taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Intriguing! Via Glynn Moody comes an interesting new site, Pulse of Open Source:

To highlight open source activity on Twitter, I have launched a new web application today called The Pulse of Open Source. This is the stream of collective consciousness from the open source community on Twitter. You can follow this stream by simply bookmarking the site and visiting regularly or by adding the RSS feed to your feed reader. You can also create a Twitter account and add the individuals you’d like to follow to your own Twitter friends list if you’d prefer. There is also a mobile version of the site for on-the-go viewing.

I’m not entirely convinced it makes sense — the “open source community” is a pretty wide and amorphous concept, covering “enterprisey” types like Iona, to conference organisers, to web standards guys to GNOME developers. That’s a wide range.

However, that site links to the original, and a version which resonates better: PulseOfPDX.com, ‘the stream of Portland’s collective consciousness‘. Basically, this is a local syndication site, with microblogging from a community of local Twitterers. Similar to the “Planet” concept, which aggregates posts from multiple weblogs into a new ‘river of news’ combined feed, as seen on Planet Antispam, Planet Perl, Planet.journals.ie, but for off-the-cuff Twitter microblog comments. It’s a microplanet, to coin a phrase.

I think I might set up one of these for Ireland… what a great idea!

Update: Ted Leung posted about this today as well, I see, linking to this call for an “out-of-the-box” Twitter aggregator:

In theory, this whole pulse idea could be packaged up to be as easily deployable as “planet” sites. Here, “pulse” is the operational brand-name of aggregating Twitter accounts, where as “planet” is the tried and true operational brand-name of aggregating blogs.

I think I still prefer “microplanet” ;)

Update 2: check out IrishPulse!

Tags: blogs, communities, planet, syndication, twitter