Twitter Journalism: Lessons from #OscarPistorius

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It was an exciting Valentine's day this year. On Febr 14, in the early morning, the news that Oscar Pistorius had killed is girl friend Reeva Steenkamp hit Twitter. The social media newswire exploded again when Pistorius had to appear in the Magistrate's Court in Pretoria, because TV and photographs were not allowed during the bail hearings.

What can journalism learn from this mayor news event on Twitter?
The complete story is published on De Nieuwe Reporter: http://www.denieuwereporter.nl/2013/03/twitter-geeft-de-individualisering-van-de-journalistiek-een-zetje/ 

Legend in FT maps

Google Fusion Tables is a great tool to visualize data on a map. But there is no legend to the map. Of course you can mouse over the map and get the data for a point or polygon. A legend explaining to the reader what is shown would be better.

Data Journalism Tricks

Scrapping data from the web is not easy. Google spreadsheets in Google drive are a great help. Here are some tricks.

Importing a table
Let's start easy. I was doing some research about Dutch municipalities and their mayors. Question was: Is the distribution of political parties over the mayors resembling the distribution in the parliament? So you need a list mayors and their party. Wikipedia is an option and works fine as example. Here is the page: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_huidige_burgemeesters_in_Nederland . Now there are several possibilities to get this in a spreadsheet: copy/paste or using OutWit Hub. Directly importing it in Google spreadsheets goes like this. Open a new spreadsheet and type in the first cell:

=ImportHtml("http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_huidige_burgemeesters_in_Nederland","table",2)

Some tech things

Browsing on the Internet is serendipity. You don't find what you are looking for but something different and interesting shows up. Here are a few:

Android

Of course I want to run Linux on my Samsung. But can also do it the other way: running Android 4.1 in a Virtual Box in Linux. Here is the recipe: http://www.keyables.com/2012/10/run-android-411-jelly-bean-on-virtualbox.html . I used the android file for tablet with Google apps. Simple, just import the file as appliance in Virtual Box. Of course we run Android as root as you can see from the snapshot

If you don't like the Virtual Box and want to run Android directly on your machine. No problem, just download the Jelly Bean .iso and install on an USB drive and boor from the drive. Here is an other recipe: http://www.keyables.com/2013/01/how-to-run-android-x86-jelly-bean-iso.html. You want to try an other Android .iso. Here is the download page: http://www.android-x86.org/download .