Jared W. Smith

I’ve done up a quick recap of last night’s severe weather over on the Charleston Weather blog. The storm report map was sourced from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet website. They’re very progressive (geotagged storm reports using the Google Maps API, a Jabber room that relays products directly from LDM, etc.) and ridiculously useful in a pinch. I like ‘em a lot, and might need them again tomorrow.

Charleston City Paper’s Lindsay Frost has a cool Twitter piece (jokingly subtitled “Obligatory ‘Hey, Ever Heard of Twitter?’ News Story”) which has a cool mention of the @chswx weather account. It’s really fun to see @chswx get some traction as I think we do some pretty cool stuff with it, especially as hurricane season gets into gear. Also featured in the article are Brian McGee, chair of the College of Charleston Department of Communication; Lyn Mettler, president of Step Ahead Web Strategies; and Andrew Edahl, a College of Charleston student.

The latest foray into my meteorologically-themed social media exploration is the Charleston Weather FriendFeed group, designed with some automated aggregation of Charleston weather-related tweets in mind, but also designed as a point for folks to share their weather stories and reports. It seems like a strange, nearly too-narrowly focused topic for a FriendFeed group, but I see it as an important proof of concept stemming from some goals we set for Charleston news reporting in March.

You may remember the Charleston news hashtag summit-of-sorts. The meeting brought together media members, active Lowcountry bloggers, and concerned Twitter citizens. We hashed out a series of tags that would classify tweets accordingly. There are tags for news (#chsnews), breaking stories (#chsbrkg), and the like. The goal of using these — and really, any hashtag — is to bring related content together so people can filter their streams accordingly. These tags have met with moderate adoption; I’ve personally seen some tags more than others. One of them, #chswx, is one focus of my FriendFeed group.

Nuts & Bolts

The Charleston Weather FriendFeed group is fed from four sources:

• @chswx on Twitter, which automatically tweets forecasts four times a day and also serves as the location where I live-tweet severe weather situations
• The Charleston Weather blog, which will house longer-form weather analysis (expect this to really kick into gear as hurricane season starts up) as well as news about new services
• A Twitter search for the #chswx hashtag, with messages originating from the @chswx account and retweets of the @chswx account filtered out to lower noise
• User-originated posts directly from FriendFeed. Anybody can posts links, photos, etc. to the group.

The feed for #chswx is probably the most important one to come in, because it enables others to contribute to the group without even having to have a FriendFeed account. Having #chswx come into the FriendFeed group honors the ideals of what we were trying to do at the hashtag summit as it lets us aggregate and rebroadcast.

The only snag? Twitter Search is fed over RSS and is not realtime. The functionality’s not yet there to return realtime results to a FriendFeed group — that would be an immense improvement in terms of timeliness of data. For now, we’ll have to still monitor Twitter for the late-breaking stuff.

Why FriendFeed?

So, why FriendFeed? It’s only emerged as the best social data aggregator out there. Its flexibility and power are unparalleled, especially now that FriendFeed is completely realtime. That, combined with its discussion and sharing (”likes”) components, make FriendFeed the ideal platform. It can be delivered in realtime over e-mail or IM, filtered with a fine-toothed comb — basically, if you need to do something with the data, FriendFeed lets you do it in any way that’s convenient for you. Its rich sharing (inline photos and videos) plus integration with Twitter make it an instant win for a project such as this. Plus, thanks to tools like BackType, we can tie FriendFeed comments back to originating blog posts, which I suspect will be critical functionality in hurricane season.

Will it work?

The whole “Charleston Weather” reporting concept is a gigantic experiment; the FriendFeed group is another component to this. We won’t really know how well it’ll work until we have a heavy weather day, and people take pictures and make reports with the hashtag. On sunny days, the Charleston Weather group will probably resemble just another automated push service. On stormy days, though, it has the potential to become a great repository of photos and reports, which could be invaluable to media outlets or even the National Weather Service as they collect information for storm postmortem reports.

Expect to see more movement with the hashtags feeding into FriendFeed soon. We have a Charleston, SC group that is a great candidate to feed in other tags, such as the news hashtags, #chsfree for free stuff to do, and the all-important #chseats for announcing BBQ meatups.

Severe weather season roars back to Charleston today. I’m in “hunker down” mode here, monitoring all sorts of varying weather information. Here’s how to keep up:

• On Twitter, I’ll live-tweet the storm event at @chswx. If you just want warnings and forecasts, I recommend @CharlestonWX. Also see @weatherwatches for advance notice of potential watches. Don’t forget local media, as well, including Rob Fowler, Josh Marthers, Joey Sovine, and the Live 5 Weather Team.
• I’m uploading radar images periodically to radar.charlestonwx.com. There’s an animation script which gives you 10 frames and many Level III products to play with.
• If time permits, I’ll do some writing with more detailed analysis at my new weather blog. Given the fast pace of these storms, blogging may be somewhat prohibitive. (It’s much easier to blog a hurricane than it is a springtime weather event.)

Despite all this technology we now have, your best defense is to have a NOAA Weather Radio and make sure to heed all warnings that come down from the National Weather Service or other emergency management officials. Remember, the Internet is a great tool, but is not intended for life-or-death decisions. Stay safe out there!

One of my focus areas in the early parts of this year has been to extract some of my side projects, such as Serious Business and Charleston Weather, out from under jaredwsmith.com so that I could give them some room to breathe and take on lives of their own. This process has largely been completed for Serious Business, as I was able to move it to a Tumblr site (which has worked well so far). Establishing Serious Business with its own branded site and Twitter account have been useful in forming a stable audience.

Now that Serious Business is done, it’s time to give my weather efforts the same treatment. The work on that started very, very early this morning, culminating in a somewhat buggy rough draft of the beginnings of a brand new Charleston Weather site at charlestonwx.com. It’s very simple and straightforward at the moment, showing only current conditions. Over the next few weeks I’ll be pulling forecasts and advisories. Also, weather blogs written here at jaredwsmith.com will be extracted and migrated over to a dedicated Charleston Weather blog (with copies retained at jaredwsmith.com for posterity).

I’m leaning towards retaining the spartan appearance of the charlestonwx.com homepage. The goal I’ve had with all of my forays into weather is to provide the pertinent information as quickly and clearly as possible; I think the design — while it certainly will see many tweaks as time goes on — is a good framework to start with. I’m currently using the Weather Underground API to bring the data in; this is a short-term solution while I examine more real-time alternatives.

Some additional changes will be made even outside of the website proper; the Charleston Weather Twitter/Identi.ca feeds will become a bit more automated with hourly conditions updates. I’m also working on bringing in real-time advisory reporting (including watches and warnings). The effects will be two-fold: It’ll make the Twitter accounts a bit more useful, and it will relieve some of the stress on me to manually update them a lot. I’m going to have dramatically less time to do that in the next few months as my day job is amping up (I’m going to set some personal records for slow days on Twitter soon), so I want to make sure that the high level of service people have come to expect from @chswx is maintained.

Thanks to everyone who’s kept an eye on my weatherblogging and tweeting efforts — I’m looking forward to further growth and improvement to these services.