A few weeks ago, October 15th to be exact, I submitted a proposal for a community news project to this year’s Knight News Challenge. Each year they offer money to projects aimed at spurring “innovation in the delivery of information and news using digital media”. You’ll note that the submission date is the same as the deadline.

Rewinding a few weeks, Guy mentioned this to me in person, but because of the annoying lack of hyperlinks and copy/paste in real life I had entirely forgotten until it came up again in conversation - approx. 4 hours before the deadline.

Never afraid to take a challenge and/or make a fool of myself within the safety zone that is the internet, I plucked some random ideas out of the air, spent 5 minutes attempting to brainstorm with myself and then figured I’d write the proposal that evening. It worked, I submitted (after helpful proof-reading pixies and quick budget calculations) and for under 4 hours work I think it was pretty good.

I find this kind of last minute brainstorming and intense planning one of the most adrenaline-pumping activities there could be. While some people get their kicks out of, I don’t know, jumping out of planes or fondling bikes, it really is just awesome fun to get the old brain tissue attacking a challenge.

I haven’t heard back on the proposal yet - I’ll take that as a good sign News Challenge folks - so I’m not going to reveal the exact details of the project now. I’ll revisit it again when I hear back - be it positively or negatively!

Lately I’ve been experimenting with one of Twitter’s new features, tracking. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a pretty simple concept. Send a text to Twitter with “track” and the words you wish to follow and every time anyone in the Twittersphere mentions them, you’ll get the twitter to your phone. It doesn’t matter if you’re following them or not, it applies to all public twitters.

I’ll warn you now, before attempting it, that you need to be careful which terms to track. My first attempt was using the phrase “web 2.0″ (fyi, to twitter, that means a message including “web” and “2.0″ but not necessarily juxtaposed). This just happened to be on the night that the Web 2.0 Summit was kicking off, and it’s not hard to see that these are just the type of people most likely to be using Twitter. Within about 30 mins, I’d received well over 50 messages. Information overload! Not that it was that much information, but the sheer bulk of messages being letterbombed to my phone every few minutes was pretty overwhelming.

For those whose phones don’t have (practically) infinite inboxes, Caveat Twittor indeed. Finding the right choice of terms is important, but looking at it any way you’re going to get a marked increase in the number of messages you receive.

The number of messages is certainly not the only issue, and one of the other major ones is that tracking is only available direct to your phone. There is no web interface, there are no RSS feeds. You can’t even view the terms you are tracking online. At first glance, it seems odd that Twitter would implement the service on the SMS side first, although perhaps because of this it has shown how the service works best.

I have found, since honing my track terms, that tracking is becoming a part of daily life and I am slipping into the routine of knowing that wherever I am, I will always have something mildly interesting to glance at on my phone. If I could track via an RSS feed, would I pay as much attention to it? Probably not. There is a distinct difference in the information propagated through Twitter and on the blogs I subscribe to.

Twitters usually contain time-sensitive info and are bleeding-edge up-to-the-minute snippets of content, whereas I rely on RSS feeds to keep me up to date on information arriving on the web over the past few days. By the time I got around to reading an RSS feed of twitters, 30 more would have arrived or the ones I am reading would be out of date. (This is somewhat of an exaggeration as I am rarely very far from my RSS reader, but you see my point.)

Given what I’ve seen so far, tracking seems to be a good aggregator of popular opinion on events and current goings on. A few days ago I received about 5 near-simultaneous Twitters of people heading to the Creative Geeks event in Soho. If I’d have been free, I probably would have popped down to this event even though I knew little about it.

The current keyword tracking is a great first effort by the Twitter team, but if anything, it just shows how much further this feature can be taken and how it could soon be changing the way information spreads offline.

To make this advance possible, one area that needs to be concentrated on is the filtering of information. An obvious example from my tracking springs to mind. One of my terms is “creative”, probably the broadest one I currently have, and as well as receiving musings on creativity and creative events happening around the world, I receive a massive amount on Creative Commons. It may be a great organisation, but it’s not what I’m looking for.

To really excel, filtering needs to be extended to cover:

• Message Content - contains, doesn’t contain, exact phrase, any words, perhaps even a Google-like similar/misspelt word system
• Blocking - currently blocking a user doesn’t prevent tracks being delivered from them
• Language
• Type of Feed
• Owner Rating
• Feed Tagging

Three of these need more detail. The first is the type of feed. I’ve found that a lot of places are using Twitter to syndicate their RSS, and while all well and good for people that want it, I don’t really care to receive every update from BrandRepublic simply because they prepend “London” to most of their twitters. Allowing owners to set a category for their twitter feed would allow trackers to filter them in or out (for example, don’t send me twitters with category “RSS” or no category).

Secondly, there is owner filtering. Now what does this mean? Simply filtering by keyword is always going to be tricky as there is no essentially no “quality control” on what you’re receiving. I think that twitter should add in a level of feed owner rating and tagging. This could come in different forms. Like this person’s feed? Rate them 5 stars. This could then become an option in filtering. Of course, it’s open to abuse and would need to be thought through carefully. Perhaps each rating could even be weighted dependent on the rating of the rater. It quickly becomes complex!

Then there is tagging. This could be done by owners, by visitors or by both. You could even have other visitors agree or disagree with a tag attached to a feed, otherwise you again open up the problem of abuse by those who incorrectly tag on purpose. (If blocking worked on tracking, maybe this wouldn’t be such a problem though.)

With all these features you would really have a, potentially overwhelming, filtering system. Lots of the options would have to be revealed carefully so as not to scare newer users, but exposing these options to power users would allow trackers to customise their experience and make tracking a part of their lives too.

Twitter have stated that they take no cut from the telecoms providers and pay for their SMS just like everyone else. For someone like myself, heavily using and testing the tracking service, Twitter sends me between 100 and 150 messages a day. Even at very good bulk rates, they must be paying around 4p a text, which adds up to a whopping £4-6 a day. I can’t speak for US prices, but I don’t expect it to be less than half that cost.

Apart from wondering how Twitter can survive much longer (and hoping they have something good planned, how much would I mind those extra 20 chars being an advert?), I find the whole concept of tracking fascinating. While the system is not currently sophisticated enough to facilitate this new form of communication, it is nice to see as a start.

I encourage those of you (including myself until today) who have their twitter accounts on private to switch to public if you want to properly participate in tracking. There are some privacy issues, and I actually suspect many of those with public feeds don’t currently know that people can track their information without following them (or visiting their page). Twitter will have to ensure they properly inform people of the benefits to the tracking service if they are to get mass-participation across their users.

I’m currently tracking: “creative”, “london tonight”, “entrepreneur”, “moshi monsters”, “mind candy”

So, after much begging and cajoling - okay, minor mentions now and then - I’ve finally set up my own blog. I shall be posting at an entirely sporadic rate on many and varied a subject. There will be no unified theory here, although you may find that I tend towards speaking about pervasive games, online communities and that Web 2.0 thang. Guy’s blogging should probably be thanked for giving me the inspiration to actually get on with it.

I spent about a week attempting to come up with a good name that also had a domain free, and I don’t think I’ve done too badly. Other potential suggestions include Jeydid (thanks Guy!) and Tempus Nougat, roughly translated as Gooey Time. Please feel free to use this last one and send me royalties.

“Who am I?” I don’t hear you ask. My name’s Jey Biddulph and currently I work at Mind Candy as a Game Designer. Until recently, this has meant working on one of the first commercial Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) Perplex City but now means that I spend my days dreaming up things for monsters to do that 7-12 year olds will like.

When not working, I enjoy having dozens of side projects on the go and finishing none of them. This is something I plan to remedy within the next few months, and I’ll be dedicating a few posts to go into further details on this soon!