saintbletch

Here's a good example of news that is just starting to trend (10 mins ago). Fred Rutten (Head coach Feyenoord) says that Pelle is in England for negotiations...

Well Gay Boot, all I will say is that whilst I can't tell what other sites you've been searching, if you check your webcam, you will see that the little green light next to the lens is illuminated. Suspenders AND boxers shorts? Fashion faux pas GB. I'm no expert, but it's surely one OR the other. It's a good observation (#notpatronising) and it's by design. If you haven't already done so, you have my permission to stop reading now... There are two issues. One is that I don't get the browsers attention to draw stuff if it is not in the foreground (the top most window that has the focus). So even if I were trying to update this, it wouldn't work. The other concerns how many requests are made to the servers that talk to your browser. Imagine if more than the 200 or so users I've seen so far were to be using it, and they each left an instance of ZSM (I like that BTW) running. My servers would be serving requests without anyone there to witness it. I really don't know how they will scale to service any sort of serious demand, so I don't want to be doing work unnecessarily. As a result I stop the timer from counting down if the window loses focus (is no longer the topmost window), or if the mouse pointer enters any of the graphics on the page. It's good feedback though (#slightlypatronising), and what I can do is allow you to see when there is a later word cloud available, and then provide a way for you to quickly grab the new word cloud without needing to press F5 to refresh the whole page. Good idea (#verypatronising). I hope some of that makes sense Gay Boot. Gay Boot? Oh, and by the way, if it doesn't make you feel too grubby you can take a look at the MUFC version. http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/2 As you might imagine, it's much more active, and as the #saintsfc twitter feed is quite quiet at the moment, you don't see a lot of evolution.

You're OK suewhistle, you have my word that no trojans will attempt leap out of my pop-up and try to enter your back door. Even if they did, rest assured that I use the finest quality prophylactic-ensheathed pop-ups. Oh, and the cheques in the post. One question re FF. Once you've uploaded the image to mediacru.sh, if you click it to open it in a window of its own, do you lose the font effect? i.e. does the font change? It did in FF when I tested it. I think it is actually an issue with mediacrush and FF. Thanks again for taking the time to provide feedback.

OK Muppets, you can now (hopefully) share the word clouds. In the bottom right hand corner of the screen is a button-like link named Share. If you click on that, it will (hoperfully) upload the word cloud to the mediacru.sh service, and from there you can copy the file location and post it on here. Like so... Oh, but Muppets, here's the fantastic thing... the image is 'alive'. Whooa. If you click on the image immediately above (not the first image in this post), it should take you to the image in a window if its own. Once there you should be able to click on the terms in the cloud, and you will then be taken off to search Twitter for those terms in relation to #saintsfc. Note. To share the word cloud like this it will try to open a new window/tab. So if your browser is blocking pop-ups you will either have to manually allow popups to appear each time, or tell your browser that you're happy with pop-ups from that domain. It's under-tested and a bit ropey at the moment, so please report any problems. (I don't think the downloaded images work properly in Firefox for example). And hey, Muppets, I can see that this is getting plenty of usage, but there are very few comments on here. All you lurkers, you know who you are, I'd really appreciate you telling me if anything is wrong on your PC/Browser configuration. A PM would be fine. http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/1 Toke's a ****.

OK Muppets, I've updated ZeitgeiStMarys so you can now change the appearance of the word cloud. If you hover over the timer in the bottom left-hand corner, you will (hoperfully) see that 3 horizontal bars appear. If you click these you can then change the font, angles and colours. Expect problems, please report any that you find. http://www.zeitgeistmarys.com/desktop-only/270614/1 Only one story in town this morning, although the day is still young... P.S. I use cookies to remember the appearance you've chosen.

Gotcha Thanks again for graciously posting your good wishes. It's refreshing. Oh and spend that cash wisely, here's some free advice. 1) don't buy any goalkeepers from Tottenham, 2) don't put it in any Icelandic banks. BTW What do Twente fans think of Steve McLaren?

Thanks, enjoy the cash. That's got me excited about the coming season again. Just what I needed. An interesting read, although this odd, non sequitur quote found it's way into my Google translation. ?

Art imitating life? I hope so. Not that I'm a particular advocate for gay sex. Not that I'm particularly against it either... I imagine that Brendan Rogers Koeman probably isn't that far away from appearing either. This morning, it appears that Lovren is being given some sage advice... Move, C*nt, Lovren. EDIT: removed...

Sage advice as always hutch. You lay off the beer and keep out of the sun, y'hear? That was the idea suewhistle. As Plastic said below, I knew that there was interesting information on Twitter, but I couldn't be arsed to trouser* it. I wanted a way to quickly show what are the most popular conversation topics and which ones are trending up or down. Longer term I want to include discussions from other sources - particularly here. I'm waiting on permission from The Man for that. As Polaroid Saint says, Wordle is a great site. Its creator Jonathan Feinberg produced the first reference implementation of the word cloud, and it is his IBM paper on the subject that provides the logic for the word cloud I use. The other sites that Polaroid Saint mentions include Tagxedo and Tagul. These are both excellent, but place greater emphasis on making the word clouds form clever patterns. Whatever you plan to do for your students, be aware that the best implementations focus on what NOT to put in the cloud. You'll probably notice that there are lot of English words that aren't shown. These are usually the common words - known as 'stop words' (articles, pronouns, prepositions, etc.), and because they appear most frequently and add little lexical meaning, they would simply drown the cloud. You, however, might want them to be in there. Just thought I'd mention it. *trouser - verb - informal slang - To monitor Twitter and post interesting snippets on TSW for the public good.

Cheers papster.

Fortaleza. Really? Who won?

May I echo the sentiments of my colleague The Gay Boot, and welcome you to the forum. I must say that it fills by old and aching heart with joy to know that you broke your posting cherry just to laud praise upon ZeitgeiStMarys. And thanks for the suggestion about selling this to the club, but this is bigger than the club, Plastic. This is bigger than you, it's bigger than me, it's bigger than TMS and everything and stuff and whatever. I have a dream where Twitter is tamed and made accessible for all through the application of a few words, some statistics, a bicycle pump, some blue and orange paint and a length of sticky-backed plastic. I have a dream where every club in The Football League has it's own Zeitgeist cloud. I have a dream where MPs will raise ZeitgeiStMarys questions in parliament. I have a dream where old people sit in coffee shops and point their tablets at ZeitgeiStMarys so that their analogue brains can make sense of a digital world. I have a dream where Eugenie Buchard and her twin sister are anointing my...anyway, you get the point. Like garlic bread, Plastic, it's the future! And anyway, if entities like clubs were to allowed to control these clouds, they'd surely be censored. The words Reed, ****, footballing and Les would appear and we'd blink and find they were automagically converted to Reed, Les, footballing and Visionary. Word patterns like big, Katharina, masculine and girl would become Katharina, Big, androgynous and boned before our very eyes. And Tokyo Saint sexually impales labradors, would transform to Kindly dog-loving Tokyo Saint helps injured dogs to walk again, uphill (from behind). Where would it all end, Plastic? BTW can I use your quote above in my nationwide print and tv advertising campaign? Nobody will judge you here, even if you do nudge the brown. All are welcome. The main issues at the moment, hutch, surrounds the speed of rendering on smaller screens (this is less about computing power and more about the logic I use to ensure that the words all fit in and are tightly packed), and also Chrome Mobile erroneously tells me that the dimensions of the screen have been resized even if the user has simply scrolled. This forces me to do a redraw of the word cloud even though none is needed.

Good to hear hutch, although I know that I've still got some work to do for tablets/phones. Now, now, now, Gay Boot. Genius is too strong a term. I'd settle for visionary or perhaps messiah. But if you'll allow me to flick the switch on the top of my knob for a moment...You ain't seen nothin' yet! So much to do, and not enough time... What, Free Forums? You'll have to explain that one to me one day over a white wine spritzer.

Oh, you lucky Muppets. The word cloud has a new default font... Also, does anyone know what the thenewfishfingersandwichforum.freeforums.org is? It seems to be another Saints' forum as I'm getting traffic from it, but I don't seem to be able to find it. Odd. http://zeitgeistmarys.herokuapp.com/desktop-only/270614/1

Isn't that called a Robbiesavage, Toke?

Hmmm.

Bear? Have you been possessed by the spirit of someone with common sense, grammar and self-indignant righteousness? And worryingly, I completely agree with you. Poor form Adam. Poor form. Stop using that ouijabear, Bear.

Spatchcock?

Yes, CB Saint, at 2:14am on Tuesday 1st July ZeitgeiStMarys became self-aware... Not yet, although it's on the todo list, but be careful what you wish for. Imagine waking up to a bright orange, 160pt font size alpine_saint filling your browser window! I'd like to merge the twitter zeitgeist with TSW so that you get a real sense for what is being discussed - ephemerally on Twitter and in more detail on here. I plan to allow the user to click / tap on a word and then show all the discussions on here, and the tweets on Twitter where that 'word' has been mentioned. Then by following those links it will take you either to twitter or to a post in a thread in a forum on here.

Why, thank you SO16_Saint. That's certainly what I'm aiming for. Firstly, apologies to all Muppets for subverting this little corner of TMS for my own purposes - and for interrupting the discussions on carrot-top cunninglus correlation. Fascinating BTW. Thanks for all the feedback so far, I'm experimenting with the scale of the font size at the moment. The smallest font size is now smaller and the way I allocate the different font sizes to the different 'words' has changed. This should mean that the word cloud packs more tightly... ...and will eventually make it easier to support mobile devices. For those using ZeitgeiStMarys regularly, if you notice any difference please let me know. I'm unsure what will happen when we get a small number of very popular terms (i.e. when our Captain decides he wants to joins another team), so please provide any feedback you can if/when you see a scenario like that. http://zeitgeistmarys.herokuapp.com/desktop-only/270614/1 Bletch.

Well, I've already been able to clear out your WestPac bank account whilst you were being mesmerized by my trojan animations. It's a good question tpbury, I doubt it. Very good. You're right that with the volume of #saintsfc tweets there is unlikely to be 150 different 'words' in the last minute. So to arrive at the 150 tokens I look back at the, then, last 1000 tweets. The length of time that the last 1000 tweets spans, changes depending on how many #saintsfc tweets there has been. Sometimes you might be looking at the last minute of tweets (when news stories are happening quickly and many people are tweeting) and sometimes you might be looking at a visualisation of the last 24 hours of tweets. The following is full of technical details, but if you're interested here's the logic I use. I actually store the last 20,000 (an arbitrary number) tweets that mention #saintsfc, this happens continuously all the time and as soon as Twitter receives the tweet from a punter, it is sent to me to store. From this long list, every minute I take a snapshot of the, then, last 1000 (again, an arbitrary number) tweets. From this list I workout what constitutes the 'words', I remove a bunch of stuff that isn't important and that would simply skew results (RT, @twitternames, URLs, shortened URLs, etc.), and then I combine the power of like terms (i.e. lallana, lallana's, #lallana and #lallana's all relate to the same thing). To measure the rate of change (orange/grey/blue), I look at what the situation was 15 minutes ago and for each of the words I compute how much it has changed +ve/-ve. I actually store the rate of change over the last 1, 5, 15, 60 and 1440 minutes, but at the moment the user is fixed to seeing rate of change over the last 15 minutes. A future version will...etc. Then in the browser, every minute it looks to get the current 150 terms and it works out what has changed and animates the word cloud accordingly. Yeah, all the mechanics to do that are in the code, but I haven't surfaced them for the user at the moment. Examples... Toke's a ****.

You've touched me Halo. #metaphorically I do know what you mean about the mesmerising nature of the animation. Glad you can see the value.

For God's sake Burpy T, give them time! They've only been here 5 minutes, and haven't even had a chance to work with the players yet. Actually, it's all about the moment (minute) in time and the volume of tweets. Watson is there, and Sammy Lee was really trending yesterday. The Twitterati has moved on. Also, remember that I'm only showing the top 150 #saintsfc terms on Twitter, so Lee may be still there, but at a rank below 150. Future versions will allow you to select how many 'words' you want to display.

Sorry Jonnyboy, I've been away oopnorf for the weekend. Assuming that you aren't asking a deeply philosophical question, or beating fatalists round the head with your determinism, I think it's Indonesian and means "hopefully". So as you say... Deep mate. Deep. One of the oddities of twitter is that you occasionally get a stream of overseas posts, and if you watch the word cloud long enough, you'll also see lots of foreign character sets. This was especially true when Japan played games in the WC and Yoshida was mentioned in a #saintsfc context. For example スポーツナビ is often popular on the #mufc version. I'm sure Toke would confirm that it translates as Sports-Navi. Which I assume is a Japanese sport web site.

Good to hear, Mr. Minty. Yes, the colouring will need some tuning. It happens like that just after a big story (lallana and shaw) are starting to cool down, and the other terms are all increasing in a minor way. As I say, it needs a bit of tuning. Yes, that's on the to-do list Minty. Whilst I actually store the last 20,000 tweets, at the moment I'm 'only' examining the most recent 1000. I found that any more than that meant that the 'echo' of big events that happened 15,000 tweets ago, still gets represented in the chart. I want the chart to reflect what is being discussed 'now'. So, with that in mind, I can either show another bar chart with the time on one axis, and the volume of tweets on the other and animate it every minute. And/or, I can simply put a count on the tooltip (the text that appears if you hover over a term or a bar chart). The count would show the number of mentions that the term had had (in the last 1000 tweets). To be honest, #saintsfc doesn't get many mentions compared to other football hash tags such as #mufc. I've set up an equivalent for #mufc here as I wanted to see if I could cope with the scale of tweets. It seems OK at the moment. I did also monitor #england and #eng (when we were still in the world cup) and that produced a massive amount of tweets - and a lot of swearing!