “I’m sad and confused…”?
beltane
The Guardian is liveblogging the protests. If it wasn’t for childcare obligations, I’d seriously consider heading down to NYC to observe things firsthand.
It occurred to me that the high numbers of young adults forced to live with their parents due to the economy has created the perfect conditions for extended street protests. Wall Street might have the money but the kids have got all the time.
Villago Delenda Est
@birthmarker:
I dunno. The rule when I was in, and I don’t think it’s changed, was that you could do political things while being in the service…just not be in uniform. The uniform makes all the difference, as it implies an official endorsement, and the military is supposed to be apart from this sort of thing, for very good reasons.
Not wearing uniforms would of course blunt the point that the soldiers and Marines are trying to make
These guys are taking a risk, under strict UCMJ protocol.
It’s very interesting that they’ve chosen to do it in dress uniforms, though, not in “working” (that is, kicking ass and taking names) uniforms…fatigues, camos, what have you. Don’t think that will mitigate any repercussions of doing it much, though.
birthmarker
@Villago Delenda Est: It seems to me this came up in the previous admin, and that’s what I remember.
MattR
@Villago Delenda Est: That article talks about the Marines as veterans which I assume means they are no longer active duty.
Linda Featheringill
@Marybdvm:
Military:
I read this a couple of days ago but never found a follow up that said it actually happened.
My resident expert on military protocol said that active duty soldiers could not participate while in uniform. Veterans who have been discharged, however, could do whatever while in uniform.
Villago Delenda Est
Once you’re OUT of the service, as we saw with Vietnam Veterans Against the War and similar vets organizations since, the rules on uniforms don’t apply because you’re out of the service and no longer subject to the rules. However, you make adjustments to the uniform to signify the fact that you’re no longer in the service, so it’s not a military endorsement one way or the other.
There’s still the issue, even if you did serve and were honorably discharged, of impersonating an active duty military member, which is why you make the changes in the clothing so it’s not a “uniform” anymore as far as the military is concerned. Given that most civilians don’t understand this subtlety, it’s, as the saying goes, “close enough for government work.”
Thymezone
Only follow smart people.
beltane
Here’s a Tweet from Confederate Yankee that pretty much sums up the RW’s response:
Canuckistani Tom
@Villago Delenda Est:
What kind of changes? Something minor enough that it still looks like a dress uniform, but major enough that you could see it on TV?
existential fish
Cole, make a list of trusted sources and people you like, and use hashtags on that list. Then use #ff and the like to grow that list. It’s easier than maintaining a pet and you do that thrice over daily, so no whining about how hard it is.
Hashtags twitter wide are worthless. Filter with lists first.
Thymezone
So anyway, what you do is, first create a list. Call it OWS Smarties.
Then do a search for the hashtag. As the objects float by, pick out the ones from smart people. Add those people to your list. After a while, you have an inventory of OWS cognoscenti and you can just follow that list. Add to the list periodically by doing new scans of the hash tag.
Pretty easy, works great.
Villago Delenda Est
@Canuckistani Tom:
Usually, it’s removing some official device on the uniform, such as a name tag, or a unit symbol, or even a button. The buttons are specified on uniforms. Although one thing that vets LOVE to do is identify with their former units…it’s part of the entire trope that they can’t very easily give up. It’s a huge part of your identity…being in the 1st Infantry Division, or serving on the USS Abraham Lincoln, or whatever.
Anything to make what they’re wearing no longer a uniform in the strict sense of the word.
You can get really technical on this. Which is part of the beauty of the entire thing.
William from the Netherlands
In tweetdeck, you can add “-RT” to your search for hashtags to get rid of any retweets
fasteddie9318
So that’s where Cole has been; he was trapped near the inner circle of Twitter.
ChrisNYC
This guy is a TWU communications staffer and he’s there, tweeting. Not often but pretty info heavy.
http://twitter.com/#!/jeffrae
JoshA
@Trinity: I tried following the accounts, but they retweet everything on earth. Didn’t find it useful.
It also completely filled my twitter feed. I know that sounds shallow (“oh noes, I can’t find the NFL tweets b/c of all these tweets regarding an important social justice movement”) but while I’d like to say up to date on the protest, I don’t want it to block out all other information.
Irony Abounds
Looking for important information via twitter is like searching for in depth analysis of important issues in People. Not the wisest course of action.
WaterGirl
@Elizabelle: That is really a great idea! I would donate to help fund that.
birthmarker
@Elizabelle: I actually would help too.
jfeathersmith
Adbusters (which got the whole thing started) has a liveblog of sorts: http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/occupywallstreet
I also found using twitterfall.com and putting just the term “occupy” into the search was useful. You don’t even need an account. Plus you can pause the stream while you follow links.
Elizabelle
@WaterGirl: and birthmarker:
I’m in too, if John will collect the funds.
We can send someone wicked smart, who can ask good questions and think on his/her feet.
Or we can watch the Village eventually cover this, and it will be as foreign to them as Uruguay or Finland.
What does it say about our fine media that we’re thinking of funding and sending our own reporters to get this thing right?
Samara Morgan
convergence.
Samara Morgan
@Elizabelle: no need. al-jazeera will dooo eet for free.
Phildo
I don’t use twitter. Tweets are too long. My attention span is too sho
polyorchnid octopunch
Get a text mode RSS reader, read the #occupywallst tag into it, push the text out into stdout, and pipe it through grep to figure out how to ditch some of the stuff you don’t want to see. There’s one called TTYtter:
TTYtter -site twitter.com -u whatev -p mypwd | grep “#occupywallst” | grep -v RT: | tee -f occupyWallSt.out
Please note that I’ve never used that software; see the above as a pseudocode that illustrates the approach you might take using typical unix text utilities rather than a definitive command to do what you’re trying to do. You can find it at:
http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/
That would get rid of all the retweets, or at least the ones that people tag properly as a retweet. Using a little more imagination (and spending some time analyzing the text output) will suggest many many more.
Hell, maybe I’ll take a shot at setting up a bot of my own and see if I can turn it into something useful… after I get back from band practice.
Cheers!
ABL
You need to create lists of people you like and trust and then follow the hashtag within the list.
Or follow a list someone else had already created.