Listen to Twitter

Finding myself working but wanting to know how Lewis Hamilton was getting on, I wondered if Twitter would be able to let me know. I was looking for interesting feeds for the students, so I knocked up a bit of XQuery to fetch the atom feed for a Twitter search and turn that into Voice+XML for use with Opera. Works pretty well even if it is rather unsophisticated and uses page refresh rather than AJAX. The script uses the md5 hash of the last tweet spoken to know what new tweets there are. I plan to have this running on Tuesday in the lecture. One problem is that it only works if the Opera window is active so I can't have it running in the background. However the main problem is that tweets don't indicate the language so a lot of very poor, and probably disappointed Portugese is being tweeted now on the Hamilton stream.

http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/xmlwiki/Twitter/vsearch.xq?search=Lewis+Hamilton&seconds=30