I seem to be going through a creative phase at the moment so I'm making the most of it and churning out code that I think is useful. The latest one is a spin off of my last blog post about aggregating my rss feeds into once place using TiddlyWeb. Yesterday, Osmosoft had a show and tell where we talked about the things we are and have been up too. TiddlyTweets was one that was mentioned - a client side twitter archiver. It reminded me of my server-side TiddlyWeb rss archiver which also happens to archive my tweets. However the problem with archiving tweets is tweets don't have tags.

Okay... so they do- tweeters have delegated specific characters to mean things. For instance if in a message I tweet "I am going for #coffee with @jayfresh" I am purposely tagging that tweet with the word coffee and referencing another Twitter user, my friend jayfresh. However, I am lazy. People are lazy. It would be lovely if when everyone tweeted they picked out the most interesting word in their tweet and put a hashtag in front of it. For instance back in February I went to Singapore and I tweeted "finding singapore airport quite dull. All the interesting shops were the other side of passport control!". At the time I didn't think this was a significant tweet and still I don't. However I am sure there are people in Singapore airport now who may find some use in that bit of knowledge about Singapore airport and make sure they go shopping before going through passport control. If my tweet was tagged with singapore and airport maybe they would find that tweet much easier. However this would require me to have written my tweet as "finding #singapore #airport quite dull. All the interesting shops were the other side of passport control!".

So anyway, I've blabbered on too much. What I've come up with is simple.

I have a TiddlyWiki which you are currently reading. Every thing I post to this TiddlyWiki has tags.
I have a delicious feed. I purposely tag links in my delicious feed so I can find them again.
I have a Flickr feed. I like to tag my photos so I can find them again.
Combine the three above and I have a list of tags.

I now tweet "finding singapore airport quite dull. All the interesting shops were the other side of passport control!"
I run the archiver I introduced in Merging all my rss feeds using TiddlyWeb.
However there is an extra step...
Now before saving I take the new tiddler that has come from an rss item. It has the text "finding singapore airport quite dull. All the interesting shops were the other side of passport control!". I parse this text for words that exist in my list of tags from above. By this I mean I look at the word "finding" - I ask is it in my tags? The answer is no so I throw it away. I then look at the second word "singapore" - and I ask is it in my tags? The answer this time is yes. It happens that when I when to Singapore I couchsurfed and made a new friend called Han Tan, who it transpired was an internet meme (ie. like the star wars kid) for dancing like a crazy man on YouTube. At the time I thought this video was funny and added it to my delicious feed I tagged it "singapore". Now I see the word "singapore" in my tweet and know I've used that word as a tag before so that tweet gains a new tag "singapore". I then go on to the word airport and so on and so on.

So now I can tag my tweets. If you use my search engine and search for singapore, you will get some tweets in the search result with that keyword. I've now enriched my data. You can see my code here

So what is the significance of this...
Well one other use case I can think of is voicemail to text. Say I leave my friend Stuart a voicemail on his phone, his lovely Ribbit service will send him a text and an e-mail with a transcribed version of my message. Maybe Stuart wants to find that voicemail again using the above tagging mechanism he has a better chance then without it.