Apparently, I have a geeky grin, post more positive than negative tweets, wear techie t-shirts and am possibly obsessed with football. Woo, uncanny! They got the quiff right too.

Discover your Twitter character on visual.ly.

This post is a quick test of the Meegloo WordPress plugin, which enables you to embed your stream – the collated text, audio, video and photo updates – into a post. I’m posting to the stream via an iPad and iPhone and just seeing what happens.

You get a nice bar chart summarising your traits by how much more, or less than, they differ from the average on Twitter.

You also get more detailed descriptions of individual traits, what they mean and your score:

TweetPsych returns scores for the following traits or content – this list is ordered by my reported traits, from more than average to lower than average:

1. Positive sentiment (42%)
2. Learning and education (35%)
3. Past (7%)
4. Primordial (6%)
5. Constructive (3%)
6. Future (-3%)
7. Anxiety (-5%)
8. Control (-5%)
9. Senses (-7%)
10. Social (-7%)
11. Media (-11%)
12. Conceptual (-12%)
13. Time (-18%)
14. Work (-25%)
15. Self Reference (-30%)
16. Present (-30%)
17. Negative (-30%)
18. Money (-33%)
19. Thinking (-36%)
20. Numbers (-37%)

The report is a snapshot in time – today – though I’m not sure how far back TweetPsych analyses my Twitter history.

After experiencing fantastic recent months, a great summer, with lots of new things happening, I thought it might be interesting to compare today’s scores with another set of scores at some point in the future, so I saved the results in this spreadsheet. It might be interesting to see if any traits score differently.

I’ve started a new job at Podnosh, a consultancy run by Nick Booth providing training, development and strategy to local councils, public bodies, charities, housing associations, neighbourhood groups and active citizens. The work is varied. Some of the things I’m working on include:

• Training workshops for community groups to learn social reporting.
• Management and support for clients’ websites (using WordPress Multisite).
• Assisting with event coordination such as SpeedData, a collaboration between Podnosh and Substrakt, a digital media and design agency.
• Coordinating the monthly central Birmingham social media surgery for voluntary and community groups.
• Creating content for blogs.

On the freelance front, I’ve just updated the portfolio with a recent WordPress theme design for Dirty Bristow magazine.

View full size image (jpg, 1.6mb) | View on flickr

Here’s how I made it…

Overview

1. Get the listening data from the last.fm API.
2. Turn the data into a form suitable for importing into Google Spreadsheets.
3. Visualise the data in a tree map.
4. Overlay the photos on the tree map.

Get listening data from last.fm API

I use last.fm to store data about my listening habits. Any track I listen to on my iPod, iTunes, Spotify or the last.fm website itself, is “scrobbled” – collected on my computer using the scrobbler tool and sent to my profile on last.fm.

You can access your data using the last.fm API (you’ll need to sign up for an API key, if you haven’t already done so). You get the data by submitting a request (i.e. typing the address in a web browser) to:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/

…and appending a method, your API key and (if you want) a time period.

To get the data about the top artists I listened to in 2010, I used the getTopArtists method:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=user.gettopartists
&user=denituthered&period=12month&api_key=myAPIKey

This returns the data as XML, which looks something like this:

<lfm status="ok">
  <topartists user="denituthered" type="12month"
page="1" perPage="50" totalPages="12" total="596">
    <artist rank="1">
      <name>Left Lane Cruiser</name>
      <playcount>179</playcount>
      <mbid/>
      <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Left+Lane+Cruiser</url>
      <streamable>1</streamable>
      <image size="small">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/
      serve/34/13235587.jpg</image>
      <image size="medium">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/
      serve/64/13235587.jpg</image>
      <image size="large">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/
      serve/126/13235587.jpg</image>
      <image size="extralarge">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/
      serve/252/13235587.jpg</image>
      <image size="mega">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/
      serve/500/13235587/Left+Lane+Cruiser+LLC.jpg</image>
    </artist>

    <artist rank="2">
      <name>Otis Taylor</name>
      <playcount>165</playcount>
      […]
    </artist>

    <artist rank="3">
      <name>Black Stone Cherry</name>
      <playcount>165</playcount>
      […]
    </artist>

  </topartists>
</lfm>

Get the data ready for Google Spreadsheets

I wanted to get my data into Google Spreadsheets to use the visualisation tools. However, XML isn’t a supported file format in Google Spreadsheets, so I couldn’t just throw my XML file up there and start visualising. So, I needed to turn my XML into a format suitable for Google Spreadsheets, such as a CSV file.

You can do this with some recent versions of Excel or other Office tools. I needed something free and used Google Refine. It’s handy for cleaning up data and exporting data into different formats.

I opened the XML file in Google Refine and deleted some of the extraneous columns and rows leaving just the following fields (as column titles):

• Rank
• Artist
• Playcount
• Image URL

I then saved the data as a CSV file and uploaded it to Google Spreadsheets. Here’s the file.

Visualise the data

To get the basic layout of the visualisation I created a tree map. In Google Spreadsheets:

1. I selected the required data fields (Artist and Playcount).
2. Chose Insert > Gadget > Tree Map Gadget.
3. Placed the tree map in a new sheet.

View full size image (png, 66kb)

The tree map recalculates itself when you change your browser window dimensions. I wanted to make a visualisation with dimensions approximately A4 landscape, and changed the window dimensions until I got a tree map layout that felt right.

Overlay the photos

I took a screenshot of the tree map, opened it in Pixelmator (any image editor will do) and then increased the image dimensions by 50% to create a larger image to work with.

The last.fm data contains URLs for image files. I did use some of these though, where there were odd shapes in the tree map, I looked around for suitable images that would work well in extreme letterbox or elongated shapes.

The final stage involved getting the photo for each artist and cropping the photo to the same dimensions as the underlying shape in the tree map.

So, I started with Left Lane Cruiser and Otis Taylor at the top left of the visualisation and then worked my way through the other artists.

This is the final result:

Here’s the finished visualisation (jpg, 1.6mb) | View on flickr

The first is a new website for Ken Hawkins Photography, which involved visual design, building a bespoke WordPress theme and assisting Ken in using the WordPress admin site to edit his photo galleries and blog.

For the second project, I helped Jon Bounds with layout and design work to produce the Christmas-o-meter. This is a fun site that rates the cheeriness of Twitter users based on comparing the sentiment of their recent tweets against a database of words with emotional value.

Read the interview »

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• UK Government Licensing Framework | The National Archives
  “The UK Government Licensing Framework (UKGLF) provides a policy and legal overview for licensing the re-use of public sector information, both in central government and the wider public sector.”
• Learn WordPress.com
  “Always wanted to be a blogging superstar? Or simply want to learn your way around WordPress.com? Go from blogging zero to blogging hero in 10 quick levels.”
• BETTER CONNECTED: Case study: How a community festival used social media – with 4 extra ideas for next year « The Dan Slee Blog
  Great stuff from Dan. “Get out of the social media bubble, talk to real people and you may be surprised. [...] Face-to-face + networking + leaflets + digital + newspaper support + community groups + public sector + council staff + ward councillors = a successful community event”
• Laura Marchbanks Photography
  I really like the design of this photoblog incorporating stories with the photographs.
• West Midlands Regional Observatory, England, UK « Data presentation, visualization & analysis software for Data Professionals
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  Layered vocal arrangements of every Smiths song by the end of 2010.

• Open Data: Empowering the Empowered or Effective Data Use for Everyone? « Gurstein’s Community Informatics
  Lots of important points in this post by David Gurstein on what it “effective use” of open data by individuals actually is, examples where effective use is taking place and some example inequalities in use of open data.
• Adobe is Bad for Open Government – Sunlight Labs: Blog
  Good article by Clay Johnson debunking Adobe’s claims that publishing content using their proprietary file formats (Adobe PDF and Adobe Flash) helps to make government information more open. Historical use by government of locked-down, proprietary technologies, such as Adobe’s, are one of the main barriers to anyone re-using government information – a core principle of transparent government and open knowledge.
• Button Maker
  Tool to make nice-looking buttons using CSS3 that degrade gracefully into solid colours with square corners in older browsers.
• Designing with Paper Prototyping | UX Booth
  Useful ideas on prototyping interfaces for mobile devices by Thomas Davies.
• Anthologize
  Use WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book.
• Royal National Institute of Blind People | Web Access Centre
  Royal National Institute of Blind People’s Web Access Centre offers information and advice on making your website accessible to everyone. Contains ideas on how to make your website work for people with sight problems, hearing, mobility and cognitive impairments.
• Public sector downsizing in a connected big society | Talk About Local
  “There’s an opportunity for public sector managers to give their staff modern skills to help them and their communities maintain morale and self esteem, find work quicker and take advantage of the emerging big society. “
• UK Web Archive
  “Here you can see how sites have changed over time, locate information no longer available on the live Web and observe the unfolding history of a spectrum of UK activities represented online. Sites that no longer exist elsewhere are found here and those yet to be archived can be saved for the future by nominating them. The Archive contains sites that reflect the rich diversity of lives and interests throughout the UK. Search is by Title of Website, Full Text or URL, or browse by Subject, Special Collection or Alphabetical List.”

For the rest of this year, I’ll be spending 2 days a week with Podnosh and 3 days a week in my current communications role at the Observatory.

Some of the areas I’ll be working on include:

• Running social media surgeries – informal gatherings of people who want to learn how to use the web to communicate, campaign or collaborate.
• Web design and development.
• Training customers to use their websites – including the conversational and social aspects, as well as technical.
• Developing approaches to open data to strengthen the connection between citizens and public information.

Exciting times! Here we go…

Photo credit: Balsall Heath social media surgery by nvirdi