Journey by Dmitri Dawkins

Approaching Twitter Demographics

// March 30th, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Cool Stuff, Life, Social Media Marketing, Technology

Recently I was introduced to InMaps from Linked In. What it does is analyze your Linked In contacts and their contacts to show how your professional contacts are connected. It then colour codes them based on common links. Finally users who are more connected get bigger dots than others. See mine below:

This is pretty cool because now you can see how your contacts are connected. But how else can data visualisation help us?

Location:

I have been trying to track keywords and events based on location via social media tools for a long time. The issue with social sites like Twitter is that people don’t set their location correctly. For instance if a Twitter user enters Jamaica as their location then it assumes Jamaica, New York, USA, not the country. Also people use other terms like jamdown, jamrock, or just cities like Kingston or Montego Bay. When trying to find tweets from a specific area even if the person matches the keywords the location may be off.

So I first considered creating a list of Jamaican twitter users, however how will this be updated (migration etc.)? Then I thought of tracking interactions and then flagging users as Jamaican, but once again that would require alot of human interaction. Ideally I want something automated and dynamic. InMaps gave me a potential answer. Track interactions between users and then group them into subsets just like InMaps. Couple that with a metrics system, where a user with properly filled out Location or listed under multiple twitter lists with specific keywords or Klout has a higher metric than others. When users are associated with other users with higher metrics it helps to create focal points for the network.

Online communities are associated by content, relation (friends, family, groups, alumni) or location. By establishing the link between individuals online we can create a dynamic social mapping tool more accurate than what currently exists, even more accurate than what the user them-self knows. This would allow analysis of keywords by social-location-grouping or possibly by profession, education, and more.

What are your views?

A sound pioneer’s resonating chords

// March 7th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, Life, Technology

An article published in The Jamaica Observer on my Grandfather, Leslie Galbraith:

LIKE many others, I have been following with considerable interest the reminiscences of Leslie Galbraith in fellow columnist Mark Wignall’s Sunday space about the part he and others played in the development of electronic sound reproduction in Jamaica.

As we are aware, the sound system is an outgrowth of radio, which, in its early incarnation, used vacuum tubes to snatch modulated magnetic radiation from the ether and convert it into a form the human ear can detect.

Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/A-sound-pioneer-s-resonating-chords_8469303#ixzz1FvD8d81B

Swarming at Jamaica Pegasus

// February 14th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Cool Stuff, Technology

Once again, The Jamaica Pegasus Hotel raised the bar with it’s 3rd tweetup on Friday February 11, 2011. Local twitter users converged “On top of the world” for the “Tweetheart” themed event. My friend Allison has already covered the main social aspects of the event here: http://nickmack.net/musings/why-the-jamaicapegasus-tweetup-is-relevant so I will go straight to what made my night:

Foursquare Swarm Badge

At 8:44pm I felt like I had caught my unicorn when I unlocked the Swarm Badge on Foursquare. This is the most prized badge I have and am proud to now have it since I started promoting Foursquare use in Jamaica months ago. This is not the first event I have been to where I expected to unlock the badge. Originally I expected it to be unlocked at Monster, a party at Chilitos Mexican, however even though over 50 foursquare users attended, they were not all checked in at the same time. The Fiction Lounge also tried to unlock it at one of their events, with no success.

So without further adieu, congratulations to Jamaica Pegasus for hosting the first Foursquare flashmob in Jamaica. Keep on innovating!

JAMPRO launches interactive web-based Investment Map

// February 4th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, Technology, Tools, Vision 2030 Campaign

Parris Lyew-Ayee (centre at podium) Managing Director of Mona GeoInformatics Institute (MGI)

Yesterday I attended the launch of Jampro’s (Jamaica Promotions Corporation) Interactive Investment Map. Jampro is in charge of ensuring sustainable development arising from foreign direct investment into Jamaica. Without a doubt this new tool has helped them leap forward by providing factual information in an easy to use interface for the world.

The Investment Map is an online tool built atop the Google map platform that conveniently provides pictorial views and data on key infrastructure, investment projects, lands for development and natural resources. You can try it out by clicking here: http://projects.monagis.com/jampro_test/

Dr. Parris Lyew-Ayee with the Mona Geoinformatics Institute developed the map for Jampro using data from government departments. The map makes it easy to find key investment opportunities in Jamaica. The map was developed at a cost of approximately two million Jamaican dollars, and praise was given to open source tools, which helped to keep the development cost low.

Dmitri Dawkins asking about open access to the data

The first thing that came to mind was the possible 3rd party uses of this data. I asked about the access to this data for everyone, fortunately Claude Duncan, VP of Investment Promotion at JAMPRO, took the time out to address the question and said the data would be available to everyone. Currently they (Jampro) are considering ways to enable people to access the data for this map, outside of the map itself. This is good news for Jamaica’s budding software development industry, access to the data will allow them to create more tools that benefit the local economy making this a truly multi-faceted investment.

(From Left) Parris Lyew-Ayee, Claude Duncan, Myself and Kelroy Brown discussing the investment map

One guest at the function questioned who would be in charge of updating the data, Jampro with additional funding hopes to ensure the data is updated as necessary, including new data from the upcoming census. They also noted that some data is dated based on the source such as the last census (2000). Hopefully in the future with geo-location services like Foursquare gaining popularity in Jamaica, we can integrate social communication to update statistics in this map (venue names etc.).

Overall I like the push of this new tool, I think it will be very useful and I applaud Jampro for using available technology to promote Jamaica. Special thanks to Mark Thompson for inviting me and providing photos from the event. For more photos please see below:

More about The Jamaican Blogger Project

// January 24th, 2011 // 8 Comments » // Cool Stuff, Technology

It has been almost 6 months since the start of the Jamaican Blogger Project. Since then, well, it hasn’t grown as much as we thought, but the primaries in the project have been pretty busy working on other projects. This year we have decided that this project is necessary to help promote blogging in Jamaica and want to build an even stronger community around it.

The aim of the project is is to promote content about Jamaica or created by Jamaicans. We will also sometimes share information helpful to the blogging community.

Currently the project is only on Twitter (@jamaicanblogger) however we also plan to launch a website soon. The @JamaicanBlogger handle currently re-tweets content posted under the #Jamaicanblogger hashtag. There is also a daily newspaper that aggregates links from the hashtag automatically: http://paper.li/tag/jamaicanblogger it has a history of previous editions as well.

Nicky from Cinnamon Coffee one of the project primaries, who originally came up with the hashtag, has also created the two logos below which we will be using to promote the project:

What would really help is feedback on the logo and what you would like to see from the project. Please comment below or contact us on twitter @JamaicanBlogger or email jamaicanblogger@dmitridawkins.com with feedback, suggestions and ideas you may have. Thanks.

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