OK, I just realized I’ve become an official old geezer because more than half the music that my 12-year-old daughter
listens to sounds like ungodly noise to me. Any lingering misconceptions I might have had about simply being a mature, but socially hip kind of guy evaporated when I realized that I just don’t understand the earth-shattering significance of
Twitter. It seems to me that trying to compress anything meaningful into 140 characters is sort of like trying to convey the majesty of a Shakespeare play in a handful of PowerPoint slides – oops, that’s already been
done… In fact, I’ve had so much pressure from some of my associates to become a Twitter-er that I’ve been trying to figure out how I’d find the time to post a half-dozen witty digital haikus a day – and just what I’d use them for.
At first, it was hard to see how a technology that breaks everyone’s allotted
15 minutes of fame down into 140-character snippets could be anything more than a way to add another couple of more dB of noise to your personal information spectrum. But after I saw a few potentially useful applications of Twitter feeds at the
O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference last week, such as
collaborative citizen science and using it to Tweet your
personal energy consumption, I began to think about how I could use it to publish my articles in
EN-Genius more efficiently.
Since the 140-character limit is much shorter than the things I usually write, I thought maybe I’d give myself some breathing room by using a simple compression algorithm that uses 2- and 3-character groups to represent many of the phrases I commonly use in my reviews. My Twitter-ed reports might look like gibberish to the untrained observer, but my regular readers could easily memorize the phrase table they’d need to decompress and decode my stories. For example, some of my stock phrases might include:
A1 –
The demand for more network bandwidth and higher quality of service is increasing every day and this product is well-positioned to take advantage of these important trendsA2 –
This device uses exceptionally high levels of integration to reduce BOM costs, board space requirements, and power consumptionB1X –
This system-on-a-chip consists of an array of X processor cores, sharing a high-speed, non-blocking interconnect fabricB2X –
The device has X Gigabit Ethernet MACs, each with its own low-latency QoS management engineWell, you get the picture…
But that seems a bit like cheating, so I’ve decided to try post the remainder of this week’s content in a series of twitter feeds without using any compression technique. I’ve posted the results below:
Monday, March 16, 2009, 9:10 pm
Vitesse 10G EPON chipset is awsum! The 4-IC solution includes the industry's first 10 Gbit/s burst mode driver combination. Very low power too. 1.5 Saltshakers.Tuesday March 17, 2009, 1:52 pm
IDT’s new high performance Serial RapidIO central packet switches R GR8 4 connecting DSPs in cellular base stations. Lots of important features – no space to list.Wednesday March 18, 10:18 am
Solartronics’ ultra-high-efficiency solar cells kick butt. They use a unique fab process 2 get U more W/$ & even make power in the dark. Just 1 technical problem remains.Thursday, March 19, 2009, 8:27 pm
Hey this is much easier than the stuff I usually write! Maybe that’s how everyone manages to look so smart and important these days? All-Twitter 4 EN-Genius?Thursday, March 19, 2009 9:39 pm
Hmmm…. Thought about all-Twitter format 4 EN-Genius and it’s a no-go. It looks 2 much like all the stuff I see posted on the other tech blogs these days.Thursday, March 19, 2009 10:48 pm
Comments? Questions? Useful apps for Twitter or music u really hate? Write me (140 words or more) at lhg at en-genius dot net or post your comments on our blog.*
Listening to the sounds of Soulja Boy, Fergie, and Bow Wow floating out of Anwyn’s computer make root canal surgery seem like a pleasant alternative. Fortunately, the other half of the time she listens to show tunes, Aretha Franklin, and other “old folks” music like the Beatles.
