
Using Twitter as Your Database - phiggy
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/using-twitter-as-your-database-2/
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chrishenn
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>

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code_duck
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.

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bbgm
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.

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code_duck
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.

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

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

