How to create a Twitter conference feed

I'm not sure I want to make a habit of this but I've received another request to blog on a particular topic. I've been meaning to write this post for a while so I'll just look at this as the push that I needed to actually do it. ;-)

So, for three conferences now I've created a Twitter RSS feed for those who are not at the conference to read the posts of those that are. The method or system isn't perfect but I think I've got the major bugs worked out. So here's how you do it.

1. Create an account using the name of the conference and/or some abbreviation thereof. For example, the last one was "CIL2008". Be sure to use an e-mail address that you've not previously used to create a Twitter account. (Twitter only allows one account per e-mail address.) If you plan on doing this for another event in the future, I suggest using a throwaway e-mail service so you don't run out of e-mail accounts you actually use.
   
2. Write a tweet or two while logged in as that account telling people that there won't actually be any content here as no one will actually be tweeting under that username.
   
3. Write a tweet telling people that if they're attending the conference who to contact to be added as a friend. Early attempts had me telling people to direct message me or the conference account with the request but this proved unreliable for people with protected Twitter accounts. I suggest telling people to e-mail you directly with their request.
   
4. As people contact you, log into the conference account and follow that person. Follow anyone who says they'll be at the conference and will be Tweeting from the conference. (Following people who are not attending will just clutter the resulting feed with non-relevant information.)
   
5. People only need to follow the conference account if their tweets are protected. Otherwise, following the conference account is technically pointless since there won't be any actual tweets from that account. (You'll be busy tweeting from your personal account.)
   
6. Instruct those not attending to follow the RSS feed found at the bottom of the conference account's "With Others" page.

That's it. I hope I've explained it well enough for others to recreate what I've done for other events. Feel free to post requests for clarification in the comments below.

Only Twhirl annoyance solved

I use Twhirl as my Twitter client. I love it. The only problem I found was it's insistence that links be opened in IE instead of my default Firefox browser. Well, turns out it's not a Twhirl problem it's an obscure Vista setting. (Non-Vista users have not had this problem.) So, if this is happening to you here's the solution with screenshots. (Originally from twhirl's blog.)

First close Twirl if its running and open up the control panel, switch to classic mode if you haven't already and select "Default Programs".

Next, select "Set Program access and computer defaults". (You may need admin access for this.)

Lastly, expand the "Custom" group and under "Choose a default Web browser" select Mozilla Firefox.

Click OK and get yourself back to the desktop. When I started Twhirl my links now opened in Firefox.

Twitter in Plain English

The folks at Common Craft have done it again.

Via Librarians Matter

CIL2008 Twitter Icon Contest - Fine, there's a prize too.

It seems that many of you are asking me what the prize is for winning the CIL2008 Twitter Icon contest is. What, getting your icon used isn't enough? Ok. Fine. Winner gets a $10 Amazon.com electronic gift certificate.

CIL2008 Twitter Icon Contest

As I posted yesterday there's a Twitter feed for Computers in Libraries 2008. @stevelawson has suggested that I run a contest to create an icon for the account. So, ok, I will. Create an icon for the CIL08 Twitter account and send it to me. On March 17th I'll post all submissions on this blog. Vote by leaving a comment. The winner will be declared on March 21st. (In the case of a tie I'll decide.) The only real rules: Keep it clean and keep it within the technical specs required by Twitter (Maximum size of 700k. JPG, GIF, PNG.)

CIL2008 Twitter feed

It's coming up on that time again. I've set up a Twitter account for the 2008 Computers in Libraries conference. If you're going to be at the conference and twittering, contact me and I'll tell the account to follow you. (You'll need to friend the account back if you're protected your updates.) Once the conference has started, or before if you'd like, use your RSS reader to subscribe to the CIL08 & Friends feed to get all the tweets from the conference.

Is reference via Twitter possible?

Last night I had a "great idea" for an experiment: reference via Twitter! Our reference department already has a Twitter account (NLC_Reference) so all that needed to be done was to make sure someone was watching the account's e-mail address and to then let people know that they could send us reference questions via Tiwtter's direct message feature. We'd then receive the questions (short ones obviously) and direct message back the (again, short) answers. Well, it turns out things are always as easy as they seem.

Unknown to me, in order for person A (a patron) to send a direct message to person B (the Commission), person B needs to be following person A. Up 'till now, this account hasn't bee following anyone as we're just posting questions asked to show the diversity of questions we get at a state library. There really wasn't any need to follow anyone. But to accomplish this idea of mine the following would need to happen:

1. We market the fact that we're accepting reference questions via Twitter and tell people our username.
2. They follow us.
3. We receive an e-mail telling us of the new follower.
4. We go to the Twitter page of the new follower and start following them.
5. They receive notification that we're following them.
6. They can now send us direct message reference questions.

Granted this isn't exactly the most complicated set of procedures in the world but one must wonder if it's worth the effort for the limited exposure. (We've got a MeeboMe page which doesn't require a user to do anything in order to ask us a question.) Say they start following us late on Friday. We're not going to follow them back until Monday morning. The result is several days before they can even ask the question let alone receive a response. Also, we're worried that if people know we're "following" them they might try to ask us a question publicly instead of via direct message. Despite the fact we are technically following them, we'd have no intention of actually reading anything they post. Might then someone think we're ignoring them if we don't respond?

The decision isn't mine. I think I've explained everything accurately to our head of reference and she's going to mull it over. I'll keep you posted but any comments on this would be greatly appreciated.

*This

Here's a list of the social networks I'm actively participating in:

• Flickr
• YouTube
• SlideShare
• LibraryThing
• Twitter
• Blog
• del.icio.us
• Jaiku
• Tumblr
• Facebook
• Yelp

Then there's the ones I have accounts in but don't use all that much:

• 43Things
• BlipTV
• Google Video
• MySpace

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few too. Add the fact that in some of these services (Flickr, YouTube, blogging) I have access to multiple accounts, one personal, one work. (Blip.tv is only work right now. I don't have a personal account there.)

Here's the problem: when I find something interesting online or have something to say, how should I share it?

I've got four bookmarklets set up; BlogThis, TwitThis, TumblThis, and TwitThis, along with the Share+ button on the Facebook toolbar, which makes posting to those sites a simple process. But each one has a different audience (if any audience at all) with different levels of immediacy. (For example, if I post it to my blog, only my subscribers will read it but maybe not for a few hours or days. If I post it to Facebook, only my Facebook friends will see it albeit a bit quicker. If I put it out to Twitter, only my Twitter followers will see it but within minutes.) Additionally, Twitter posts need to be kept to 140 characters, my Tumblog can contain more but I usually don't, del.icio.us is for stuff I want to go back to later or share with my classes, and my blog is for more extensive writing even though I post short stuff there too.

Well I could, and do sometimes, post the same content, or various versions of the same content, to multiple services. For example, I put a link to my blog review of my new keyboard on Twitter. Why didn't I also share it on Facebook? I have no idea. It just didn't occur to me until I wrote the previous sentence.

I have a pseudo-solution and that's my Jaiku account. Jaiku allows me to pull in content from all of my other accounts that are outputting feeds. So, if you visit my Jaiku page or subscribe to my Jaiku feed, you'll get all of the content from almost every other service I post to. (There's no way to pull in Facebook info that I can find so there's one notable exception.) The trouble is, there's no one in my extended circle of friends using Jaiku with two notable exceptions (planetneutral and jessamyn) and they don't seem to be doing much with it anyway. So, is a "solution" really a solution if no one uses it? I don't think so.

So, how do you handle it? Do you just pick a favorite and stick to it? Do you clearly delineate in your own mind what goes where and not worry about who's at the receiving end? I'd really like to know.

RE: Twitter

via Gaping Void

CIL2007: Web 2.0 and What it Means to Libraries

Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet and American Life Project

• "I adore librarians"
• Ask a Ninja: What is Podcasting
• The Starting Point
• Tim O'Reilly & John Battelle
• The Web as platform
• netscape v google
• doubleclick v adsense
• akami v bittorrent
• harnesing collective intelligence
• data is the next "intel inside"
• software above the level of a single device
• rich user experiences
• Changes
• cashing - peer to peer
• britannice - wiki
• personal sites - blogging
• evite - upcoming.org
• doubleclick - adsense
• ofoto - flickr
• taxonomy - folksonomies
  
  
• etc
• Web 2.0 meme map
• 6 hallmarks of the Web 2.0 world that matter to libraries
• The Internet has become the computer
• # of computer users is indistinguishable from # of Internet users
• Broadband availability up
• Internet users # up
• wireless connectivity up
• people go online from more places
• # of people accessing internet from libraries has doubled in past 4 years
• broadband turns the internet into a destination
• broadband intensifies people's internet use and it becomes more serious
• broadband makes video a big part of the internet experience
• broadband make people's internet use more social
• Tens of millions of Americans, especially the young, are creating and sharing content online
• 55% of teens have profiles on social networking sites
• 20% of adults have profiles on social networking sites
• SN Profiles: Switchboards for social life
• Teen girls more likely to use all SN features
• 51% of young adults have uploaded photos / 37% of adults
  
  
• 39% of teens share their own creations / 22% of adults
• 33% of teens are tech support for their families & orgs / 13% of adults
• 25% of kids / 33% college students / 12% adults have blogs
• 27% of teens / 14% adults have their own Web site
• 26% teens / 9% adults have created mashups
• 19% teens / 9% adults have an avatar to interact with others
  
  
• 15% teens / 8% adults have created videos
• Even more internet users are accessing the content created by others
• Long Tail audience
• 46% of young users read blogs
• 44% of young adults seek info in wikipedia
• 14% of young users download podcasts
• many are sharing what they know and what they feel online and this is building conversations and communities
• 33% of young adults have rated a product, person, or service online
• 32% of young adults have tagged content
• 25% of YA have commented on videos, also blogs & photos
• tens of thousands are contributing their knowhow and processing power
• 40% of users participate in peer-to-peer
• grid computing
• open source movement
• online Americans are customizing their online experiences
• 40% of YA customize news and other information pages
• 50%+ of YA on specialty listservs
• 25%-33% of YA get RSS feeds
• 5 issues libraries and all online participants must struggle to address - Pam Berger - http://www.infosearcher.org/
• Navigation
• transitioning from linear format to nonlinear in format
• Context
• learning to see connections
• Focus
• practicing reflection & deep thinking
• Skepticism
• learning to evaluate information
• Ethical behavior
• understanding the rules of cyberspace
• The Machine is Using Us
  
  

Technorati Tags: cil2007

Twitter @ CIL2007

If you want to follow the Twitter feed from CIL you can find it in the conference wiki @ http://cil2007.pbwiki.com/Twitter%20Feed. There you can also find the URL for the RSS feed if you wish to subscribe in your aggregator.

If you would like your tweets to show up in this feed send an e-mail with your Twitter username to me (msauers[at]travelinlibrarian.info) and I'll add you.

What are we twittering?

Twitterment is a new Twitter search engine. More interesting is the way in which you can search two different terms and get a comparrision of their use. Here's a sample of library vs. bookstore. Guess which one won.

Twitter 404 page

Twitter 404 page
Originally uploaded by Travelin' Librarian.

Has anyone else noticed Twitter's creative 404 error page?

Referenceing Twitter

The Nebrask Library Commission's reference staff are Twittering! Check them out at http://twitter.com/NLC_Reference.

This cartoon made me think of Twitter

via gapingvoid

Twittered out?

Just use AutoTwit. Write your posts, set a schedule, and forget it.

Computers in Libraries will be all a Twitter

I've set up a twitter account for CIL. If you are attending and wish to have you're updates passed on to the conference account, send me your Twitter username (a comment left here will do but you can also e-mail it to me,) and I'll add you. If you're not attending and wish to follow the conference via Twitter, watch http://www.twitter.com/cil2007 14-19 April 2007.

One-sided Twitter conversations

I'm being sucked in by Twitter. So much so that I complained to one friend that she never posts and she retorted with the fact that I'd not yet moved my Twitter widget to my sidebar. But that doesn't exactly address the title of this post...

Lat night I got to watch one side of several conversations. What was happening is one of my Twitter friends, person A, was obviously posting back and forth with one of their Twitter friends, person B. However person B isn't a friend of mine so I was unable to "hear" their side of the conversation. In this particular instance I was thinking that the conversation was more interesting this way but not knowing what the actual topic was, it just got me thinking.

A Basic Twitter Search Engine

Steve Rubel at the Micro Persuasion blog has used Google to create a basic Twitter search engine. Here's the results for searching library.

Another way to post to Twitter

Don't want to leave Firefox nor actually go to the Twitter site in order to post? Try the Twitter Firefox Search Plugin which allows you to "post updates to Twitter right from your Firefox Search Bar". I've tested it and it works. The only catch is that as a result you end up going to your Twitter page. I'd rather it didn't send me anywhere but it does save a few clicks in the posting process.