Secrets to Microblogging Success If you are new to microblogging or have found yourself stumped by the tools and the process, this post could be your jump start to success. You may have attended workshops or conference sessions where presenters introduced their ‘network’ and demonstrated a hearty, global greeting from dozens of individuals who seemed poised on the edge of their virtual seats, waiting for a request from the presenter. Did you go home and try it yourself, just to discover that not only was there no one listening, you couldn’t think of a thing to say? Phweet Have you ever wished you could just Talk to your Twitter friend?Have you ever wanted to spontaneously set up a Conference Call with your Twitter friends?Have you ever felt irritated that you have to turn on a separate client to accept a Call? Phweet lets you accept calls with one click from your Twitter page or Twitter clients. Phweet is a simple service where you don’t need to download or share anything more to talk.
Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools! Various Twitter-related tools and plugins have been multiplying fast over since we did our big Twitter Toolbox and 8 awesome Firefox plugins for Twitter earlier. When we say fast, we "mean 140+ new tools" fast, and we probably missed some, too. You know what this means: now you have to arm yourself with dozens of shiny widgets you probably don't need, but you can't resist them anyway. Why Twitter Matters Can the fledgling microblogging service become a social media powerhouse to rival giants like Facebook—or will it be gobbled up? It's easy to laugh at nonsense on Twitter, the microblogging rage. "My nose is leaking," writes someone called Zapples, "so imma go to sleep now.…" But I've heard lots of similar drivel (and even produced some myself) on the phone—an important technology if there ever was one. The key question today isn't what's dumb on Twitter, but instead how a service with bite-size messages topping out at 140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary. Here's why I'm looking. In the last few months, the traffic on Twitter has exploded, growing far beyond its circles of bleeding-edge tech enthusiasts and hard-core social networkers.
Twittercounter: Show Off Your Following with a Chiclet Given the huge overlap between bloggers and Twitter users, I suspect this simple new site might take off. Or, at least I’m sure we’ll be seeing its end product on a lot of blog sidebars. Twittercounter is a new service that creates a chiclet showing off your Twitter follower count. It’s styled almost exactly the same as the Feedburner chiclet that shows your blog’s total number of RSS subscribers, except it uses Twitter’s white and blue color scheme. To add it to your blog, all you do is go to Twittercounter’s site and enter in your Twitter username, which in turn generates some HTML that you can copy and paste. The site also has some other basic features, like seeing who the most popular Twitter users are (as measured by number of followers) and who the most recent users are that they've started tracking.
academhack » Blog Archive » So You Want to Microblog (Twitter) With Your Students? So over the past couple of months I have been writing here about my use of Twitter in the classroom. The first post garnered some much interest that I ended up writing a follow-up one. In both cases though I wrote primarily around the specific ways I used Twitter, or my reasons for doing so, without actually covering the how-to aspect. To be sure there are several tutorials (these two videos for instance), and an introduction from the Common Craft show, so what I thought I would cover here are the logistics of setting it up in an educational space. There are several ways to do this, I am just going to outline the one that I think is most effective.
Tweet Spot: Web 2.0 Educators Are Atwitter About Twitter Twitter is a Web 2.0 utility that asks the question "What are you up to?" It's a microblogging platform that allows users to share small tidbits about their current activities, locations, plans, and more. I can send out a Twitter update using my cell phone or my blog or by logging into the Twitter Web site. Disruptive Conversations: The 10 ways I learned to use Twitter in 2007... (aka Why and How I use Twitter) UPDATE - April 9, 2008: Four months later, I revisited the ways I've learned to use Twitter and added a few more. How have I learned to use Twitter in my online communication? Let me count the ways... After Chris Brogan posted his "Twitter Revisited" piece last week and on the same day Jeremiah Owyang talked about popularity and Twitter, I put some thought into how Twitter has substantially changed the ways in which I communicate online. Some of this I talked about in my segment into Mitch Joel's Yuletide podcast, and some of it listeners to For Immediate Release will hear in my report into today's FIR.
quot;cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": my increasingly twitter'd world February 29, 2008 my increasingly twitter'd world [follow me on twitter] [In case you haven't figured this out already:] Besides my blog and my e-mail account, the other main tool I use to communicate with the online world is Twitter [I don't really use Facebook anymore, but that's a story for another day]. The general M.O. these days is, I use gapingvoid for publishing my cartoons and my more permanent, "archival" written stuff. Anything Could Happen - Twitter - Evan Williams What is Evan Williams doing? I ask myself this as I consume a second cup of strong coffee in a quiet San Francisco café. It is early in the morning on the first workday of the new year, and Williams is apparently blowing me off. For the past two weeks he has ignored my e-mails, phone calls, and text messages. We were supposed to meet this morning to discuss his next move; instead we have radio silence.
academhack » Blog Archive » Twitter for Academia I must admit that when I first heard about Twitter I thought it represented the apex of what concerns me about internet technology: solipsism and sound-bite communication. While I obviously spend a great deal of time online and thinking about the potential of these new networked digital communication structures, I also worry about the way that they too easily lead to increasingly short space and time for conversation, cutting off nuance and conversation, and what is often worse how these conversations often reduce to self-centered statements. When I first heard about Twitter I thought, this was the example par excellence of these fears, so for many months I did not investigate it at all. Then I read an article by Clive Thompson at Wired. Clive’s article convinced me that perhaps it was worth giving Twitter a try.
Twitter in Academics: This Prof Shows How to Do It I am floored and amazed by this amazing article about Twitter in Academics. (which I picked up from Twitter, of course.) The uses outlined by this visionary prof include (I include summaries and quotes from the prof): Class Chatter: Connecting the class with one another and the real world.Classroom Community: Adding the sixth sense to the classroom." This carried with it a range of benefits, from more productive classroom conversations (people were more willing to talk, and more respectful of others), and also helped me to understand what type of students they were...I can definitely say that changed the classroom dynamics for the better. I think this is connected to what Clive Thompson calls the sixth sense of Twitter.
Twitter Tools Twitter has taken on a very important role in my online networking. I have written about Twitter-Changes in Networking back in December 07. Since then my networking habits have changed again, but in this post I don’t want to talk about what twitter is nor how and why I use it. Instead I want to show “other” tools that I use to get the most out of Twitter. Twitter has a search function, that allows you to search by username. If you don’t know the username or its correct spelling…you are out of luck.
Site password: 'project' wiki / Education Pack See also other Twitter Packs by Topic Protocol: alphabetical order brief 100 word bio to right Classroom Tools