Sunday, June 7

My work on Times Square billboard tomorrow :)

I had mentioned on Thursday that I had a killer little project underway. I was contacted by Ashley John Heather of dotbox for some rush assistance in their Best Friends Day campaign for the charity DoSomething.org.

I'm taking #bff tagged results from search.twitter.com and pulling them into a local SQL Server 2005 database. The intake procedure filters for banned words, banned users, prioritized users. Then 10 at a time, pre-filtered tweets are put in front of a human moderator using a WinForms interface (yes, WPF would have been sexier, but I had <4 days to get this done) where the user can choose to "Display", "Prioritize" or "Ban" based on the tweet's text content and author. Content is batched for publishing to the ticker to be displayed on the bottom of the billboard.

OK ... that sounds like pretty run-of-the-mill CRUD work, right, so what's the point? I hear ya! Here's the kicker: the tweets approved in the moderation process will be published to Time Square's largest billboard, the Clear Channel billboard, from 8am-8pm Monday (tomorrow) June 8th, six out of every 15 minutes:


Yeah, how friggin' cool is that?