The Superbowl, 5 Live and Twitter

Taken by jdebner on Flickr.

Superbowl XLIII took place last night. If you have the slighest interest in American football (or if you are indeed American) you’ll know that already.  I hold a bit of an interest. Not enough to watch the whole season prior to the event, but enough to sit down and pay attention for one night a year.

I eventually opted to listen to the commentary on BBC Radio 5 Live, while lying in bed. What I like about 5 Live is that they are fully aware that a lot of the people listening will be regular listeners who may not fully ‘get’ American football, but hold a bit of an interest (I was pretty much target audience then).  They explain it in layman’s terms (again, I was target audience).

The best bit… next door were having some sort of Superbowl party, with a few folk round for drinks and watching it on the telly.  Radio audio is always slightly ahead of telly audio, so I got to hear what was happening in the Superbowl, and then get their boisterious reactions 5 seconds later.

What was also fun was listening in my ears while watching the continuous stream of comments regarding the Superbowl on Twitter.

I’ve spoken about Twitter before. It’s a what’s called a “microblogging” service. You have 140 characters to say whatever you want, and your ‘followers’ then get to read what you are saying (or tweeting as it is known).  Its popularity over the last month or two has risen consisderably after the media have picked up on Twitter’s famous users such as Stephen Fry and Barack Obama.  I’ve had an account with Twitter for year and a bit now. At first I thought it was a bit daft, who’d want to read what other people were eating for lunch?  But over the last month or so I have really begun to understand its potential.

I understood it as soon as I had discovered the Twitter search facility.  As the name may suggest, it allows you to search Tweets based on certain rules.  You could search for all the Tweets coming out of Aberdeen. You can also search by subject, like what I was doing last night, searching bythe  subject ‘Superbowl‘.

So now not only was I listening to the Superbowl and hearing the thoughts of the commentators, I was also listening to the Superbowl and getting instant reaction on the game from thousands of people around the globe.  Every touch down and fumble of the game, somebody had something to say.  The Twitterverse were massive fans of the half time show with Bruce Springsteen, me included!

What was also fascinating to watch was the continous stream of tweets about the snow which is hitting the UK at the moment.  People in London commenting on the status of their street, how Boris had cancelled all the buses and the tweets as people slowly realised they weren’t going to make it to work.  Despite being 1,000 miles away in a snowless Aberdeen, I almost felt I was a part of it.

I know next time something, god forbid, major happens I’ll be logging on to Twitter so get a better understanding of what’s going on.

It even lets me know what minor celebrity Richard Bacon had for lunch, a vegetable biryani if you’re interested.

David (or @drl if you have Twitter)

Barack Obama as a Tag Cloud

tag cloud of obama's speech by emilychang on flickr

Saw this on Flickr earlier and was impressed by it. It’s a tag cloud of Barack Obama’s speech from earlier today.

For those of you who don’t know what a Tag Cloud is, the most used words from the speech appear, and the more often the word was said the bigger the font size. Unsurprisingly one of the most common word is “nation”.

David

I’ve got the flying bug

US Airways Flight 1549 Plane Crash Hudson in New York taken by Janis Krums on an iPhone

Stunning pictures from New York as US Airways Flight 1549 lands in the Hudson river.  It’s shocking that while the world tries to battle terrorism, my main concern when flying  now won’t be the possibility of a bomb on board, but the terrifying fear we cross flight paths with a flock of geese. 

It is a great example though of a plane landing in water and everyone survivng.  Every time I fly I look at that emergency instructions card thinking “when has a plane ever landed on water like that?”, well now my question has been answered. Maybe I’ll read that card more carefully next time I fly.

Speaking of which, the middle of January blues have struck and I’m already thinking about where to go on holiday this year.  I have already pencilled in a trip to Norway in August.   I had one of those spur of the moment purchases before Christmas and bought tickets to see Coldplay in Bergen.  I could have gone to Glasgow to see them, but thought it would be more exciting to go to Norway, not to mention more expensive.

But we can’t wait till the end of August to go somewhere abroad, so it looks like a trip somewhere at Easter possibly.  Faro in Portugal and Croatia are two destinations that are looking promising.  The problem is, I’m quite lazy and would prefer to fly from Aberdeen airport which is 20 minutes from where I stay, rather than driving to Glasgow where the choice of flights are considerably more.  Therefore flying from Aberdeen to somewhere exotic tends to be double the price as it involves a stop in London or Paris (and after travelling through Paris last year I vowed never to do it again).

However if Emma doesn’t get over this plane landing in the water in New York, it looks like a weekend camping in Lossiemouth might be our only option.

David