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The David Bowie Book Club

Back in 2013, David Bowie released a list of his top 100 must-read books. It is no secret that the late music icon had an insatiable appetite for learning and enlightenment through reading. As a result, there are some real gems on his list. Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son, announced on Twitter that he’d like to start up an impromptu book club focused on the list. The first choice is Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd


For those of you playing along at home, a deadline of February 1st means you had better get crackin’. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an English copy of Hawksmoore on Amazon for less than $200. Reviews of the book are VERY mixed. It will be interesting to see what the David Bowie Book Club thinks of it. You can follow along on Duncan Jones’ twitter page.


#BowieBookClub

Sheboygan Scanner

Sheboygan is a small city of approximately 50,000 residents – a population that seems to provide an endless stream of dumb criminals and weird, small-town crime. Maintained by an anonymous user since February of 2009, the @sheboyganscan twitter account has tirelessly transcribed entertaining communications that come through the Sheboygan, Wisconsin police scanner. Here are a few gems I’ve cherry picked for you:

Tweets From The 144 Republicans Who Voted To Send The U.S. Into Default

Earlier this week a vote was held in congress on HR 2775. This was a vote to reopen the federal government and temporarily raise the debt limit. Despite the dire consequences of this senate amendment not passing, there were 144 republican representatives who voted against it. Below is a twitter timeline of all those representatives.


It should be noted that representatives John Mica, Tom Petri, and Sam Graves are not included because they don’t have twitter accounts. Here is the complete list of republican representatives that voted to send the United States into default.

How To Easily Turn Your Twitter Stream Into A Linkblog Of Your Friends

Since Twitter allows you to search the tweets of just the people you follow (in addition to “all” and “top” tweets), it is easy to create a Linkblog of all your friends. Simply enter “filter:links http” into your search bar. Easy and productive. This is great little trick if you are the type of user that gets on twitter to find cool links to read, watch, or listen to.

Eight Bit Hubs

Eight Bit Hubs

Eightbit.me is a fun little site that lets you 8bit yourself a new avatar and twitter icon. Those of us who grew up playing early video games will find this aesthetic deeply pleasing. Rumor has it that eventually the plan is to let all these personal avatars participate in some kind of game experience (are you listening SXSWers?).

The Top 100 Most Annoying Twitter Accounts

It’s difficult to separate the signal from the noise on twitter. Actually, it’s difficult to tell if there is any signal on twitter at all (but that’s a whole other blog post). There are literally hundreds of over-active accounts, mostly bots, that provide little to no value to your average twitter user. Here are a few of the most blatant abusers.

InternetRadio is the most often updated (with nearly 900,000 tweets), non-news related, active account. It’s a bot that simply lists songs being played on shoutcast.com. I’m not sure what use this is to anyone. Ill Street Lounge and Boot Liquor (almost 420,000 updates) do the same thing for soma.fm

Father Time (over 275,000 tweets) is a bot that updates every minute, on the minute, with the time. That would be 720 times a day. How could that really help anyone? But if that’s not enough for you Is It Now… (over 550,000 tweets) does the exact same thing. At least Big Ben is entertaining.

ThinkingStiff (over 430,000 tweets) appears to be an account the owner is using to climb to the number one spot on the Cursebird leaderboard. This is actually a somewhat interesting project but is still a very annoying twitter account.

Twitterholic keeps a continually refreshed list of the 100 most updated (annoying?) accounts in twitter.

Full disclosure: my incredibly annoying twitter account can be found @hubs.

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