Recently in twitter Category

Jon Stewart had a segment on twittering last night that was rolling on the floor funny. At least, it was funny to me. But it also provoked some thought into our love affair with Twitter going mainstream. If you didn't catch it, go ahead. I'll wait. In fact, I'll see you after the fold.

Yesterday my twitter feed started talking about follow cost, a lovely little site that calculates your average updates per day, as well as the rate of your last 100 updates. Of course, I always like to try out new gimmicks, so I entered my twitter ID and got my result. I have to admit, there were cute messages while the page calculated and did its thing, but then the result was revealed. As twitter asks "What are you doing?" so does follow cost ask you, gentle reader, "Is robin2go worth the pain?" You might figure that the answer, direct from the horse's mouth, is a resounding "NO!! For the love of God and all things holy, do not follow! Run for your lives!" Resulting graphic after the fold.

I was downloading LDSC "stuff" from my camera this weekend and stumbled across some community love which kind of choked me up. Chicken And Stars is a podcast that I do along with @Reginaldgolding and @Micala, and it is VERY grassroots. We talk about local community, things that are happening now, what people are talking about, and try to highlight someone so we can all get to know them better. It is a lot of fun to do, and Wednesday nights are C&S nights, complete with adult beverage in hand, as we sit down to create more madness and mayhem.What I really love is that the community is willingly coming to play with us and engage in this little experiment of ours.  What makes this relevant on my professional blog is that, at the end of LDSC, three of our listeners decided to create an homage to C&S and presented us—in front of EVERYONE at the summer camp—with a fan poster and a canned goods drive that was then donated in our name to the local food bank. Voila the poster:

As part of the Learning Design Summer Camp, one of my contributions to the event is discussing Twitter and the backchannel communication. I will be doing a brief (10 minute) lightning talk to introduce Twitter, as well as helping to facilitate a more indepth discussion of the uses (and ramifications) of the backchannel. I'm very excited about participating in this event, although I tend to find it somewhat ironic that people look to me to talk about Twitter.  Yes, I get excited about social media and social networking; I think it is becoming more critical to our success AND our sanity, but I'm sure there are others out there who do it better. Nonetheless, I am happy to contribute what I can and, to that end, I've taken my portion of a copresented talk given at the Web 2008 Conference here at Penn State earlier this summer and created a very brief overview (realizing I only have half the time I had there to get it all across). Slides are shared, after the fold, in case you're interested--although, quite frankly, the interesting stuff is still in my head to go along with the slides.

As we continue to plan the Learning Design Summer Camp, my twitter feed is once again morphing into a community of anticipation. We did this in the TLT Symposium, and it was a good feeling to be a part of something in which everyone looks forward to participating. In community discussions on the wiki about the look and feel of the summer camp logo, I sat one evening and watched the artwork change, and expand, and form new ideas as people added their thoughts and input, whether it was comments in the wiki, new logos that had been bastardized from earlier versions to better illustrate a point, or even the discussion that carried through twitter. I can't think of another time where I've seen the community drive the discussion and truly help form an event. Sure, a good planning committee will be productive in their interactions, but this is something completely different. This is an open invitation to a group to help plan an event they can then participate in. I watch the dynamics and I'm almost in awe with the way it just unfolds before my eyes.

I have so much I want to say about things I got to explore at Web 2008 Conference earlier this week. I have to say that, to me, this had a much different feel than previous Web Conferences. I felt there was a lot more to offer this year under a greater variety of topics. I think Birds of a Feather and Lightning Talks were even more successful than before and, IMHO, I think the conference is going in the right direction. Agree? Disagree? In either event, make sure you give them your feedback in the evaluations for both the conference and the next day tutorials. Your opinions are very important to future directions and risks that the conference will take. In the meantime, there will be more posts about other things (believe me; I know I've got one or two about Steve Krug alone) over the next few days as I sort them out of my brain. Today, however, I want to share an idea that stems from one of the tutorials I had on Tuesday.

Tuesday morning was Mark Greenfield's tutorial on The Long Tail of Social Networks. It was inspiring, and I keep finding myself resonating with what our social networks have to offer that really isn't captured effectively elsewhere. (I had to thank Mark later, because his book list alone is gonna run me about 200 clams and a couple of months to read it all. The Long Tail, Groundswell, Millennials Go to College and Here Comes Everybody, to name a few—and this doesn't even include Small Pieces Loosely Joined or Everything is Miscellaneous, which are already on my To Read list. My husband will be so thrilled.) I especially love the term groundswell, which is defined as a social trend where people use technology to get things from each other. That's my kind of social trend.

I'm following a new twitter friend in my twitter feed: MashupAwards. The bio reads "The best mashups on the web" and I'm enjoying the exposure to some combinations I probably wouldn't have come across without it. I'm particularly fond of Twistori, which was first tweeted by Gary Chinn, and TwittEarth, a twitter public timeline visualizer that uses fun icons to show geographic location of tweets. Even 2itch, a Google Maps mashup that makes it easy to find restaurants, stores, gas stations, and more which are open 24 hours.

I love the fact that this unassuming little application has exploded in a way that it has become second nature to many of us. More than this, I love how twitter itself has spawned more third party apps and mashups, because it shows the power of the community by taking what we currently do and applying it in ways originally unintended (or at least unconsidered). Mashups push my mind in new directions and, while I might not be the creator, I can appreciate it, use it, and incorporate it into my daily life.

Please sir, may I have some more?

I have spent THE most amazing day today being a part of the most amazing experience. Today I had the pleasure of attending the TLT Symposium that is the brainchild of Cole Camplese's group at ETS. This is what ALL symposia should aspire to be when they grow up. But how they did it, I believe, is a result of two parts planning, one part social networking, and one part buy in from the very community it helped to create.

Some things really are no different from last year: a one day event, started off by a keynote speaker, and then breakout sessions that focus on (ironic, I know) teaching and learning with technology. Throw in a lunch midway through, and you've got a respectable recipe for a standard one day meeting. So what happened to make this one so different?

Needless to say, the keynote speaker was beyond extraordinary. Lawrence Lessig, father of Creative Commons, was an inspired choice that drove home the concept of shared responsibility for our future as a society. I don't know of anyone in the audience who wasn't affected by the voice of reason, the challenge of his call and the possibilities of tomorrow, if we only use our collective voice today. Having a keynote speaker of this caliber would have been a respectable step up by any measure of success. Yet, this was only part of the equation.

Well, the latest movement afoot in my neck of the woods is trying out Pownce, yet another social platform. Thanks to Cole Camplese, a handful of Twitterites have moved over and are, like myself, straddling the two systems. There have been several tweets by others who have (one guesses) previously tried Pownce, but I'm not sure you can really decide unless you give it that old college try. Being who I am, I also include the ability to go mobile with the platform, as I am always on my BlackBerry (mom's CrackBerry, as my kids affectionately call it)  and I think that has become an integral part of the social experience. So here are the little things on usability that I've noticed.

• On a mac at work, I have interacted in Twitter almost exclusively in Twitteriffic, a great little app with a small footprint that sits on my desktop and keeps me in the loop. I love it because it's small, but there. I can ignore it, I can follow it, I can go off to a meeting, come back and catch up quickly. Better still, being a keystrokes grrl, I love being able to reply or direct message with simple keystrokes so I can basically get straight to my own tweet.  The only downside I experience is that occasionally I miss some tweets, and not sure I know why. Usability: A-

• Pownce has a nice looking interface, and I really like the threaded discussions. At first glance, it looks slicker than Twitter. More sophisticated. But does this really mean it's better? I have to actually go to a webpage and, sad to say, I don't do that often enough. This might be a trainable point, but do I really want to be trained? Usability: B