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Using Twitter as Your Database

open.blogs.nytimes.com

97 pointsphiggy6 comments

The Times continues to impress me with their adaptation to digital news. Back when they introduced their new subscription service I had a very poor opinion of the them (I even wrote an article[1] for my school paper about it.)

Now I subscribe, and it's worth every dollar (at least on a student subscription :) I appreciate it when the Times is more conservative on the whole “social media” idea. Compared to CNN, which is so full of webby 2.0 qr twat crap, it’s great. And blogs like the Open impress me in showing they are using some cool technologies (Sinatra) to make a better experience (election tracking).

[1] http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5055192/10111NYTSubscribeOpin.pdf

Besides that they can't shake the concept of a paywall, the NYT is indeed one of the newspapers that does a good job online. I should hope so, given their size... I remain unimpressed and even puzzled by the poor state of the website of the average local newspaper. I see it as more than the NYT has done a great job, the industry on average has done an abysmal job of creating useful well designed online services - therefore, ones that have modern websites like the NYT stand out.

The NYT has great set of dev's, including the DocumentCloud folks who have open sourced a ton of their tools (http://www.documentcloud.org/opensource). I presume this work comes out of their Interactive News team which features folks like Jeremy Askhenas.

I met their research dev team some years ago and was pleasantly surprised by how good they were.

Absolutely, the NYT web site is very, very good. I've been quite impressed by a few of their slick special features.

That's what I'd expect from one of the top 5 newspapers in the world, though. What I'm wondering about is why the average newspaper for a town of 1,000,000 in the US has such a clusterfuck disaster of a website.

We did templates for city-level tweets. E.g. Twitter in London: http://tlondon.linkstore.ru

This is neat, but I've always considered Delicious (despite the recent ownership troubles) to be a sort of databasey type service.

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