And then someone made a live updating map out of it:
Let me just say, before I go any further, Twitter is really weird. This stuff doesn’t make sense. Sure, It’s great to have a load of people providing weather reports across the country in a standardised format that can automagically be turned into a live updating map. That’s fantastic. But how the hell did it happen?
I suspect it’s a combination of a number of factors, most of them human:
1) The British love talking about the weather. Before the snow even started #uksnow was a “trending topic” on Twitter Search. Furthermore, snow in Britain, especially urban southern Britain, is a relatively rare event.
2) Hashtags have, it seems, become mainstream, at least amongst those who’ve been using Twitter for a few months.
3) The British, while loving to talk about the weather, do so with their tongues firmly in cheek. The notion of rating the snow out of ten, therefore, appeals to a certain sense of humour. Hell, if you’re going to react to something in an over the top manner you might as well go the whole hog. After all, this is snow in Britain. (At the point, remember, no-one knew it would be the worst best snow in 18 years.)
4) Whoever started the “rate your snow out of ten” thing was obviously fairly well connected but it spread incredibly rapidly for a meme. I reckon this because it was instantly comprehendable. The hashtag made sense (unlike some) and was already in use for general chatter about the snow, British people know a postcode when they see one, and everyone understands a rating out of ten. Also, everyone had the data in their heads ready to input. “It’s snowing fairly heavily in my area” = “#uksnow B13 6/10″.
5) What’s really interesting is there was no real purpose to doing so. Just a faith that someone, eventually, would take this data and do something with it. I guess this has a lot to do with precedent. Whenever there’s a collection of data released onto the ‘net you know some visualisation nut will turn it into a graph or a map or something. So it would have been really odd if, within 12 hours, there wasn’t a live updating Googlemaps mashup.
6) You can’t easily hack it. There’s no opportunity to insert rude words. You could probably tweet inaccurate reports but they’d be buried by the amount of accurate ones so the system is pretty self-healing.
7) It’s fun.
Sure, the map isn’t that accurate. It’s biased towards major population centres and is notably empty in Scotland (where, I guess, snow is a bit more mundane than in London). But as an exercise in spontaneous collective reporting across many networks using a single keyword to bond otherwise disparate groups, well, it’s pretty fascinating.
Could you replicate it? I dunno. The thing about projects like this is no-one owns the end result, which is one of the reasons folk are willing to participate. If a major site had asked people to send in reports (like the BBC does) they might well get some but the end result would be owned by that site. The thing about a project which no-one owns is that everyone owns it, even if they only contributed a couple of bits of data. This is our map, just as Wikipedia, by using the GNU Free Document License, is our encyclopedia. That, I think, is what makes this sort of thing interesting and not a little bit exciting.
Now, go play in the snow people!
(Bus photo by @dubber using the Atheist Bust Slogan Generator)
[Update: Within minutes of posting this (and informing Twitter) it comes to my attention that Paul Clarke came up with the standard of #uksnow [postcode prefix] n/10 and started the meme off. As part of the UKGovWeb lot he’s only a degree or so away from me on Twitter which explains how I heard about it so quickly. Nice one Paul!]
Love it – many similarities to how I saw it (writes another over-analyst). By Sunday night I had four checklist factors which I thought made the whole thing fly: see if you agree?
http://is.gd/i0wy
Interesting take on this – have to say I took part a little bit too, enjoying the notion of rating the snow quality :D
What you raise about how ‘we’ own this data is particularly interesting – I wonder if the people who kickstarted the idea are also into the whole OSM project (which I’ve helped out with a little tiny bit)… It seems like both could be helped along with a very similar mindset. I wonder if we’ll see more user generated weather reports in the future – but primarily, I wonder if people will increasingly turn to aggregating the weather themselves? Or is this just a one-off?
@Christopher: I’d imagine it’s just a one-off for weather. The novelty will soon fade. That’s one reason why this isn’t a sustainable replacement for journalism or whatnot. But I think these blurts of collective aggregation (or whatever you want to call them) are less interesting in themselves and more interesting as an illustration of what’s going on underneath. This sort of thing happens on a much quieter level on Twitter all the time with impromptu gatherings and the like. This is big but it’s the small that really matters.
@Paul: Have updated the post accordingly. Since our Twitter networks appear to overlap a fair bit I expect we’ll meet sometime soonish. Be good to chat!