It took me a second to realise that I had signed up to the Birmingham Community Alert, I gave them my postcode and mobile number (through a Text), and thought nothing of it.

Thankfully, the incident was a hoax, and all is well. The service then followed up with a Text, as seen to the left, to alert me that all was fine.

Overall I’m really impressed by the service (which is opt-in), and feel comforted by the fact that in the case of disaster/alerts I can be sent information.

The points I’d think might need work thought are:

• Use a recorded ‘real voice’ instead of a ‘text to voice’ system
• Allow the person to replay the message (i.e hit # to listen again)
• What happens when the phone networks jam? (An email would be nice as well)

So overall, job well done to Birmingham Resilience, Birmingham City Council, NHS, Police and Fire services.

So what was it all about?

Hackitude is a two-day hacking event based around your ideas. Non-techie-types can suggest ideas for things they’d like to see made, and hackers can setup or join working groups to make those ideas a reality.

Anyone could suggest an idea (or more than one), that they think is something that is missing in the online world. All the ideas are on the site, so take a browse – could you help build one of them in the future?

We chose to work on one by Dave Harte, which involved letting the public know where allotments where and what facilities they had etc.

I was popping in and out through the evening, but alongside Jamie Garner, but my main task was to help devise the data structure/model that the backend should work on.

The concept was to make it as flexible as possible, allowing us for instance to use the same database, and site, to pull out information on local cafes and facilities, or pubs with wifi etc.

Here is a video shot by Nat, of Aquila TV, of Jamie and myself explaining it (this was taken at around 1AM – so I’m not looking too fresh!)

I had other commitments through the weekend, but popped in a few times to help see how it was progressing and helping/hindering others along the way.

What came out of it was a remarkable system, which can be seen on the Metalocal site. It quickly shows the data, and filters based off what facilities your require.

Only a small subset of data is within the system, but its testament to all that it got done in the space of the weekend.

What do you think? Know of any other cool ideas like this?

P.S. Have a giggle at this:

Sociable, in the sense of user engagement and interaction.

From a historic perspective, I was only aware of them as they had followed me on Twitter – before they had actually opened the shop. The fact that they were to be located around the corner from my office made me interested, and I awaited their coffee and also how they would use their Twitter account.

What I’ve spotted @UrbanCoffeeCo get upto:

-When people ask where they are – they respond back with directions, and even a map now and again.
-When someone got a new job – they were congratuated.
-If people visit, they ask how it was

Through my circle of friends, I’ve only heard good things about it, but with the internet and their twitter account so have a lot of other people. The fact that people can say “I’m off to @urbancoffee” can lead to interest in their followers.

They also seem to ‘get’ how they can use twitter:

I can’t quite remember exactly when they opened, but you can see a consistant tweeting effort by the company, that said, when I’m on holiday in Oct they did go a bit quiet

Now their target market is going to be the people in and around the Colmore Business area, or living in the locale. Which ties in with the tweeting occurring mainly in and around their hours, and key ‘peak’ times – like lunches and late afternoons on the weekends.

Yet it’s not all one way traffic, the brand respond, and also alert followers to things of interest. Whether it be the latest filter on, the soup of the day etc:

What it shows is that by simply engaging with your users, and they will engage back.

Lately they are offering whoever is Mayor of the coffee shop a free coffee once a week. Which is encouraging people to ‘check in’ with Foursquare, and when they do – their friends know exactly where they are – helping spread the word about the coffee shop, and of course you can only be mayor by visiting the most in the last 60 days. . . so a lot of coffee will end up being drunk.

They are encouraging people to use Foursquare, and it will be interesting to see how other Birmingham Businesses start to use Foursquare, and whether they have similiar customer interactions.

What are your experiences of Urban Coffee Co, and other businesses that have a web presence?

Visualisations from:
Tweet Reach
Tweet Stats
Twitter Stream Graphs –May appear, server unresponsive.
Tweet Paste

Pete Ashton, was ‘in charge’ of the twitter account @supersonicfest – this was used over the weekend to interact with the festival goers.  As well as the account, the hashtag #supersonic was used.

Over on ash10.com Pete has conducted some preliminary analysis, focussing on the numbers and proportion of tweets sent, which contained one of:

• @supersonicfest,
• #supersonic
• supersonic festival

I offered up to do some quick analysis, and thought It might be interesting to look at text analysis.

Using the service by IBM, called Many Eye’s, I uploaded the dataset that Pete provided (plain extract and on Many Eye’s) and did some very quick analysis.

A wordle, is a simple map of common words, in this particular example I’ve removed off the ‘common English words’ as well as the keywords identified above.

Supersonic Wordle

For all the above, you can click on the image and interact with them on Many Eye’s.

So, let’s see if we can see any relationships using a ‘phrase net’

Supersonic Phrase Net

I’ve not excluded any words in the above, but we can see that ‘Goblin’ still shows up as a popular word.  With phrase nets, the idea is that you can see the relationships between words.

A better way to drilldown into the patterns, is to use word trees.  In this case below, I’ve focussed on the phrases that include ‘rhubarbradio’, which covered the event (Listen Again on Rhubarb Radio).

Rhubarbradio & Supersonic Word Tree

Finally,  ignore what was actually said.  Data is about patterns, therefore I suppose that the number of tweets including #supersonic exponentially increased over the weekend. This is in the form of a steamgraph, and is drawn directly from the Twitter search engine.

Supersonic Steamgraph

The good thing about the steamgraph is that we can see some key words at the peaks, (if you click the graph you will be able to input your own search and then see the actual tweets that included the keyword)

This was a whistle stop tour of some text/trend analysis tools.  I’d highly recommend having a play on Many Eye’s yourself.  Also take a look at this post on Juice Analytics regarding text analysis.

In the second part of the analysis, I’ll be looking into the date, time and people trends.  So check it out soon.

Through the Help Me Investigate site , I came across an investigation regarding parkingtickets, with the aim to find the most ticketed street in Birmingham in FY09. It sounded interesting, and I was delighted to see a FOI request from Heather Brooke (here it is on What Do They Know)

Data, it’s a rather ambiguous term. Anything can be seen as being a form of data, if you can ‘track’ it and put it in a spreadsheet then it sounds like data to me. The issue with data is that it can be rather hard to infer anything meaningful, especially if you are provided with a lot of data.

This is what happened with the data we were provided, it was in 3 separate excel files due the volume of tickets issued – a staggering 135,656 in a single year. To make it more manageable for everyone I consolidated the data into one single text file. So that the data could be ‘mined’ using a database, or in my case visualised. If you are interested the data is freely available.

The joy of data visualisation, is that you an instantly see and drill down into patterns, trend and other interesting items that you spot. This can make it easier and quicker to get some good solid numbers. You can see some graphs that I produced.

So what do we find? Of the 135,656 tickets issued between 1st April 
2008 – 31st March 2009, we can see that the most ticketed street in Birmingham was Alum Rock Rd, Washwood Heath (in Liam Byrne’s constituency) with 3,995 tickets.

That itself is a lot of tickets, but what is more surprising, is that if you take the 5th most ticketed spot (Alcester Road, Moseley) only 1,545 tickets were issued. Quite a difference.

The other interesting point on location, is that Livery Street Car Park (by Snowhill station) is the second most ticketed spot at 3,439. Yet this is a carpark, the majority of private sector carparks allow you to pay in full the amount required for your stay. Unfortunately Livery is a pay in advance, so if you get distracted shopping you are likely to be ticketed for overstaying.

One might expect that all staff are issuing tickets ‘fairly’ and in accordance with the rules. Though it’s surprising to see that the warden BM739, issued 5,080 tickets. The next ‘top’ ticketer issued 3,559. This shocked me, as that’s a LOT of extra tickets by BM739.

You can see the tweet I sent:

“Look out for parking enforcer BM739, top ticketer, mainly ladywood and city centre” :
1:11 PM Jul 13th

In general, we can see that the amount of tickets being issued over the year increased, month on month. Which suggests that either Birmingham parking wardens are being told to be more strict, that there are more wardens out and about or everyone is being told to be like BM739!

So that’s a quick run through what I found. I will be putting the data out in a form that will allow others to interact with it, and I’m also considering the value of seeing both the historic data held. As well as some additional fields, such as if the ticket was disputed. Do the tickets that BM739 issue get disputed the most?. Is there a particular parking infraction that is successfully appealed 80% of the time etc.

If you have any specific questions, add them as a comment, or email me on neil@rasga.co.uk. The software used to create the graphs, is available for a 15 day trial at http://www.tableausoftware.com/, the table is from Google Fusion (Birmingham Tickets Table), why not give it a go yourself?