Pop over to darkskies2010.com where the project is now live. Thanks for your help.

Cheers

Andy

UK Snow mashup by Ben Marsh

This is an open invite to software & mashup people to provide some innovative software ideas for #darkskies2010.

The principle is this. Twitter works well when people are in trending mode and create a groundswell of comment & chat. But comments tend to disappear in a flash. How do we make things work for #darkskies2010?

I was impressed by the #uksnow exercise run by Ben Marsh. You need to recognise that in much of the UK, snow is a significant news & chat item. What Ben did so brilliantly was to give Tweeters a way of structuring their comments, and showing the results online. The tweet formula was this:

#uksnow SY4 8/10 Yey! I love this!

#uksnow is the hashtag that gets the attention of the mashup. SY4 is the first part of a UK postcode/zip. 6/10 means heavy snow. The rest is social. Further details are here http://uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk/. The map changes in real time (sorry if it is not snowing as I write this!).

Can we produce a map that is perhaps less responsive in real time, but builds up a pattern of light pollution from tweets?

How do we do this worldwide? A mashup to show tweets on a geolocation basis will be good. Individual countries could have individual maps. We are open to all ideas. Please post them here or email them to darkskies2010@gmail.com.

Thank you very much

andybodders

20 March 2010: a worldwide celebration of starlit skies & protest against light pollution.

The idea for a social network Dark Skies event arose spontaneously on the evening of 5 January. We were chatting about the weather on Twitter and someone mentioned the stars. After a flurry of Tweets between people around the world, the idea of a Dark Skies event emerged. 20 March 2010 was chosen from several suggestions because it’s the Spring Equinox and has only a sliver of moon. Although some countries may get cloudy skies, somewhere on earth they will be clear.

The aim of #darkskies2010 is to celebrate the beauty of the stars and to highlight the menace of light pollution. It will be a worldwide event.

We will be posting more about #darkskies2010 in coming weeks. Meanwhile, why not tell us your ideas about how we can best celebrate dark skies on the Spring Equinox?

For regular updates, follow @darkskies2010 on twitter.com: https://twitter.com/darkskies2010