If you use twitter you may know of the hashtags naming scheme that is in popular user.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/49309-what-are-hashtags-symbols

Ian (Ise) and I have been experimenting with these for making snow and avalanche information easier to search. For example

#MF #FR #DEPT66 (Pyrenees Orientales) regional #AvalancheBulletin for the 05-janv.-2012:- goo.gl/aPJdY

or

#AvalancheBulletin #CH Upper Valais, Considerable avalanche risk: critical conditions off the secured slopes goo.gl/XLRFb

If you search on #AvalancheBulletin you will get daily tweets of the conditions. #CH will narrow it down to Switzerland.

We will tune this hashtags over the coming days and propose that other people tweeting snow conditions use, or develop the format. For a start #AvalancheBulltin needs to be shortened and made less specific. So if you were in Courchevel you could tweet something like

#FR #CHV #ARVBU 30cm of fresh, good off piste skiing on all slope aspects

If you think of other hashtags then you can add them to this thread.

Travel companies have a list of 3 letter codes of all the alpine resorts, for example #CHX for chamonix and it would be good to follow some standardized format.

you can do advanced searches, for example :

http://twitter.com/#!/search/#AvalancheBulletin%20from:davidzof,%20OR%20from:snowslider

You can also save searches, I’ve no idea where they’re saved though, presumably somewhere safe to be recovered by a cultural anthropologist or techno-archaeologist in the year 2525 (if man is still alive)

or if woman can survive?

I saw under one’s account that one can save searches, I didn’t check too far but can’t these then be shared with other users?

btw I saw you went with the AvrilLavigne hash tag #AVRI ? Did you think this was the best idea? Or is it too avalanche risk specific, it might be nice to have a more generic snow and avalanche tag, something like

#SAVB (Snow and Avalanche Bulletin)?

I did try it, then I tried to create a column in tweetdeck and got the Avril Lavigne stuff.

#SAVB sounds better and works in tweetdeck.

also, this is only an issue with clients. The widgets work fine as you can control which accounts you’re searching in. It would be more ideal if you search in a twitter list but no client seems to do that probably because the API documentation doesn’t seem to provide a method.

I can see that limiting accounts could be useful to avoid people hash spamming.

spam and the more innocent retweeting. Snow Forecast have the same problem if you look at the eyeball reports, they were picking up the odd retweet mostly innocent but a pain.

Some ski resort hashtags:

#CHX - Chamonix, #VDI - Val d’Isere, #TIG - Tignes, #ARC - les Arcs, #LAP - la Plagne, #MER, Meribel, #VAT Val Thorens, #TAN - La Tania, #ADH - alpe d’Huez, #LDA, les Deux Alpes, #L7L - les Sept Laux, #SER - Serre Chavalier

... have added a Twitter widget to the home page

mostly the SLF feed is working, there were some internet issues today which highlighted the need to detect if the bulletin can’t be accessed.

The trigger to run is supposed to be the report being updated rather than a time interval and it seems to have fired a couple of times in error. Probably not a big deal to iron out.

The widget is good but could be improved, there’s some methods in the API to retrieve list members, if you retrieved the members then searched on them and the hashtag it would be better. So I may update my webpage to build the widget on the fly in PHP.

But it’ll need to wait a week or two so I don’t inflame my RSI, then do some work and clear a few tonnes more snow