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Peter,
I don't do facebook or twitter so I would like to ask if there's a way people tweeting about their stolen bikes could be encouraged to make a detailed report to the Chicago Stolen Bike Registry as well. Thanks for any help w/ that.
Yeah, I understand, I don't do Facebook either. I'll post a link to the official Chicago Stolen Bikes Registry on the Twitter page. BTW, you don't need an account use Twitter. You can just search chistolenbikes and see the feed. You only need an account to tweet yourself. In fact, I think you can hook up the Twitter feed RSS and just receive updates if anyone posts a stolen bike. Spread the word.
H3N3 said:Peter,
I don't do facebook or twitter so I would like to ask if there's a way people tweeting about their stolen bikes could be encouraged to make a detailed report to the Chicago Stolen Bike Registry as well. Thanks for any help w/ that.
I fully support the Stolen Bike Registry and I think it's an excellent, well implemented tool. The problem is with speed. If someone tweets about their bike stolen as soon as it happens, that tweet immediately pings every single Twitter follower of chiStolenBikes, instantly. Most Twitter users send those tweets from their cell phones so it could be done faster without having to wait for the victim to get home and get online before reporting the theft.
I will gladly hand the chiStolenBikes account over to the webmaster of the Chicago Stolen Bikes Registry. There is a way to add the Twitter feed directly to the website via Twitter's account settings.
Thanks, Peter. That definitely helps my understanding. Anything that could potentially help someone get their bike back is worth pursuing.
The CSBR is me, a guy named Paul, and a guy named Jason.
Paul does the technical stuff, I do the day-to-day approval/editing/communicating, and Jason serves as a backup to me (could use an additional person in his role actually.) I've alerted Paul to this thread and asked if he knows how to have new reports generate tweets, or for any other ideas. At one point he was going to integrate with Everyblock Chicago but they got sucked up by some corporation. In any event no need to hand anything over-- let's see how it works and think of how we can connect/integrate.
Peter Muller said:I fully support the Stolen Bike Registry and I think it's an excellent, well implemented tool. The problem is with speed. If someone tweets about their bike stolen as soon as it happens, that tweet immediately pings every single Twitter follower of chiStolenBikes, instantly. Most Twitter users send those tweets from their cell phones so it could be done faster without having to wait for the victim to get home and get online before reporting the theft.
I will gladly hand the chiStolenBikes account over to the webmaster of the Chicago Stolen Bikes Registry. There is a way to add the Twitter feed directly to the website via Twitter's account settings.
Hours and hours of work have gone into the stolen bike registry and it's been a constant battle to get people to use it. We still have a constant barrage of people posting fairly useless reports to chifg, craigslist, etc. of the variety that say "if you see it punch the rider in the nuts" but provide almost no other useful info. The registry was started to hopefully make us a little smarter than that, and also to help educate and to provide a tool to get some clues as to how to combat bike theft.
There's a lot of advantage in having one central resource that's well-indexed and doesn't expire or become impossible to search after a short time, so I don't understand how the Twitter feed will help and am concerned that it will actually hurt-- but some of that may be just not being familiar enough with Twitter to understand what the benefit would be. Any handholding in this regard appreciated.
Also any ideas for how the two resources could be integrated with each-other?
I think it will be useful as a supplementary device in addiction to the Stolen Bike Registry. Twitter is very good at getting the word out quickly about something. I think the best thing to do might be, if you see someone tweet about a stolen bike, reply with a nice nudge to also file with the registry.
H3N3 said:Hours and hours of work have gone into the stolen bike registry and it's been a constant battle to get people to use it. We still have a constant barrage of people posting fairly useless reports to chifg, craigslist, etc. of the variety that say "if you see it punch the rider in the nuts" but provide almost no other useful info. The registry was started to hopefully make us a little smarter than that, and also to help educate and to provide a tool to get some clues as to how to combat bike theft.
There's a lot of advantage in having one central resource that's well-indexed and doesn't expire or become impossible to search after a short time, so I don't understand how the Twitter feed will help and am concerned that it will actually hurt-- but some of that may be just not being familiar enough with Twitter to understand what the benefit would be. Any handholding in this regard appreciated.
Also any ideas for how the two resources could be integrated with each-other?
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