My Twittermates – via Jane Hart –
Tag: Twitter
News & Celebrity Now
Will Richardson describes the way news is currently collected:
from his blog – http://weblogg-ed.com/2009/the-news-according-to-twitter/
Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody says journalism is losing ground as a profession, as it becomes an activity that anyone can practise, and this demonstrates his point.
Twitter – a Brief Intro
I’ve been ‘playing’ on Twitter for a few months now. I choose who I follow based on whether we appear to have similar interests, and I let anyone who wants to follow me. There are people who I follow who don’t follow me, and people who follow me who I don’t follow back. It makes for a kind of discontinuous ‘conversation’, and you might wonder why I bother. Here are some reasons:
- it can be interesting seeing what people are doing/thinking in different parts of the world;
- I find links to sites about things that interest me, mostly about the impact of social media on education and small businesses;
- I find blogs I want to add to my RSS reader;
- reading Tweets can take the boredom out of waiting.
If you’ve heard the buzz about Twitter but don’t ‘get’ it, here are two resources that might help you start, but you have to play on Twitter for at least a month to find out how you might want to use it, and if it’s useful for you.
CommonCraft’s Twitter in Plain English by Lee LeFever
Biz Stone’s How Do You Use Twitter, on Vimeo
The discipline of only having 140 character spaces helps you practice alternative phrasing, brevity, and, possibly, texting spellings. The availablity of Twitter on mobile devices allows you to do silly things like watch political debates while reading Tweets and writing them while the debate (or game or show) is still going on.
Personally I use a variety of Twitter applications:
- On my laptop
- http://twitter.com/home – the home site
- http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/ – which allows me to see any Replys or Direct Messages even if I’ve missed them when they first showed up on Twitter
- There are many, many Twitter applications – use Google if you want to try some of the others.
- http://twitter.com/home – the home site
- On my iPhone
- Twitterific – which is free from the App Store
- Summizer – $2.99 from the App Store and allows you to search for topics and/or follow hashtags (Look it up;-> I had to).
So give Twitter a try, but do watch out; it can become addictive;->
Jing (for Screencasting) and TweetDeck (for Twitter)
Summertime is playtime, and we’ve had record amounts of rain where I live, so my playing has been indoors. Here are a couple of tools I’ve been playing with.
Jing is a free and very easy screencasting tool. Because I’m thinking about Personal Learning Environments, that’s what I made this screencast on –
My problem is that by covering my full screen, I get a screencast the size of my full screen, which is too big. Twitter helped me get a partial answer. (I’m using TweetDeck because with it, I can see any replies immediately and I can separate the people I follow into different groups, for ease of following conversations.)
Alana’s advice allowed me to reduce the size of my Jing screen, but it only showed part of what I had captured. I wanted the whole image, but smaller. I have asked for help on Twitter several times previously and most often got a reply, so I consider it an important part of my PLE. It’s a place where I can ask and answer questions from peers.
So I’m playing, and thus learning how to use these tools, so when the weather is sunnier and/or I’m busier, I’ll be proficient and efficient in using them.
Talking to Editors
Image via Wikipedia
Last night felt like summer in downtown Toronto. I was one of two speakers to the Editors Association of Canada in the beautiful Women’s Art Institute, and enjoyed giving my rather rushed presentation. (There’s a rigid deadline when the building must be cleared.)
I always enjoy presenting, especially about how useful and easy it is to use web 2.0 (aka social web) applications. I put the PowerPoint (visuals only) up on SlideShare for those who want to review the info.
Tipping Towards Brevity
Image via Wikipedia
My (New) Blogging Pattern
I used to try and blog once or twice a week – and felt badly if I failed to keep my blog current. My earliest blogs were long ruminations, almost essays, using academically correct formatting and referencing. I actually kept two, sometimes three blogs, trying to keep my professional, academic, and personal interests separate. At that time, I got many of my inspirations for what to write about from reading the blog posts I collected, using RSS, through Bloglines.
Too much! It turned a pleasure into a “should” and felt prison-like. Over a period of time I moved to one dominant blog, leaving behind a few orphans. I created a WordPress blog, because I could add niftly little widgets and make my blog both look attractive and work as a repository for much of my life on the web.
This setup was more comfortable, but when I got busy, I still neglected both my Bloglines and my blog.
I joined Facebook, because I read about it on blogs and in newspapers, and my daughter told me to;-> I found aspects of it interesting and handy, but wasn’t all that keen on some parts of it so I took (take) a conservative approach. However, through Facebook I discovered Twitter. And I’m hooked. I love eavesdropping on the partial conversations and I scavenge news and info through the links. If someone seems to be using Twitter without contributing, or is just boring, I stop following them. It’s easy, like sliding away from the bores at a large, noisy party. Then I followed the web metaphor, and I linked my Twitter stream onto my blog. And, copying something I’d seen on other blogs, added my del.icio.us saves to my blog.
The tipping point that I recognized this week was that, although I am continuing to semi-neglect my Bloglines and its inspirations, I now collect the stuff that intrigues and feeds me through Twitter. Then, using my online bookmarking tool, del.icio.us (and diigo, too) I share it. The items I save to del.icio.us now automatically create posts on my blog even when I don’t compose and write one up. I write less, but share as much, I think, but in a briefer, more discontinuous manner. I am, however, increasingly taking the (brief) time to annotate the links I save and share, to create more context.
Maybe my attention span has shortened, or maybe I’ve moved to the efficiencies (Twitter and automatic posting of saved items) that the web creates and encourages. Whatever the rationale I use, I have definitely tipped over into a new pattern of keeping up and sharing.
I think, (I’d appreciate feedback here) that my blog is still useful to others, at least to those who share some of my interests, because what I collect from Twitter (and from time-to-time from my Bloglines account) winds up on my blog through the del.icio.us posts.
It’s what I do now, and I enjoy this pattern.
Learning Living 