All Posts Tagged With: "twitter"

In an effort to integrate Twitter into my blog a bit better, I’m trying out Twitter’s @Anywhere, which adds a pop-up info box when you hover over an @ Twitter address (among other things). So, let’s see how this works with mention of a couple Twitter addresses…

@steveouting

@dmediakitchen

It’s pretty easy to set up. @Anywhere gives you a few lines of custom Javascript to add to your site or blog; I simply added it to the end of my Wordpress header.php file.

I like it so far. Notice the “more…” link in the pop-ups; they give you more info on the Twitter account that you’re hovering over. … I’ll explore and add more @Anywhere features later, when I have some free time.

This is from the Tweetcloud service. Try it yourself; pretty cool. … No great surprises for its overview of my Twitter posts…

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I’ve been playing around with alpha and beta versions of some content payment and donation solutions. Today I deactivated Payyattention, which added a widget at the end of article pages asking for a quick, voluntary payment if you liked what you read and want to monetarily support me. (This was a trial, and no actual money was accepted.)

The developers of Payyattention have been working on several concepts all generally revolving around the mission of identifying and funding the best online content. A tipping system, even if it’s simpler than previous ones that have come and gone over the years and containing a social-signal component, apparently isn’t the way to go, they’ve decided, so the Payyattention widget is about to expire.

According to Steve Farrell of Payyattention, he and his partners are moving in a different direction that might best be described as “emergent authority structures.”

That geeky-sounding description can be simplified. Farrell says that his team’s future direction will focus on providing or pointing online users to the highest-quality news and entertainment and bringing it to a wider audience. This will be selected by “aggregating the sum of thousands of individual decisions about who and what is worth paying attention to,” he says. (If that sounds akin to Digg, ponder that the two y’s in Payyattention were inspired by the two g’s in Digg.)

An example of this is HourlyPress, a project of Payyattention that uses the linking behavior of a selected group of influencers on a particular topic to identify, each hour, the most important stories published recently online. The first example of this is NewsAboutNews, which has been operating for a few months now and tracks the Twitter link behavior of seven thought leaders on news and media who are frequent Twitter posters.

NewsAboutNews lists the top 10 articles about news and media as determined by article links that the seven selected influencers (“editors”) have included in tweets, combined with tweets and retweets by other “sources” (people who the editors follow on Twitter). A more complete description of the process of best-story selection can be found on the HourlyPress homepage.

Farrell believes this is truly significant and points to the future of news:

“We see this approach as being the future, displacing the broadcast model that we’ve all grown up with, RSS news readers, and haphazardly finding things through your friends on social networks.”

If I’m understanding the direction that Farrell and company are heading, it’s in identifying the best content about any topic or area in realtime by using a combination of computer algorithm and the online behavior of a selected group of humans with a shared expertise or interest, and their like-minded colleagues. You might think of it as in between Google News, which selects news stories purely by machine algorithm, and a website like Digg where lists of top stories are ranked by the recommendations of a mass of self-selected online users.

In between, perhaps there’s not only opportunity, but a better way to identify the best online articles and content streaming through the vast, rapidly moving river of Internet news.

For Farrell, it’s about the belief that consumers faced with news and information overload online will begin to look for the best filtering mechanisms.

As for the financial model that can be layered on top of emergent authority networks, that’s the big thing to be tackled. You can ponder that challenge more deeply by reading this post on “retrospective news” by Lyn Headley, one of Farrell’s partners.

If you’ve been to a media conference lately, you know that it’s increasingly common for audience members to be posting to Twitter during speeches and panels. At the Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas recently, during a panel I was chairing, not only were some audience members tweeting about the panel, so was one of the panelists when she wasn’t speaking!

Yesterday I was on a long car ride with a buddy who’s interested in educational technology, and we were bouncing around ideas, including how to leverage social tools online and using mobile devices. I don’t know if some educators haven’t already tried this, but here’s an experiment we devised using Twitter:

• Pick a day when your class has a guest speaker.
• Ask all the students to take notes by posting to Twitter (laptop or cell phone).
• Each tweet-note should have common hashtag (e.g., #123notes).
• Because of Twitter’s 140-character limit (including the hashtag), students will be forced to boil down the speaker’s points to their essence.
• And, of course, clue in your speaker so he/she knows why the students are glued to their phones and laptops!

Here’s why this could be a beneficial classroom experiment:

• Any individual student taking notes or just listening to a speaker will retain only a percentage of what’s been presented. Some will pick up and remember more than others.
• With all the students taking Twitter notes, the resulting stream of tweets (in my example, http://twitter.com/#123notes) will document more of the speaker’s ideas and thoughts than any one student could record on his/her own.
• Students can review the tweet stream later to get a better understanding of what was said — reading about points that might have gone over their heads, or that they missed in a moment of lost concentration.
• Those who missed the class can still get a pretty good idea of what was presented.
• Students can even tweet among themselves (using the hashtag) so there’s a side-channel conversation going on.

I think this is a technique that could actually enhance the amount of information retained by a room of students listening to a speaker. Has anyone tried this? If not, how about it?

I think this post by Robert Scoble today deserves a reading by all journalists: “Steve Jobs’ bad news heralds the real-time web age.” The A-list blogger was watching his Twitter and Friendfeed streams for news from people about the Steve Jobs announcement of the Apple CEO taking a medical leave, and he was amazed at the amount of instant chatter and information being shared about the announcement.

Posted to Twitter & Twitpic

For any reporter and editor when an important event occurs — especially a local one — watching Twitter and/or Friendfeed is a great information-gathering tool. Yes, as Scoble notes, there’s a lot of noise and you don’t necessarily know who to trust. But the more you use Twitter and/or Friendfeed, the more you’ll come to know the people who you follow — so over time you can pick up a sense of what sources of instant Twitter/Friendfeed news you might trust.

Anyone can do this, of course. When the US Airways plane crashed into the Hudson River earlier today, lots of people posted to Twitter, or added eyewitness photos to Flickr, or other social networks. For an editor sitting in a newsroom overseeing coverage of this event, monitoring the social media stream of eyewitness reports could be a useful addition to the staff reporting arsenal already assigned to the crash and calling in details.

Scoble is a fan of Friendfeed, and it is indeed a useful service for something like this plane crash, since it scans a number of social media outlets. For example, check out this Friendfeed search for “Hudson crash”, which includes all sorts of stuff — from short reports by people who witnessed the crash, to an eyewitness on a ferry who took a close-up of the plane being evacuated and posted it to Twitpic via a Twitter post. (The photo became so popular that it overwhelmed the tiny Twitpic service.)

I think Scoble is correct in saying that the now wide popularity and use of services like Twitter and Friendfeed are the front lines of news. Most of the time for unexpected events, like plane crashes, eyewitnesses are going to be there before professional journalists.

A new role for journalists is to tap into this instant stream of eyewitness accounts. Editors can perform a public service by filtering out the best and most accurate of these early “citizen” reports, saving online users the trouble of combing through all the junk to find the nuggets.

One of the great things about Twitter, of course, is that when a big breaking news event happens, there are often witnesses on the scene with a cell phone who will post some quick tweets about what’s going on, before any reporters can get there. (You’ll remember the Continental jet that went off a Denver runway recently and one of the survivors tweeted about his experience.)

An incident a few days ago proved that’s not always the case. I woke up on New Year’s day and looked at the news on my iPhone to see what was new in the world. Top story in a bunch of places was a crazy bombing threat that shut down much of the resort city of Aspen for much of New Years Eve. By the time I heard about it, the bomber had committed suicide and there was plenty of mainstream media coverage of the story.

But I was curious to see if Twitter was a decent source of news and eyewitness tidbits the evening before, when the craziness was going on and police were roping off city blocks and defusing bombs. I checked out several services (including Twitter’s own advanced search) and looked through tweets sent on New Years Eve by people in Aspen. I was a bit surprised to find not much. Plenty of chatter about sections of the city getting roped off, but nothing from the tweeting witnesses that shed much light on what was going on.

So the local Aspen newspapers got a bit of a break in being the ones getting breaking details onto their websites as their reporters learned what was going on. Columbia Journalism Review has an article that lauds the papers’ coverage: “Aspen New Year’s Eve Bomb Threat Proves—once again—the value of a local paper.”

I’m wondering if this little Twitter experiment I just posted will get any traction. We’ll see.

The amazing thing about Twitter is all the creative (and practical) uses people are finding for it.

Show us your best self-photo!

Last night in Boulder (and not ending till this morning) we had one of our area’s famous windstorms. I saw reports of 80 to 90 mph wind gusts in some areas of the region. (I didn’t get much sleep last night due to the noise, as I’m sure was common for folks around town.)

So what was the first thing I did when I got out of bed? I looked for Boulder Twitter posts to see what other locals were saying, and if they experienced any wind damage. It didn’t occur to me to look in the local newspaper’s website, because I knew that I’d get a good picture of what happened via local tweets.

Lots of journalists have been pondering and pontificating on how to use Twitter to cover news, including me. Last night’s wind storm was yet another classic example. A traditional reporter looking for Boulder residents’ personal experiences could save a lot of time by finding local tweets to pick up tidbits, and contacting some of those Twitter users for follow-up interviews. That surely beats walking or driving around town interviewing people, or calling random residents on the phone.

Here are a few simple ways to find location-specific tweets, such as last night and this morning from Boulder:

1. Use search.twitter.com and search for “boulder winds.” (Skip the quote marks.)
2. Search twitter.local.net for Boulder. (That’ll get you all tweets from Boulder, not just ones about the wind storm.)
3. Many iPhone Twitter apps have search features, which you can use for searching by location and/or keywords. I use Twitterlator Pro and love it.

I’ve just scratched the service. As Twitter use grows, it’s becoming an increasingly useful tool not just for people wanting to keep informed of fast-breaking news, but for reporters looking for eyewitnesses to add to their coverage.

If you’re in the news business and still think Twitter is silly and/or a waste of time, and of little consequence to journalism, this should wake you out of your stupor:

Read his Twitter feed for a survivor’s experience of what he went through and saw — before any reporters could get to interview him and fellow passengers on the Continental plane that crashed on takeoff in Denver Saturday evening.

Also interesting: This short video of the founder of Seesmic explaining how he’s watching CNN coverage of the crash and a spokesman telling reporters there’s no information yet, while the tweeting passenger is spilling his guts already.

I was tickled to find my name on Robert Scoble’s list of top tech blogger/FriendFeed/social media people. He’s got a huge following, so by appearing on his list, I’ll pick up some new followers on FriendFeed, Twitter and my blog, I’m sure. (I’ve noticed some already.)

Scoble is publishing the FriendFeed URLs for the folks on his list, so most likely that’s where people will start following them. The tech blogger and gadfly’s recommendations carry weight, so we’ll all get somewhat of a boost from this.

But this got me thinking about the people who start to follow me but don’t know me. With Facebook, my “friends” learn about both my professional and personal activities; but those are mostly people I know at least casually. It’s a closed social network, under my control. By contrast, with Twitter, I have “followers” who know me, as well as many who don’t but follow my tweets (probably) because they’re interested in my work or media-related opinions. Ditto for FriendFeed, but they’re getting not only my tweets but also my blog posts and photos posted to Flickr. Those systems are open, in that anyone can follow me; it doesn’t require my permission.

The thing is, I (and most of the other people I know who use Twitter) post professional as well as personal stuff. On Friday I posted to Twitter about media and political topics; today I posted a tweet about my daughter’s birthday party. While I primarily tweet on media topics, I also tweet when I go mountain biking (one of my passions); my Flickr photos are usually personal.

To my “friends,” the personal stuff is perhaps of interest; I know I enjoy reading personal tidbits not only from my real friends, but also professional colleagues who I consider to be casual friends. But for these new non-friend followers, I guess they’ll have to put up with my occasional personal ramblings interspersed with the professional-related stuff that I post.

It’s a bit odd, really. I mean, why would anyone who doesn’t know me give a hoot that I mountain biked on this really great trail? Or am currently hanging out at The Cup on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder? A FriendFeed that mixed personal and professional would be fascinating to follow for a movie star, football quarterback, politician or celebrity. It’s probably not so scintillating for all we non-celebrity types.

But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps it is interesting to learn little personal bits from normal people we follow but don’t know and have never met. I see a lot of that from people who I follow on Twitter but don’t know well, or at all. The bits are short and easy to skip over. Yet I actually find it interesting and read them, when I’m in the mood. It’s a bit of modern-day voyeurism.

What’s your take on this? Do you enjoy seeing personal glimpses from people who you follow on Twitter and FriendFeed? Or do you find it annoying?