27Apr10 RFID Tagged Cows Start Tweeting
A herd of dairy cows from the University of Waterloo might be the first of the bovine species to use Twitter. The cows brag about milk production, RFID transponder glitches, eating habits, technical issues with the “Mr. Terminator” milking machines and the specific nuances of which teats perform best. Some of the cattle even let loose with an occasional literary quotation from Virgil. We’re hoping for Twitpics soon. The tweets are actually a project from the University’s Critical Media Lab (as whimsical as we like to be at Mashable, we know cows lack the necessary opposable thumbs for tweeting). Lab members Ron Broglio, Marcel O’Gorman and Pouya Emami have teamed up with dairy farmer Chris Vandenberg and a dozen of his favorite milk cows on Buttermine Farms in Brant, Ontario.

The data for the tweets comes from a modern, computer-operated and cow-initiated milking system. The team explained:
Each cow wears a RFID tag that is used to coordinate her activities with a central computer. As a cow approaches the robotic milking pen, the computer reads the tag and determines whether or not the cow is scheduled to be milked, based on her stage of lactation and average daily output. If the cow is ready for milking, she is allowed into the pen. Once inside, a robotic arm washes her teats, latches on, and extracts the milk while the cow eats high-grade feed to make her happy. The milk output and feed input is recorded by the main computer and stored in a database, along with the total milking time, time/teat, and total time in pen.
Fascinating, isn’t it? The cows basically milk themselves, and the amount of information this system generates is enough to power a Twitter-based stream of data on milk production and dairy farm life. If you’d like to take a closer look at the project in action, check out this Twitter list of the 12 dairy cows on Twitter. I feel that I should close this post with a cow-related pun, but I’d rather simply say that I think this is a pretty sweet idea and wonder what other kinds of fascinating data could be auto-tweeted with a “human” voice.
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19Apr10 The Bus Ride: Webrings 2.0
Name: The Bus Ride Quick Pitch: The Bus Ride lets users create and share collections of related web pages, based on a topic. Genius Idea: If you’re old enough to remember Webrings, strap on your toupee and get ready for a blast from the past. The Bus Ride acts as a kind of Webring 2.0, letting users create and navigate “routes,” collections of up to eight related links. When a user “rides the bus,” he is guided through each site on its route with an iframe containing a modicum of information and Facebook-powered annotations.

Serial entrepreneur and founder Zachary Garbow, who is also a Y-Combinator alumnus, said the product is intended to “tell a story, like a mix tape for the web. Since each route is greater than the sum of its parts, the Bus Ride brings a new twist to link sharing that cannot be found via traditional sharing methods such as Digg, Twitter or Facebook.” Garbow’s past projects have also centered on the idea of creating more social web browsing experiences. His Firefox extension SocialBrowse was a simple way to share links with contacts around the social web, and Qwisk was another iframe-based, socially enabled, browsing/sharing platform. While The Bus Ride seems like a cute, user-controlled premise for social browsing, Garbow also revealed that he plans to use data gathered from this app to build a guided search engine down the road. In the meantime, however, we think this idea is good for a few groups of people, including and particularly those in primary education. But annotated bookmarking is as competitive as it is hard to monetize; will Garbow need to find another idea to achieve startup glory? Give The Bus Ride a spin, and let us know what you think.
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