How Bottlenose Can Help Turn Twitter into a High Signal Channel

Reviewing Bottlenose

On Saturday I discovered the Bottlenose service and quickly realised how it can enhance my Twitter, Facebook and other channels to enable me to quickly find content of interest to me. Within a few minutes of using the service I found myself agreeing with Mashable that “Bottlenose is a Game Changer for Social Media Consumption” and ReadWriteWeb that the service is “More intelligent than basic consumer dashboards like TweetDeck and HootSuite“.

I came across Bottlenose from a tweet posted by @suebecks. I found that I had previously registered for the service but hadn’t yet received an activation code. However since Bottleneck have stated that “if you happen to have a Klout score over 30, you can register and gain access straight away ” and my Klout rating is 48 I was able to use the service straight away.

A Web-Based Twitter Client

Figure 1: Display of Tweets

Once you have logged in and registered your Twitter account the display of tweets from your followers, incoming (@) message and direct messages is similar to the interface provided by other Web-based twitter tools such as Hootsuite. The accompanying screeenshot shows the tweets from my Twitter followers, together with my @ messages, including the tweet from @suebecks which alerted me to the service.

The Personalised Newspaper Feature

Selecting the Newspaper option, however, provides functionality which isn’t provided by Hootsuite. As illustrated in Figure 2 the display shows the content of links which have been shared by your Twitter followers.

In February 2011 in a post in which I suggested Who Needs Murdoch – I’ve Got Smartr, My Own Personalised Daily Newspaper! I described the first mobile app I had encountered which provided this functionality. A year later, in February 2012 a post entitled My Trusted Social Librarian explained how an app such as Smartr helps me find useful content from trusted people I follow on Twitter.

I still use Smartr on a regular basis, to download the content of links which have been tweeted which I read on the bus travelling to work. However the Smartr app can no longer be downloaded and the name now refers to an email contact manager app provided by Xobni. In addition since Smarts was only available as an app I was unable to make use of this useful functionality on my desktop PC. It now seems that Bottlenose is providing this functionality, and has integrated this with a Twitter client.

Figure 2: Display of the content of shared links.

The Sonar Feature

As described on the Marketaire blog:

The Bottlenose name was inspired by the dolphin, which is reflected in its primary feature known as Sonar – a visual representation of your online conversation. Bottlenose maps topics and tags throughout your social network, allowing you to see branches of information, also giving you the ability to dive into each one.

The Venturebeat blog agrees: “The tool’s most compelling feature is Sonar, a visual interface that distills stream updates into a clickable trending topic diagram“. The blog goes on to add “People can select the Sonar option to see which topics, hashtags and people are resonating across their networks, and click displayed words to view related content and re-center the diagram around each keyword“.

My use of the Sonar feature is illustrated in Figures 3 and 4. I can use thre Sonar interface to view tweets in a variety of ways, including all tweets from my followers and my incoming messages. In addition I can chose a filter which provides an auto-classified display of incoming tweets. Figure 3 illustrates use of the “TechNews” filter and the associated keywords and hashtags associated with this topic. Clicking on the RSS option displays tweets containing this topic from my Twitter follows during the selected period.

The Sonar view can also be used with the service’s search interface. In Figure 4 I have searched for “JISC” and have the ability to select additional keywords. It should be noted that although many of the tweets are relevant for me, there is a name clash with use of the acronym in Japan where it stands for the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee. One enhancement to the service I would find useful would be the ability to filter out content which aren’t in English.

Figure 4: Sonar search for JISC with Tech News filter and RSS keyword

Figure 3: Sonar search for Tech News filter and RSS keyword

Some other features of the service which are work mentioning include:

• Integration with Facebook and LinkedIn services.
• Integration with Google Reader which can provide Sonar interface for blogs.

On 9 May 2012, the day version 3 of Bottlenose was launched, TechCrunch announced Social Media Dashboard Bottlenose Gets Smarter, Adds Support For Multiple Accounts, Facebook Pages.

The article pointed out that “in many ways, directly competes with Hootsuite and Tweetdeck … [but] puts a stronger emphasis on filtering your streams, both by implicitly learning about your interest and by giving you a sophisticated set of tools to create your own filters“.

Discussion

A service which emphasis the importance of filtering capabilities to discover information of interest would appear to be relevant to the library community as well as the early adopters of social web services in the teaching and learning and research communities. I have previously described the value I have found in using Twitter to discover both content relevant to my professional interests and to develop my professional networks as I described in a post on You Have 5 Seconds to Make an Impression! the links which have been established in Twitter led to collaboration on an award-winning paper. My experiences have been echoed by Melissa Terras who documented her epxreinces in a post entitled Is blogging and tweeting about research papers worth it? The Verdict.

But if such as Bottlenose can provide useful resource discovery functionality, how should a provider of resources ensure that they can be easily discovered by such tools? As described in a paper on “Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information” which analysed 135 science blogs “most of the bloggers in our sample had active Twitter accounts connected with their blogs, and at least 90% of these accounts connect to at least one other RB-related Twitter account“. This suggests that scientific bloggers appreciate that Twitter can complement blogging activities. Initially this is likely to have focussed on the conversational aspects of Twitter and for many, including myself, the value of Twitter was first appreciated from use of Twitter at conferences. Such conversational aspects are clearly important and some early adopters of Twitter feel uneasy when Twitter is used for purposes such as marketing and when others services, such as Twitter archiving and analysis tools, become popular.  However my view is that Twitter is a tool and there is no single correct way in which it should be used.

So in addition to Twitter being an open conversational medium, I think we are also seeing Twitter being used successfully as an alerting mechanism. Back in 2009 Jeff Nolan asked Is Twitter Killing RSS?  I suspect that I am not alone in using Twitter as the tool for reading new content, including blog posts, which my Twitter community has brought to my attention, rather than using my RSS reader as my main channel for keeping up-to-date with developments.

But rather than regarding Twitter as the RSS killer, I feel that we can regard Twitter as the new metadata format for delivering content, with the key metadata element being the link, with the remainder of the tweet being a free text apart from a small number of common conventions, including RTs and the @ and # symbols. So when the questions about the minimum number of metadata fields needed to support resource discovery were being discussed perhaps, in one context, the answer was a single URL field, with the remaining content being left to users to fill in. We now seem to be finding that social discovery, in which one’s professional network support resource discovery, is being complemented by data mining tools.

As I finish this post, on Sunday afternoon on the final day of the football season and shortly after the Formula 1 Grand Prix has finished, I can view my followers’ reactions by using the Sports news filter and a search for “Manchester” provides a wider perspective, as shown below. I think this illustrates how tools such as Bottlenose may be used in s sporting, social, cultural and political context – and it might be work trying it during the next broadcast of BBC’s Question Time.  But what I would really like would be the development of a richer set of filter, ideally filters which can be created by the user or would learn from user behaviours, which would enhance social discovery to support professional activities. Although it has been suggested that “Twitter, like blogging, needs an edge, a voice, a riskiness“ I suspect this is coming. And I for one will be happy to continue to use tools such as Twitter to support my professional activities, even if they evolve from their initial purpose.

Curating #KEDAI Tweets Using Storify

Digital Author Identifier Summit

A Digital Author Identifier Summit, organised by Knowledge Exchange, took place in London on 12-13 March 2012. As described on the Knowledge Exchange web site:

Knowledge Exchange organised a summit and brought together various national and international organisations working on Digital Author Identifiers. This summit took place on 13 and 14 March 2012 in London.

The web site went on to describe how:

The objectives were:

• to share knowledge and experience and to exchange views on desired developments
• to identify priority issues for technology, service and policy development
• to explore and stimulate interoperability and common approaches
• to inform and support future planning – explore the role Knowledge Exchange (KE) can play

I did not attend the event but some of my colleagues were present. In addition a number of people I follow on Twitter were also at the event and participated in the discussions and provided summaries of the talks given by the invited speakers and the conclusions of the breakout sessions.  I therefore became aware of the event via my Twitter stream and soon discovered that the event hashtag was #KEDAI

Curating Tweets from the Digital Author Identifier Summit

In light of UKOLN’s involvement in a variety of work associated with digital identifiers, having spotted the quality of the reporting of the workshop on Twitter, I decided that it would be useful not only to myself and UKOLN colleagues but also the wider research community if I were to keep a record of the significant tweets, or ‘curate’ the tweets to use a term which currently seems fashionable.

I used Storify to keep a record of the #KEDIA tweets and a screenshot of the first six tweets is illustrated.

It was interesting to note that the top aim of the event was:

to share knowledge and experience and to exchange views on desired developments

Nobody said that the sharing had to be restricted to those who physically attended the meeting, so I’m pleased to be able to amplify the notes provided by several attendees at the event, including those shown in the photograph (taken from the Knowledge Exchange Web site).

It should be noted that the tweets hosted on Storify can be embedded on other web sites using an embedded script tag. This requires use of embedding technologies which are not permitted on WordPress.com. However I have just noticed that there is an option to publish a Storify story directly on a WordPress.com blog. Unfortunately this did not work, so I have captured the first set of tweets as an image in order to illustrate what you will see if you visit the Storify page.

Reflecting on the Value of Tweeting at the Event

From looking at the tweets we can see evidence of the success of the two-day workshop, with @BasCordewener commenting:

#kedai meeting was a very good one. Vibrant discussions, relevant recommendations, increased knowledge! Led by @atreloar, inspiring chair.

and @atreloa modestly responding:

@BasCordewener You are too kind. I was only part of a team that worked very well to deliver an excellent event #kedai

The value of the tweets was acknowledged by two remote participants with @williamjnixon showing his appreciation for hearing about the event on Twitter

Diping in and out of the non-Indonesian Knowledge Exchange Digital Author Identifiers Workshop #kedai, thanks to @atreloar for heads-up

and @mopennock showing her appreciation to the two people who tweeted about the event initially:

Thanks to @bindonlane & @atreloar for the #kedai tweets, sounds like a fascinating event.

Emerging Best Practices

As described in a post on Resources from Andrew Treloar’s Seminar on Data Management on 1 April 2011 Andrew Treloar (@atreloar) gave a seminar at UKOLN on “Data Management: International Challenges, National Infrastructure and Institutional Responses – an Australian Perspective on Data Management”. As part of our work in maximising impact of such seminars we provided a live video stream of the seminar, with a video recording (taken on a smartphone) subsequently being published.

In the pub later that evening Andrew, my colleague Paul Walk and myself discussed ways in which events, ranging from a  seminar attracting a handful of people to a larger workshop lasting a couple of days, might be ‘amplified’, even if there is no budget available for commissioning professional AV services.  It seems that such approaches were embraced at the workshop earlier this week, based on a handful of people tweeting at the event and the tweets subsequently being curated and publicised to a wider audience. How might we summarise the emerging best practices for organisers of events who wish to maximise engagement opportunities from a wider audience?

• Have an event hashtag, ensure that it is publicised in a timely fashion and that its meaning and purpose can be easily found.  Note that for the #KEDAI tag @atreloar’s initial tweet helpfully provided the context:

About to start moderating/presenting at/taking part in Knowledge Exchange Digital Author Identifier workshop in London #KEDAI

He then went on to point out possible clashes with other uses of the tag:

By the way, apologies to those of you seeing a hashtag collision for #KEDAI. If it’s in Indonesian it probably doesn’t relate to the w’shop

• Encourage participants to tweet in order to obtain a critical mass (bearing in mind that being a solo person tweeting about an event can be difficult) as illustrated by @atreloar:

Will try and shame others into tweeting so you get more than just my take on it #keda

• Provide a concluding tweet which helps others (including a third party who may be curating the tweets) to identify when an event is over (although, as in this case, there may be subsequent tweets this may not always happen).  In this example, @atreloar provided a conclusion in echoing the comments made by the final speaker at the event:

In summary, very helpful and he wants to thank (on behalf of US!) the JISC and KE for organising the event #KEDA

But what of the possible risks associated with curation of tweets form an event?  Such issues are being addressed as part of the JISC-funded Greening Events II project which is being led by ILRT, University of Bristol, with UKOLN delivering a workpackage on best practices for event amplification.  In a blog post published yesterday on Assessing the Risks: Twitter Kirsty Pitkin described an initial risk assessment approach which will be included in the Greening Events II report on use of Twitter at events.

In this post, I’ll not repeat the warnings of possible risks (which include event spam and inappropriate tweets). However the initial risk is worth highlighting: the risk of doing nothing or failing to engage. For those who may be averse to taking risks it should be noted that doing nothing may be the biggest risk!

Reading Kirsty’s comments it occurred to me that in addition to inappropriate tweets resulting from the mob mentality i.e. “the audience may engage in a negative critique of the speaker whilst a presentation is ongoing” there may also be tweets which the person tweeting may feel not to be appropriate to be included in a curated record (e.g. jokey asides),  As part of the process for curating tweets I’m thinking that a summary which provides the context, the scoping criteria for including and information about removing inappropriate tweets may be a useful addition to a curated story would be useful.  My suggested approach is given below:

These tweets were curated by Brian Kelly, UKOLN based on tweets with the #KEDAI hashtag.  Duplicate entries (i.e. RTs) have been removed. A summary of the curation of this story has been posted ion the UK Web Focus blog at  http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/kedai-tweets-and-the-value-of-storify/

If any inappropriate tweets have been included in this story, please contact Brian Kelly (@briankelly). If appropriate such tweets will be removed.

I’d welcome your thoughts.

Five Years of Using Twitter – Is It Becoming As Essential as Email?

After Five Years of Using Twitter, It Is Now Embedded For Me

Five years ago today, acccording to TWbirthay, I created my Twitter account. And via the MyFirstTweet service I was able to rediscover what I said on that momentous occasion. Rather disappointingly it was:

Filling in my expenses forms, after trip to JISC Conference at Birmingham.

I can’t remember what my first email was about, but I suspect I sent it on a Honeywell Multics mainframe shortly after starting work at Loughborough University of Technology in 1984. I do remember subsequently getting involved in a discussion as to whether undergraduate students should be allowed to use email: I was in favour, but some felt that the service would by used for inappropriate social purposes. A more senior colleague pointed out that we, Computer Services staff, used email to agree on the pub to go to on Friday lunchtimes and as we used email for social purposes, we could hardly block students from doing likewise.

The Computer Services Director at the time did not himself use email, with messages being printed off and delivered to his in-tray. That may sound strange today, but I sometimes wonder whether Twitter today is regarded in a similar fashion as email was almost 30 years ago, with senior managers pointing out that they have important strategic and management decisions to make, whilst others who had chosen not to embrace the new technology would argue that the trivia about going to the pub illustrated the irrelevance of the medium to those who weren’t part of such social activities and wanted to focus on doing their job.

Sounds familiar?

Usage of Twitter over 5 years

As I described in a post entitled 5,000 Tweets On Twitter provides value across a range of my professional activities, and its use is now embedded with, according to Tweetstats, an average of six tweets per day being posted. Indeed, as I mentioned a few days ago, Twitterers Do It In Bed! - and, according to the accompanying poll, find value in the flexibility it provides.

An example of the value of Twitter’s rapid response can be seen from a series of five DMs (Direct Message) which was used to commission a parallel session for the IWMW 2012 event:

[Me]: BTW Are you interested in submitting anything to IWMW 2012?

[M]: was wondering whether people might be interested in hearing from GOVUK guys about agile, open source, inhouse dev & maybe facilitating that?

[Me]: That sound great. Very relevant. Want to say something about learning from others outside HE sector.

[M]: It fits in with a lot of the anti-CMS stuff Mike Nolan talks about as well – I’ll send in a proper proposal – is it in Edinburgh?

[Me]: Edinburgh on 18-20 June. Thanks

While I was having this conversation which led to an agreement for a session at the IWMW 2012 event, I was composing a message to another speaker, which hadn’t been finished by the time the above Twitter conversation had been completed.  Twitter can be so much more productive in cases like this, I have found. This is not to say that Twitter has replaced email; rather that in an environment in which digital literacy is important, an ability to make use of a range of tools to support one’s tasks is important for those who are looking for productivity gains.

“I’ve haven’t got time for Twitter“

People do say “I haven’t got the time for Twitter” or “I don’t get Twitter“. I think the former view seems to demonstrate a lack of understanding of the importance of filtering and the value of Twitter clients beyond the Twitter.com web site. The latter view does, however, provide the suggestion that there is something to ‘get’ beyond the sending of 140 characters in a fashion similar to sending SMS messages.

Back in 2009 in a post on Twitter for idiots Andy Powell was critical of the view that a half-day Twitter course was actually needed, especially for information professions.  Perhaps a half-day course is no longer needed.  I’d like to summarise my Twitter for Sceptics advice in five bullet points:

• A Twitter ID can be valuable in itself (you don’t actually have to tweet using it). This is particularly true if you speak at conferences in which a back-channel provides event amplification of the talks, since it can provide an identifier for the speakers.
• Although having a Twitter community (the people who have chosen to follow you) is valuable in achieving the critical mass which can help support effective discussion and debate on Twitter, if you have no followers you can still contribute by making use of a Twitter hashtag, such as an event hashtag, which will enable your contributions to be seen by others following the hashtag.
• If you feel passionate about arguments being made on TV programmes such as BBC’s Question Time, you can contribute to the debate by tweeting with the programmes hashtag (#bbcqt).
• You should not read every tweet from people you follow – Twitter, unlike email, is meant to be a stream of ideas which you can dip into and contribute to.
• You get a much better appreciation of the subtleties of Twitter if you use a dedicated client such as TweetDeck, rather than the Twitter web site.

Anything I’ve missed?

The #LODLAM Session at #SXSW Demonstrates Importance of Consistency of Session Hashtags

What’s Happening at #SXSW?

My former colleagues Adrian Stevenson (@adrianstevenson) and Julie Allinson (@julieallinson) are taking part in a panel session on “Radically Open Cultural Heritage Data on the Web” today at the #SXSW 2012 Interactive, Film and Music festival in Austin, Texas. I should also add that information about #SXSW is also available on Lanyrd, and, is increasingly happens, information on individual sessions, such as the Open Cultural Heritage Data session is also available on Lanyrd.

From Twitter I discovered that there is a SXSW festival app available for several mobile phone platforms which I installed on my iPod Touch to see what could be learnt from the approaches they’ve taken.

As can be seen it provides access to information about the sessions, location details and biographical information for speakers and panelists. In addition there is also a share facility which is populated with session information which can be shared on Twitter, Google+, Facebook or by SMS, again as illustrated.

However, as pointed out in a tweet by @ellielovell:

Just realised that the hashtags advertised for sessions in the pocket guide, are different from the ones on the SXSW Go app. Annoying #sxswi

As can be seen, the event hashtags for the session are #sxsw (the festival’s hashtag) and #LODLAM which, as can be seen from a Twitter search, is a well-established hashtag for discussions about Linked Open Data used in a Libraries, Archives and Museums context (as can be seen from the LOD-LAM Zotero group and Google Group and the web site about the International Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums Summit held in San Francisco
in June 2011).

The session page on the festival’s web site provides easily found details of the hashtag for the various sessions. In order to see the patterns for the hashtags I have summarised details for sessions which may be of interest to readers of this blog, with links to both the session abstracts and Twitter searches.

Session	Hashtag	Search
Radically Open Cultural Heritage Data on the Web	#LODLAM	Search
The Connected Company: An Inventory of the Possible	#connected	Search
Excessive Enhancement: JavaScript’s Dark Side	#excess	Search
The Social Network for Computers	#SocNetComp	Search
Are We Killing Social with Social?	#killsoc	Search
The New Black? How Digital Ed Is Everything	#nwblk	Search
Using Big Data Takes Machines & Humans	#manmachine	Search
The UnCollege: Learning Outside University	#uncollege	Search
The Trend of Trending	#Trending	Search
Open APIs: What’s Hot? What’s Not?	#apishotnot	Search
How Is Internet Helping People Make Their Own Laws	#onlinelaw	Search
#NoFailWhale: Tweet More, Drop Out Less	#NoFWhale	Search

Hashtag Strategies for Events

According to Wikipedia Twitter hashtags were invented on 23 August 2007. Their role in events quickly became apparent and by 2009, as referenced in a post about Twitter archiving,  event hashtags were being used at large events such as #ALTC2009 and #IWMW2009. In August 2009 in a post on Hashtags for the ALT-C 2009 Conference I proposed the event organisers should take responsibility for proposing hashtags for individual sessions as well as for the event itself. This proposal did not go down well, with the following comments being made:

• “Sorry Brian, but I do think this scheme is too complicated for the lightweight Twitter approach”
• “I really think this is trying to make Twitter something it isn’t. The very thing that people appreciate about Twitter is its lightweight nature and this is simply over complicating things”
• “When you first started suggesting multiple hashtags, I think I assumed it was a bit of a comedy experiment. Now, it’s becoming clear that The Librarian Is Too Strong In You.”
• “Way too complicated, messy, and just so damn cluttered”
• “I’m in agreement with those that suggest this is over-complicating things – mainly because I struggle to see the problem it’s solving”
• “Sorry Brian, I’m with the others here. Twitter is for catching the ‘buzz’”.

There were six negative comments with only one supporting, although in a somewhat lukewarm fashion, my suggestion:

“In the past I’ve generally argued against multiple hashtags – agreeing with the comment that they introduce complexity. However, given the size of ALT-C, and the number of concurrent sessions, I have some sympathy with the issue that Brian raise”

However a year later I asked Are the Benefits of Multiple Event Hashtags Now Accepted?. As can be seen for the SXSW festival, it does seem that session hashtags provide both a useful way of easily referring to a session and to enable others to easily find and join in the discussions.

The challenge is now to establish conventions for agreeing on the session hashtags.  For events I have organised, such as the IWMW series, I use #Pn for the plenary talks and #An, #Bn and #Cn for the three parallel sessions. These tags are advertised on the event web site, as illustrated. In addition the session chair will announce the hashtags at the start of each session.

But, as we have seen from the approaches taken at SXSW, should a more human-friendly naming convention be used? For sessions which are discussing topics which have an established hashtag there can be advantages in this approach. But what if this isn’t the case?  I’d be interested in hearing about the approaches taken by other event organiser. One thing that is clear is the need for consistency. As @ellielovell commented in response to a query about the SXSW app and the session hashtag:

you don’t see them until you use the “Tweet” button and then it puts it in the tweet. They should have advertised it in app

It would, I feel, be unfortunate if valuable Twitter discussions were fragmented across different session hashtags.

Twitterers Do It In Bed!

This morning I ‘met’ @dboudreau and chatted with him about web accessibility conferences. I also came across a tweet which linked to a blog post from John Foliot about the recent CSUN 12 conference. After reading the post I noticed that his comments about the need for accessibility advocates to be willing to discard the view that HTML pages must conform with HTML standards if this gets in the way of implementing non-conformant approaches (such as use of WAI-ARIA techniques) which enhance accessibility of web resources for people with disabilities. This view was relevant to a discussion I was having yesterday with @mjday so I tweeted the link to him.

I then saw a tweet from @hdzimmermann which had been retweeted by @wowter which linked to a report on The Future of Research Communication (available in PDF format). The report looked very interesting but, at 24 pages, was too long to read on my iPod Touch, so I favourited it so I could read it later. As I was aware that the report would be of interest to others, I also retweeted it. My suspicion that the report would be of interest was confirmed when I noticed that, shortly afterwards, @PlanetClaire and @antoesp themselves favourited my retweet.

Looking at my recent Twitter interactions (a feature which is now standard in the mobile Twitter app) I realised that I did not know who @antoesp, who had favourited my tweet. Looking at her Twitter biography I found that she is:

PhD candidate in the Education and ICT (e-learning) program – UOC, Barcelona. Submitted my MRes thesys on digital scholarship, IoE, University of London.

She also provided a link to her academia.edu page from which I learnt that her current research activities include:

social media and course design, research ethics in online settings, impact of ICTs in higher education institutions, digital scholars and open faculty, open educational practices and new models of higher education.

Looking at a post of hers on Cloudworks I found we had shared interests relating to open scholarly practices:

Investigating the relationship between emerging digital scholarship and open scholarship in higher education settings.

I sent @antoesp, a DM (Direct Message) asking if she’d be willing to write a guest post on this blog about her interests in open scholarship and was pleased to receive a speedy response agreeing to my request.

I then got out of bed!

Before I got out of bed, however, I reflected on how the world has changed in the past five years.  Until a few years ago the notion that you would engage in engage in online discussions about your work would have been the stuff of dreams – or perhaps nightmares!  Was I alone in such practices, I wondered? And so I asked:

Anyone else willing to confess to sending work-related tweets & emails while in bed from their mobile device #thingsIdidntexpect

It seems I am not alone with people responding:

*puts hands up*

yep, I do that occasionally

I confess.

All the time!

Forgive me Father for I have sinned #manytimes

I find that @DaGooses do it all the time! Me less so #BedWorkTweets

of course!

more often on laptop but pretty much everyday

guilty as charged m’lud

On the other hand a few people gave alternative views :

No absolutely not , you need to get out more Brian !

nope – would be more than my life was worth!

You’re saying there are actually people who tweet re work from bed? To quote Sheldon, For shame! For shame!

The most insightful comment, however, came from Chris Gutteridge who said:

 I do the most productive work for my job before I out of bed, generally. Office full of distractions.

I find that using Twitter in the way described in this post is useful in catching up with background reading (the links which are shared) and hot topics (the discussions which are taking place).  In addition, as I found in my dialogue with @antoesp, Twitter can provide a lightweight tool to carry out business transactions.

Tweeting in bed could, of course cause domestic problems. I should add that at around 9am this morning while I was engaging in discussions with my Twitter stream my girlfriend was reading the Guardian App on her iPad. We are both comfortable with making use of our mobile devices when we’re together – in a way perhaps because the technologies we use are so transparent to us that we don’t regard them as technologies, just as we don’t talk about the television technology, the cinema technology or the newspaper technology (although when it comes to sharing sections of the Guardian on a Saturday morning the print format is superior to the iPad app, especially when I want to read the Sport supplement).

However one comment highlighted addition possible concerns regarding such practices:

Yep, done that. But reading the Google Apps update blog at 3am was a particular work/life balance low.

This is a legitimate concern. But is it anything new? Weren’t work/life balance issues still relevant before technologies became so pervasive, with pressures to take home excessive amounts of reports to read, which may have also been read in bed (although report-writing was probably restricted to the living room or study)? What do you think? Do you tweet in bed?  Do you think this is unhealthy? Or do you feel that this enables you to have the flexibility to adopt working practices which you feel comfortable with?  feel free to leave a comment or, if you’d prefer to leave an anonymous view, respond to the poll.

My Trusted Social Librarian

I’ve mentioned recently how I use the Smartr app on  my iPod Touch to view the content of links which have been tweeted.  I have set up a number of Twitter lists, such as my JISC list, which enables me to view the content of links posted from such official accounts but I tend to prefer the serendipity of reading content posted by people I follow generally on Twitter or particular groupings, such at attendee at events.

I tend to download new content in Smartr in the morning while I am waiting for the bus (using a neighbour’s WiFI which I can legitimately access using BTFON).  This then provides me with timely content to read on the bus travelling to work.

This morning I noticed that several of the interesting links which were being posted had been tweeted by @aarontay.  This may be because Aaron works at the National Library of Singapore so that when I am getting up it is the middle of the afternoon for Aaron. He is therefore more likely to be using Twitter to share resources of interest while colleagues in the UK will be describing what we had for breakfast!  However this is only partly the case  – I also find that Aaron’s Musings about Librarianship blog is valuable reading.

In light of Aaron’s proven track record in creating useful content and sharing links to content provided by others it occurred to me that it might be useful to create a Twitter list containing just Aaron’s Twitter account so that I would be able to easily see the content of links which Aaron has shared and read then, even when I am offline.

As can be seen from the accompanying image I am now able to view the content using Smartr.  It occurred to me that this is an example of how a trusted librarian contact can provide a ‘frictionless’ presence in social media.  Tony Hirst wrote about this recently in a post entitled Invisible Library Support – Now You Can’t Afford Not to be Social? which followed up on ideas previously described in a post which asked Could Librarians Be Influential Friends?

In his post Tony wondered:

“whether it made sense for librarians and other folk involved with providing support relating to resource discovery and recommendation to start a) creating social network profiles and encouraging their patrons to friend them, and b) start recommending resources using those profiles in order to start influencing the ordering/ranking of results in patrons’ search results based on those personal recommendations“.

Coincidentally earlier today I was looking for blog posts about the VALA 2012 conference which UKOLN Director Liz Lyon had spoken at recently. As illustrated my Google search provided a link which Aaron had recently shared on Friendfeed. My trusted librarian contact is helping me to find resources which may be of interest to me on Google as well as Twitter.

Last year Aaron richly deserved to win a Library Mover and Shaker award.  Although I’ve never met Aaron we have spoken on Skype and had discussions on Twitter and via our blogs.  I’m pleased that recent technological developments are now enabling me to gain value form the resouces which Aaron is ‘frictionlessly’ sharing on services such as Twitter and Friendfeed. Who are the other librarians I should also follow in order to ensure that I can keep up to date with new developments, I wonder? Or to put it another way, I have found one intelligent agent who searches the web and finds content of interest to me.  I’d like another one please!

 

Favouriting Tweets, Openness and Frictionless Sharing

Yesterday I favourited (or should I say ‘favorited’) a tweet from @lisaharris which had a link to an article on “Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. An hour or so later I received a direct message (DM) asking me if I was interested in exploring possibilities of joint work in this area.  We exchanged a few messages and agreed to discuss this more using a technology which allows for more in-depth discussions – the telephone :-)

It occurred to me that this is an interesting example of frictionless sharing - I spotted a link to an interesting resource and decided to bookmark it (using Twitter’s ‘favorite’ function) for reading later.  The bookmarking takes place in public (as, for example, I also do when I wish to bookmark web resources using Delicious or Diigo). And as a result of this public action Lisa Harris, who posted the tweet on Sunday morning, got in touch with me.

I have found that being aware of such Twitter favouriting activities has become easier following recent developments to Twitter’s mobile client.  As shown in the accompanying image (on the right if viewing this post in a web browser), such activities are readily accessible via the Twitter.com web site on a desktop PC.  But since, as with increasing numbers of  other Twitter users, a mobile device is now my preferred method of using Twitter, it’s the Interactions tab on my iPod Touch which typically alerts me to similar activities, as shown below.

From this we can see, for example, that @lualnu10 (Marisa Alonso Nunez) favourited and then retweeted my comment:

Great post from @ambrouk on “Why I Blog”. Good to see open reflections based on “vanalytics” & “pimpact” (TM Amber :-)  http://t.co/7oaEtc2N

It should be noted that access to such interactions are not available on all Twitter clients.  A lack of awareness of Twitter’s more subtle aspects is perhaps an example of why people may fail to ‘get” Twitter. As I mentioned in a recent post on Twitter? It’s Better Than The Most Things (According to Sturgeon)  there is a need to understand techniques for filtering Twitter content which are best exploited by using a dedicated Twitter client. In this example, however, we can see that there can be benefits in accessing content (interactions) which may not be available on all clients.

It is appropriate that the screenshot of recent interactions mentions Amber Thomas blog post on “Why I Blog“. In the post Amber explains why she is embracing ‘open practices in her role as a JISC programme manager. She cites Lou McGill’s definition of open practices:

By Open practices I mean a broad range of practices which have an ‘open’ philosophy, intention or approach [...] Informal and formal open practice takes place within wider societal contexts which are evolving rapidly. Open practices take place in, and are enabled by, a highly connected socially networked environment”

Amber’s post primarily addresses the open practices within the context of blogging, and covers associated metrics which can demonstrate the ways in which the content is being used and shared.  However as we can see Twitter also provides an example of open practices in which the value lies not just in the content which is shared in the 140 characters or the embedded links but also in simple frictionless sharing actions such as favouriting and retweeting.

Of course there may also be risks in public bookmarking activities: it you favourite a tweet on “how to deal with a difficult boss” you may be sending unintended messages to your manager! But open practices will always entail risks – I suspect the question will be what your personal attitude to risks are. And perhaps if you are an optimist you will see the advantages which can be gained in open practices, as I suggested in a post on “A Tweet Takes Me To Catalonia“.  But if you are at heart a pessimist, you may well worry about how your tweets could be used against you.   I can’t help but think that embracing open practices says a lot about the individual rather than the technology. On reflection, this is an over-simplistic analysis as I know several people I follow on Twitter who enjoy sharing their grumbles on Twitter, particularly related to public transport failures around the south west!

Twitter? It’s Better Than The Most Things (According to Sturgeon)

Early this morning I came across a tweet which announced:

Academic study – Most tweets are useless http://j.mp/xf85VN

The tweet provided a link to an article published in MacWorld which described how:

Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have found that even though Twitter users follow who they want to follow on the microblogging service, they say only about a third of tweets are worth reading and that a quarter of them are completely worthless.

My initial reaction was “Wow – a third of tweets are worth reading. What a high percentage!” I was then puzzled by the headline for the article which read “Twitter users: Most tweets are garbage“.

This headline reminded me of the comment made in July 2003 by Sebastian Rahtz, at the time manager of the JISC OSS Watch service, that “Of course 99% of open source software is a pile of donkey cr@p” (and subsequently making the point that “if it was not clear from my post earlier. 99% of commercial software is poor too. obviously“).

Sebastian was, of course, simply citing Sturgeon’s Law.  As described in Wikipedia “Sturgeon’s observation [is] that while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, it could be noted that the majority of examples of works in other fields could equally be seen to be of low quality and that science fiction was thus no different in that regard to other art”.

We can therefore conclude that Twitter is well above Sturgeon’s average!

More seriously, it does seem that the research was based on a flawed understanding of how experienced Twitter users obtain value from their Twitter stream.  The article describes that the researchers:

gathered their findings by first setting up a website called “Who Gives a Tweet,” where, over 19 days in 2010 and 2011, 1,443 visitors rated about 44,000 tweets from roughly 21,000 Twitter users. (Twitter claims more than 200 million tweets are sent per day.) Visitors were incented to rate tweets in exchange for getting some feedback about their tweets.

This seems to assume that Twitter users simply process the raw set of tweets in their stream.  That’s not how I, nor other experiences Twitter users I follow, use Twitter.

In brief the approach I use to gain value from Twitter is to:

• Follow a sufficiently large number of Twitter users in order to ensure that there is likely to be value in the content of the tweets and the interactions between the users.
• Group my Twitter followers (in my case Using columns in TweetDeck) into categories which supports how I use Twitter (for example, I have a column for users based around Bath for whom I might gain value from tweets about local issues).
• Use Tweetdeck’s search facility to identify tweets of particular relevance. This is often for an event hashtag (whilst the event is running) but can also include general topics of interest (e.g. #openscience).
• Be ruthless in marking tweets as read.

But in addition to these simple techniques for gaining value from Twitter I also use other tools which can aggregate the content of links posted by the people I follow on Twitter. My current favourite app for this purpose is Smartr (which is illustrated).  This morning, while waiting at the bus stop at 07.11 the most recent links tweeted within my Twitter community informed me of @timbuckteeth’s early morning blog post on “Human 2.0“; @dajbelshaw’s post on “Conferences as Catalysts for Educational Innovation and Change” and @malin’s link to an article on  ”It Must Be Measured: #Scio12 #Altmetrics“.  By 07.30, as I got off the bus in the town centre I’d read those three articles – all thanks to this information being shared by three of the people I follow on Twitter and the tools I used to help me find the quality resources.

“Only about a third of tweets are worth reading”? yes, I’d agree with that. But the time it takes to discard the rest is small whereas it is much more time-consuming to process my email to find useful information. And of course, finding something decent to watch on the TV – well most of the content there is crap. But at least I have my Twitter community to help identify the quality TV programmes – and I have to admit that I watch Wallander and  The Killing following the rave reviews I read on Twitter.  S0 thanks to @timbuckteeth, @dajbelshaw and @malin and the remainder of the 955 people I follow on Twitter for providing such great content!

Learning From Shared Twitter Links (Before Trunk.ly’s Demise)

The Forthcoming Demise of Trunk.ly

On 19^th February 2011 I signed up for the trunk.ly service.  The email I received which confirmed my registration summarised the features of this service:

• Trunk.ly indexes the full web page that all your links point to. Just search and find, no need to worry about tagging or summarizing content.
• If you #tag content in Twitter, or tag it in Delicious, Trunk.ly will create tags for you.
• Trunk.ly also checks your Twitter favorites so you can just favorite content with links without retweeting it if you prefer.

I have to admit that I’d forgotten about trunk.ly until I received an email recently telling me that the service has  been acquired by AVOS (who have recently acquired Delicious.com) and that the trunk.ly service will terminate from the end of the week: Friday 13^th January.

The email did inform me that I can export the content created by trunk.ly:

This tool creates a list of all your bookmarks in a format understandable by most browsers. You can save the generated page (as HTML) and import it into your browser — or anything else that accepts bookmarks in a standard format.

Your tags will be included in the export file even if you don’t see them on the page. This is the limitation of the export file format.

I have exported the content and hosted it on the UKOLN Web site.  However before the service is withdrawn I thought it would be useful to explore what it can tell me about the links I have shared on Twitter.

The service is associated with my main Twitter account (@briankelly) and with the UK Web Focus blog.  Since registering with the service ten months ago it has harvested 4,997 links. I am followed by six other trunk.ly users and follow 13 users.

The service allows me to browse through the links I have created in chronological order as well as the links created by people I follow. As illustrated Trunk.ly can summarise the content of the link and, if available, include an embedded image.

Trunk.ly also allows me to explore the content by any associated tags.

As shown in the accompanying screen image I can see that I used the #altc2011 Twitter hashtag for a number of tweets.  Clicking on the tag enable me to view the three tweets I posted: one which linked to a FriendFeed post in which Seb Schmoller described how  ”“Recording can improve a bad lecture! 7… – Seb Schmoller – FriendFeed”; one on ““Battling legal, logistical and technical obstacles to archiving the Web” « UK Web Focus” which summarised one of my blog posts on Twitter archiving and one on “Martin Hamilton’s blog: ALT-C 2011: Cloud Learning with Google Apps” in which I retweeeted Martin Hamilton’s link about a presentation he gave at the ALT-C 2011 conference.

Of more interest, however, is Trunk.ly’s search interface.  This enable me to search not only resources which I have shared but also resources shared by the people I follow as well as all Trunk.ly users. Examples of the terms contained in links posted by myself and Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) are given below:

User	No. of links	Search term					Domain search
		“mashup“	”RDFa“	”jisc“	”ukoln“	“OU“	“.ukoln“	“.jisc“	“.open“
@briankelly	4,930	40	157	907	832	119	151	35	16
@psychemedia	10,339	558	78	372	68	568	14	31	372

Unsurprisingly we both tweet significant numbers of links back to our host institutional Web site.

It is also possible to search by the resource type which have been shared:

User	No. of videos	No. of images	No. of places	No. of PDFs	Everything
@briankelly	74	88	34	30	4,098
@psychemedia	266	271	0	137	8,533

Discussion

In February 2009 Mike Ellis that, for services such as Twitter and blogs “The person is the point“:

Twitter, like blogging, needs an edge, a voice, a riskiness. As long as institutions can retain this – i.e., do it for a reason – then, IMO, things will get more interesting. If they don’t, we’ll probably all be unfollowing museums as quickly as we can slide down the steep, slippery trough of disillusionment…

That may have been the case in Twitter’s early days but now Twitter does not need to have an edge. Twitter can be used for sharing ideas and resources and for discussing the implications of the ideas and commenting on the resources.

The Trunk.ly blog has announced that:

Trunk.ly will be discontinued, and we will immediately start working to integrate our technology and insights to accelerate the link-saving and searching capabilities in Delicious. 

I’m pleased that I still have my Delicious account and will be interested  to see how the service becomes embedded within Delicious. It will also be interesting to see if the resource sharing capabilities provided by Twitter, and the ways in which such sharing can now be analysed will have a role to play in the development of altmetrics. As described in the altmetrics manifesto:

 Articles are increasingly joined by:

• The sharing of “raw science” like datasets, code, and experimental designs
• Semantic publishing or “nanopublication,” where the citeable unit is an argument or passage rather than entire article.
• Widespread self-publishing via blogging, microblogging, and comments or annotations on existing work.

A Google search for “altmetrics twitter” provides a link to a tweet from @jasonpriem:

BIG #altmetrics news: Highly tweeted articles 11x more likely to be highly cited http://doi.org/hb6#scholcomm #twitter

The tweet provides a link to a paper on “Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact” which concludes:

Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication. Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations, but the true use of these metrics is to measure the distinct concept of social impact. Social impact measures based on tweets are proposed to complement traditional citation metrics. The proposed twimpact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time.

These conclusions were based on analysis of all tweets containing links to articles in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). For a subset of 1,573 tweets about 55 articles published between issues March 2009 and February 2010, different metrics of social media impact were calculated and compared against subsequent citation data from Scopus and Google Scholar 17 to 29 months later. A heuristic to predict the top-cited articles in each issue through tweet metrics was validated.

For those working in the area of medical internet research it would seem that Twitter has an important role to play in increasing citations or helping to identify important papers. Perhaps, after all, Mike Ellis is right: the person is the point. But the person may be the researcher and the point may be the research, rather than the researcher’s edgy voice.

Survey Paradata:  As described in  a post on Paradata for Online Surveys blog posts which contain live links to data will include a summary of the survey environment in order to help ensure that survey findings are reproducible, with information on potentially misleading information being highlighted.  The survey findings described in this post were collected on 30 December 2011 using the Google Chrome browser on a PC running Windows 7.  It was noticed that there were differences between the  two ways of finding the numbers of links which have been harvested: the information provided in the user’s profile (e.g. see my profile page which states that there are 4,997 links)  and the numbers given for a search for the user (see my search results).

Isn’t #Sherlock Great! (TV & a ‘Second Screen’ For the Twitter Generation)

A Scandal in Belgravia

Wasn’t last week’s episode of Sherlock (“A Scandal in Belgravia“) great! I thought so and when I looked at my Twitter stream last Sunday night it seems that many of the people I follow on Twitter were impressed. too.  I then searched Twitter for #sherlock and found the approval of the first in the new series was pretty overwhelming.

As a friend of mine later said, it’s not surprising that Twitter users liked the programme so much as it was written with users who are au fait with Web technologies in mind.  Note only did the programme feature @TheWhipHand it also mentioned John Watson’s blog.  Both had been created to accompany the programme, and yes people did view the Twitter stream and the blog while they were watching the programme, as can be seen from the accompanying screenshot of the tweets which were posted during the show.

TV’s ‘Second Screen’

The link between a TV programme and a Twitter stream reminded me of the pioneering which Tony Hirst and Martin Hawksey were involved in back in 2009.

As described in the Wikipedia entry for “Twitter subtitling”:

The concept of combining video and twitter feeds for recorded events was first proposed Tom Smith in February 2009^[1] after experiencing Graham Linehan’s BadMovieClub^[2] in which at 9pm exactly on the 13th February 2009, over 2,000 Twitter users simultaneously pressed ‘Play’ on the film ‘The Happening‘ and continued to ‘tweet’ whilst watching, creating a collective viewing experience.

Smith, in response, proposed that media such as DVDs and YouTube videos could be enhanced by overlaying asynchronous status updates from other Twitter users who had watched the same media ^[1].

Separately, in March 2009 Tony Hirst (Open University), in consultation with Liam Green-Hughes (Open University), presented a practical solution for creating SubRip (*.srt) subtitle files from the Twitter Search API using Yahoo Pipes. The resulting file was then uploaded to a YouTube video^[3] allowing users to replay in realtime audio/video with an overlay of status updates from Twitter. Hirst subsequently revisited his original solution creating the simplified Twitter Subtitle web interface for the original Yahoo Pipe^[4]

The concept was revisited on the 16th February 2010 by Martin Hawksey (JISC RSC Scotland North & East) in response to a notification by Hirst made via Twitter during a broadcast of the BBC/OU’s The Virtual Revolution series in which Hirst requested information on replaying the #bbcrevolution hashtag in real-time^[5].

Although Tony and Martin’s work initially focussed on providing a mashup of tweets and recordings of a number of BBC TV programmes Martin subsequently developed the iTitle tool which was used to merge event tweets with video recordings taken at a number of events held with the UK higher education sector.

As described in a post on Captioned Videos of IWMW 2010 Talks iTitle was used after UKOLN’s IWMW 2010 event to provide Twitter captions of the discussions which took place during the plenary talks at the event.  One of the developments Martin made to iTitle was to provide a search facility which enable you to jump directly to the video associated with the content of a tweet.  I described this can be used to provide crowd-sourced bookmarking capabilities of live video feeds. As illustrated using an example of the IWMW 2010 conclusions I could search for “good stuff” and find three examples of tweets containing these words.  In the screen shot I seem to be looking at the Twitter Wall at 10:51 on as @PlanetClaire as she tweets “Professional network grown after this IWMW. Good stuff. #iwmw10″. It’s not only the BBC which can take a post-modernist approach to the blended real world and online environment!

After speaking at the University 2.0: the Extended University Conference held at the UMIP in Sandanter, Spain in 2010 at which a number of the plenary talks were live-streamed it occurred to me that there could be other ways in which iTitle could be used. Professor Alejandro Piscitelli, University of Buenos Aires gave a fascinating talk on Explorando los bordes y contornos de la Universidad 2.0. The talk was given in Spanish and I listened to the English translation.  Since the audience were mostly Spanish the tweets were also in Spanish. The talk seemed to be one which Professor Piscitelli had given on a number of occasions. But what aspects of the talk would be of particular interest to the Spanish audience, to an audience in Argentina or in the UK or USA (Professor Piscitelli is a fluent English speaker). I should also add that Martin Hawksey was a remote observer of the conference. Martin processed the tweets posted during Professor Piscitelli’s talk by using Google Translate to translate them into English, Spanish and Catalan. The user could selected their preferred language and view a recording of the talk will the translated tweets being displayed in the recording. Note that although this interface is still available it seems that the original video recording is no longer available at the UIMP.

These thoughts came back to me when I saw Sherlock and the accompanying Twitter backchannel.

I am sure the BBC will have been analysing the tweets and interpreting how the audience was responding to the complexities of the plot.  But will they be using analyses of live Twitter posts in order to make comparisons between the posts from the UK audience and a US audience when the programme is broadcast over there?

Back in February 2010 Tony Hirst gave his thoughts on Broadcast Support – Thinking About Virtual Revolution:

I watched the broadcast on Saturday, I started wondering about ‘live annotation’ or enrichment of the material as it was broadcast via the backchannel. Although I hadn’t seen a preview of the programme, I have mulled over quite a few of the topics covered by the programme in previous times, so it was easy enough to drop resources in to the twitter feed. So for example, I tweeted a video link to Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, explaining how Google ad auctions work, a tweet that was picked up by one of the production team who was annotating the programme with tweets in real time

Tony concluded by referencing Martin Hawksey:

PS here’s another interesting possibility – caption based annotations to iPlayer replays of the programme via Twitter Powered Subtitles for BBC iPlayer Content c/o the MASHe Blog (also check out the comments…)

The Ideas and Experimentation Become Apps

We are now seeing these ideas being deployed in a commercial context. Just before Christmas I came across the Zeebox app. This is described as “new way to watch television. It’s social, connecting you to your TV-watching friends, so you can chat, share and tweet about whatever’s on” which I have now installed the app on my iPod Touch.  Previously I typically used my iPod Touch to view tweets and had a large enough Twitter community to spot hashtags which may emerge or have been minted about a TV programme. However apps such as Zeebox are now managing this process and provide a ‘frictionless’ way of sharing thoughts and opinions.

This is an example of a “Second screen” which is defined in Wikipedia as “A term that refers to the electronic device (tablet, smartphone) that uses a television user, to interact with the content they are consuming“.

It’s good to see ideas which were explored in the higher education sector a few years ago starting to be used by the early adopters in the mainstream community.  There’s a danger, though, that such mainstream uses of Twitter will lead to a backlash by those who are uneasy when a technology become used in entertainment.  But rather than looked at the trivia which we’re likely to see on the backchannel for Saturday night entertainment programmes, let’s explore how the easy-to-use applications which are now becoming available can be used to support our educational and research interests.

Looking back at the blog posts written by Tony and Martin in 2009 and 2010 might be a useful starting point for seeing what the future may hold :-)

Alternatives To Twapper Keeper

On 23 December I received an email which confirmed the news about the forthcoming demise of the Twapper Keeper Twitter archiving service:

First off, on January 6th 2012, the TwapperKeeper.com site, and all related archives, will be shutdown with no access to any existing archives. Please ensure you have compiled all of your data by this date.

What should you do if you wish to continue keeping an archive of tweets, especially for event-related tweets which seems to be one particularly valuable use case?

One solution is to use Twapper Keeper! Or perhaps I should say Your Twapper Keeper, the open source version of Twapper Keeper. As part of the developments to the Twapper Keeper service the software was made available under an open source software licence in order to decouple the provision of the service from the software used to provide the service. Anyone, therefore is free to download the software from the Github repository and set up their own Twitter archive.

For those who have warned about the risks of dependencies on third party services for which there are no formal contractual agreements this example perhaps demonstrates the value of funding the development of an open source alternative. But is this really the case? Will institutions be downloading the software in order to be able to manage their own archives? I see no evidence that this is having, but I’d like to be proved wrong.

Perhaps this is a case for which an easy-to-use proprietary solution is all that is needed, especially since the content is typically not created primarily be members of a specific institution but, in the case of event-related Twitter archives, attendees at an event who are likely to be based across the sector rather than at a single institution.

On the Event Amplifier blog in a post entitled Goodbye Twapper Keeper Kirsty Pitkin explores the possibility of using Hoot Suite, the company which purchased Twapper Keeper, for managing Twitter archives. However Kirsty has described the financial implications of such a decision:

A Pro customer (paying $5.99 per month) can archive only a measly 100 tweets, or purchase a bolt on to archive up to “100,000 tweets and download all keyword related Twitter messages”. When I attempted to upgrade my plan, I found that 10,000 additional tweets would cost me $10 per month, and 100,000 additional tweets would cost me $50 per month.

But in addition to the options of installing the Your Twapper Keeper software or purchasing an appropriate account from HootSuite, Kirsty has highlighted an alternative approach: “Martin Hawksey is a master of Google Spreadsheet tools and has created this alternative method of collecting tweets and has provided detailed instructions to archive and visualise Twitter conversations around an event hashtag“.

Martin has helpfully provided a video which is available on YouTube and embedded below which describes how to use his solution.

It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these options proves the most popular solution across the sector: the open source solution, the subscription service, the Google solution or possibly an approach I haven’t described. Which will you be choosing?

Facebook and Twitter as Infrastructure for Dissemination of Research Papers (and More)

A tweet from @Wowter (blogger, information specialist and bibliometrician at the Wageningen UR Library) alerted me to the news of the “Free new #SpringerLink mobile app: Access 2,000+ peer-rev. journals, 49,000 books,127,000 #OA articles.http://ow.ly/8gv9W“.

I installed the app on my iPod Touch and was interested to note that there were just three ways of sending information about the 2,000+ peer-reviewed journals, 49,000 books and 127,000 open access articles: as illustrated the three dissemination tools are email, Facebook and Twitter.

Via @Wowter’s Twitter timeline I also found the news, initially announced by @MFenner, of the “New blog post: CrowdoMeter goes Mobile http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2012/01/04/crowdometer-goes-mobile/“.

The blog post describes how “Two weeks ago Euan Adie from altmetric.com and myself launched the website CrowdoMeter, a crowdsourcing project that tries to classify tweets about scholarly articles using the Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO) … This project is far from over, ideally we want 3-5 classifications per tweet or an additional 1,000 classifications“. In order to “make the classifications as simple as possible, and to help further with this we today [4 January 2012] launched a mobile version of CrowdoMeter. Simply browse to http://crowdometer.org with your iPhone or Android phone [and] sign in via your Twitter account“.

I did this and captured the following screenshots:

Initially in this post I intended to highlight how the Springlink app suggests that Facebook and Twitter may be becoming part of the dissemination infrastructure for research papers, especially on mobile devices. However when I read Martin Fenner’s blog post I realised that Twitter, in particular, may have a role to play in the curation of information about research papers and scientific data.

Hmm, I wonder if Twitter will catch on outside this niche area?

Responding to the Forthcoming Demise of TwapperKeeper

Twapper Keeper Archive Service to be Shut Down

On 8^th December 2011 the following announcement was made on the Twapper Keeper Web site:

Transition update
Twapper Keeper’s archiving is now available in HootSuite! As a result, we will be shutting down Twapper Keeper. Existing archives will be kept running until Jan 6, 2012, after which you will not be able to access your archives anymore.

Twapper Keeper has been widely used within the UK’s higher education sector, especially for archiving tweets containing event hashtags at events aimed at the developer, researcher and library sectors.

The popularity in the service has helped to demonstrate the importance of Twitter archiving, something which was not necessarily widely appreciated a few years ago. But in light of, for example, the recent news item on the JISC Web site which announced that “Social media ‘not to blame’ for inciting rioters” and went on to describe how:

A study of 2.4 million Twitter messages from the time of the riots has found that politicians and other commentators were wrong to claim the website played an important role in inciting and organising the disturbances.  

we can see that the importance of Twitter archiving for a variety of purposes is now more widely understood.  However it seems that Twapper Keeper will not be providing a long term repository of tweets. This does not necessarily mean that tweets will be lost since, as described in an article on Tweet Eternal: Pros and Cons of the Library of Congress Twitter Archive published in Time on 8 December 2011 “Thanks to a deal between Twitter and the United States Library of Congress, every public tweet sent on the social messaging service since its creation will become part of the Library of Congress’ digital archive, available to researchers and historians as an example of contemporary life and culture“. However as highlighted in Nature in  n article on Social science: Open up online research “Social media hold[s] a treasure trove of information [but]  the secretive methods of ethics review boards are hindering their analysis, says Alexander Halavais.“

Since it unclear when and if the Library of Congress archives will be made publicly available people and organisations which have made use of Twapper Keeper may wish to migrate the content of these archives. This post will describes approaches for migrating existing data, ways of identifying which archives may need to be preserved and ways of identifying key stakeholders who may need to make such decisions.

Migration of Existing Archives

Tools

Since creators and users of Twapper Keeper archives have less than a month to migrate their content, this post will outline ways in which the archives can be managed, and a discussion about the implications of the announcement of the closure of the service will be made at a later date.

Martin Hawksey has published a post on his MASHe blog which describes how you can Free the tweets! Export TwapperKeeper archives using Google Spreadsheet.  Martin’s post also links to a post entitled LIBREAS.Library Grab your TwapperKeeper Archive before Shutdown! which describes a technique which can be used by those familiar with R code. Tont Hirst on the OUseful.info blog has also listed a technical solution based on R code in his post on Rescuing Twapperkeeper Archives Before They Vanish.

For people who may not be familiar with use of Google Spreadsheets or implementation of software applications for accessing Twitter archives you should note that you can also use a Web browser to view archives of interest (having ensured that all items are displayed and not just the default 10 items). You can then view the HTML source and save the file so that you have a HTML representation of the tweets which you can take manage locally.  In addition, you can also save an RSS representation of the tweets which will provide a more structured format which should be more amenable to subsequent processing, if you wish to do this. Examples of this approach can be seen from the copies of the  IWMW10 and IWMW11 archives.

Selection Criteria

In addition to being aware of the tools which can be used there will also be a need to decide which archives may be still be of relevance and identifying who may need to take responsibility for migrating the content to an appropriate location. Tony Hirst, in his post on Rescuing Twapperkeeper Archives Before They Vanish, has suggested that “one approach might be to look to see what archives have been viewed using @andypowe11′s Summarizr“. However although the Summarizr home page  lists recently viewed Summarizr summaries of Twapper Keeper archives, it is not clear if a comprehensive list is available and, even if such a list could be made available, how this would inform decisions on the selection of archives to be migrated.

An alternative approach is to look at the TwapperKeeper archives which have been created by particular Twitter IDs.  We can see, for example, that Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) has created 27 archives.  Similarly using Twapper Keeeper’s search facility I find that I have created a total of 62 Twapper Keeper archives. Perhaps the initial stage in identifying archives to be migrated is for active Twapper Keeper users to identify the archives they have created, and then for them to make a decision of archives to be migrated, where the new archives are to be hosted and what to do for acrhives which will not be migrated, which might include informing key stakeholders.

Case Study

Rather than attempting to keep a copy of all of of the Twapper Keeper archives I have created, in this post I will provide a summary of the archives I created and docum the decisions I have taken regarding migration of the content and the reasons for these decisions.

Migrated to UKOLN Web site: The IWMW2009, IWMW10 and IWMW11 archives, which will be made publicly available, together the UKOLN and Ariadne_Mag archives which will be stored locally if we decide at a later date to analyse the tweets.

Key stakeholders informed:  A number of archives may of interest to organisations such as JISC, CILIP, ALT, UCISA and CETIS. These organisations will be notified of the archives which I have created and will be informed of the techniques described in this post if they wish to migrate the content.

Archives of personal interest: Archives of personal tweets and personal interests have not been migrated.

Other archives: Other archives include archives for broad subject areas (e.g. #a11y, #phdchat) for which a general tweet about the forthcoming demise of the Twapper Keeper archive will be made and archives for events and areas of interest for which I had a short-term interest and wished to be able to view the tweets but which which I have no longer term interest.

A summary of the Twitter archives and the decisions I have made are given below.  Please note that:

• The data given in the table was collected on 9 December 2011.
• The decisions given in the table may be changed at a later date.
• Twapper Keeper archives for other areas relevant to myself and UKOLN colleagues  may have also been created.  The #IWMW09 archive, for example, will be migrated and decisions about other archives will be made shortly.

Archive Type	Name	Description	# of Tweets	Create Date	Comment
#Hashtag	#a11y	Accessibility (a11y)	96,491	04-25-10	#a11y community to be informed.
#Hashtag	#a11yhack	DevCSI hack day	329	06-21-11	One-off DevCSI event. Report has been published.
#Hashtag	#accbc	CETIS/BSI Accessibility SIG meeting	396	02-28-11	One-off DevCSI event. CETIS SIG coordinator to be notified.
#Hashtag	#altc2009	The ALTC 2009 conference	4,754	08-28-09	Large annual event. Report has been published. Event organisers to be notified.
#Hashtag	#altc2012	The ALT-C 2012 conference (Association for Learning Technology)	104	09-12-11	Created for next year’s event. Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#altmetrics	New approaches for developing metrics for scholarly research	1,393	01-15-11	#altmetrics community to be informed.
#Hashtag	#Ariadne	The Ariadne hashtag – which may be used for UKOLN’s Ariadne ejournal.	42,102	09-21-10	Content not migrated due to multiple uses of tag.
Keyword	Ariadne	Archive of tweets contains the string ‘Ariadne’	79,991	09-21-10	Content not migrated due to multiple uses of keyword.
@Person	ariadne_ukoln	Tweets about the Ariadne web magazine.	2,792	05-28-10	Content to be migrated to UKOLN.
#Hashtag	#Bathcr	The University of Bath’s Connected Researcher activity.	296	04-14-11	#Bathcr community to be informed
#Hashtag	#brdidc11	Symposium on Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards, August 22-23 2011, Berkeley	51	08-22-11	Content not migrated.
@Person	briankelly	Tweets about Brian Kelly	9,952	03-19-10	Content not migrated as alternative backup available.
#Hashtag	#CETIS	The CETIS service, based at the University of Bolton.	9,561	09-24-10	CETIS colleagues to be informed.
#Hashtag	#CILIP	CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.	14,356	09-24-10	CILIP colleagues to be informed.
#Hashtag	#CILIP1	Campaign on future of CILIP organisation based on CILIP’s 1-minute messages.	357	06-13-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#CSR	Comprehensive Spending Review	0	10-15-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#dataprato	Invitational workshop to identify & agree areas for joined-up international action in research data management.	128	04-11-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#digdeath	The conference on Death and Dying in a Digital Age held in Bath, UK	72	06-25-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#eduwebconf	The eduwebconf conference	33	11-07-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#falt09	ALTC Fringe	219	08-28-09	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#fbdevlove	The Facebook developers hack day	1,297	03-26-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#fpw11	The Future of the Past of the Web conference, British Library, London on 7 October 2011.	755	09-22-11	Event organisers to be notified.
#Hashtag	#heweb10	Tag for the HigherEdWeb 2010 conference	8,812	09-28-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#heweb11	The HighEdWeb 2011 conference, 23-26 October 2011	11,505	10-23-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#ILI2011	Internet Librarian International 2011 conference held in London on 27-28 Oct 2011.	3,067	10-27-11	ILI organisers to be notified. Report has been published.
#Hashtag	#ili2012	Tweets for the Internet Librarian International (ILI) 2012 conference	3	10-29-11	Created for next year’s event. Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#ipres10	Tweets for the iPres10 conference, Vienna, 19-24 Sept 2010.	5	08-27-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#ipres2010	Archive for the IPres 2010 conference to be held in Vienna on 19-25 Sept 2010.	1,424	08-27-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#ISKB	A holder for the ISKB	27	09-17-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#iwmw12	UKOLN’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) 2012 event	2	10-29-11	Created for next year’s event. Content not migrated.
@Person	iwmwlive	IMWM live blogging account	3,744	04-30-10	Content to be migrated.
#Hashtag	#jisc10	JISC 2010 conference	2,065	04-02-10	Event organisers to be notified.
#Hashtag	#jiscHTML5	JISC HTML5 Case study work	18	11-18-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#jiscpowr	Archive of tweets related to the JISC PoWR project provided by UKOLN and ULCC	13	07-09-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#jiscpowrguide	Archive of tweets about the Guide to Web Preservation published by the JISC-funded PoWR project and launched on 12 July 2010.	2	07-09-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#JISCPP	The JISC-Funded Patients Participate project.	0	05-25-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#ldow2010	Linked Data on the Web 2010 conference	530	04-25-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#loveHE	Times Higher Education campaign to support Higher Education in UK.	20,719	06-12-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#mdforum	UKOLN’s Metadata Forum	1,746	12-10-10	Content to be migrated.
#Hashtag	#morris	Tweets about Morris dancing	183,338	10-16-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#OAweek	Open Access week	4,603	10-19-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#online11	The Online Information 2011 conference held in London on 29 November -1 December	3,915	11-29-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#oxsmc09	socialmediaconference	1,063	09-18-09	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#PhD	Tweets for researchers using the #PhD tag	161,215	09-24-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#s113	Workshop session at ALTC 2009.	1417	09-03-09	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#scl2010	Scholarly Communication Landscape (SCL): Opportunities and challenges symposium, held at Manchester Conference Centre on 30 November 2010.	0	12-02-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#SHB11	Security and Hunan Behavior conference	1,117	06-18-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#SLG2011	CILIP School Librarian Group conference.	283	04-03-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#thatlondon	People (Northerners?) talking about going to “that London”	1,781	07-09-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#ucassm	Social Media Marketing Conference organised by UCAS.	225	10-18-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#ucsoc12	UCISA SSG (Support Services Group) event.	5	09-05-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#udgamp10	What Can We Learn From Amplifed Events seminar, given by Brian Kelly, UKOLN at the University of Girona	395	09-01-10	Content migrated.
#Hashtag	#ukmw09	UKMuseumsandtheWeb	750	12-05-09	Content not migrated.
Keyword	ukoln	Tweets about UKOLN	3,385	03-19-10	Content to be migrated.
#Hashtag	#ukolneim	UKOLN’s Evidence, Impact, Metric work	523	11-05-10	Content to be migrated.
#Hashtag	#UKOLNseminar	UKOLN seminars	69	04-01-11	Content to be migrated.
#Hashtag	#UniofBath	Tweets about the University of Bath	1,798	06-15-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#UniWeek	The UK’s Universities Week campaign.	1,767	06-15-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#Virtualfutures	The Virtual Futures conference	2,216	06-18-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#w3ctrack	W3C Track at WWW 2010 conference	205	04-30-10	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#W3CUKI	W3C UK and Ireland Office	266	04-18-11	Content not migrated.
#Hashtag	#ww2010	Misspelling of WWW2010 hashtag	904	04-29-10	Content not migrated.

I welcome suggestions on other tools and approaches which can be used for managing such archives and also approaches to selection and deletion criteria for Twitter archives.

What Twitter Told Us About ILI 2011

Thoughts on #ILI2011

As I said to one of the two video bloggers who recorded participants’ thoughts and comments about the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conference, ILI is probably my favourite conference as it provides an opportunity to catch up in developments in the online Library world in the UK, Europe, North America and Australasia.  This year at ILI 2011 I could only attend for the first day, but this did give me an opportunity to hear about, amongst other topics, JISC-funded developments in the areas of usage data, analysis techniques which can help to prove value and three cutting-edge technology developments taking place in Norway, Belgium and the USA.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time to give detailed thoughts on the sessions I attended. However an analysis of Twitter usage at the conference might help to provide some insights into how Twitter was used at the conference.

What Does Twitter Tell Us?

If you carry out a sentiment analysis of the archive of the tweets from last week’s #ili2011 (Internet Librarian International) conference I suspect you’ll find a lot of positive comments.  Without going into a textual analysis of the content, what can we learn from the Summarzr statistics of the 2,683 tweets from 310 users? (Note as described in a post on Conventions For Metrics For Event-Related Tweets I feel that such summaries should include a data range, so this total covers the period from slightly after the start of the opening plenary talk on Thursday 27 October at 08:38 (actually 09:38) to Saturday 29 October at 09:37).

As perhaps might be expected for an event with over 300 librarians and information professions the Twitter users understood the benefits of providing distinct tags for the three parallel streams. This is a bit of a hobbyhorse for me and I was pleased that I was able to set a precedent in the first set of parallel sessions when I encouraged the 100 or so participants in the session on “A101 – What’s on the Technology Horizon?” to use the tag #A101 to be able to differentiate the conversation from those taking part in sessions “B101 – Not So Secret Weapons – Advocacy and Influence” and “C101 – The e-Book Revolution in Libraries“:

ili2011 (2676) , a101 (98), c202 (67), lidp (61), a104 (54), a203 (53), b103 (45), a102 (44), a201 (41) and b202 (32).

The easily-identifiable tweets will help myself and Åke Nygren, my fellow speaker in the session, to be able to see what was being discussed during our talk, so such session tagging provides a useful way for speakers to gain feedback for their talks. Our opening track seems to have been the only one in which significant numbers of session-tagged tweets were used. However it seems that the benefits of such tagging were quickly spotted with the second, third and fourth parallel sessions (which end in 2, 3 and 4) being included in the above list of the top ten hashtag contained in the TwapperKeeper archive. I should also add that in revisiting my post on Thoughts on ILI 2010 it seems that use of session hashtags is new this year, with only session #C102 being included in the list of top ten hashtag for last year’s event. (Having just looked at last year’s programme it seems that Session C102 on Monitoring and Maximising Organisational Impact was given by myself and Joy Palmar, so it seems it has taken a year for this practice to become embedded!)

The list of the top Twitterers at the conference included several of the ‘normal suspects’ who have a proven track record of tweeting at conferences headed, as was the case for ILI 2010 by @bethanar and @Mimomurr.

Comparing the overall numbers of tweets at the year’s events with ILI 2010 it seems that Twitter usage has now stabilised:

ILI 2011: 80% (2150) of the tweets in this TwapperKeeper archive were made by 14% (45) of the twitterers. The top 10 (3%) twitterers account for 46% (1241) of the tweets. 56% (175) of the twitterers only tweeted once.

ILI 2010: 80% (2032) of the tweets in this TwapperKeeper archive were made by 15% (57) of the twitterers. The top 10 (2%) twitterers account for 45% (1143) of the tweets. 61% (229) of the twitterers only tweeted once.

It should also be noted that once again there were very few geo-located tweets: 39 tweets this year compared with 18 last year, both of which represent no more than 1% of the total number of tweets.

Feedback From Twitter

The event organisers have sent out a SurveyMonkey form to ILI 2011 participants which will help to inform planning for next year’s events. But in addition the event organisers will also be able to analyse the content of the tweets.

I have created a Storify page which summarises a number of tweets related to particants’ thoughts on the conference, rather than comments on the topics discussed at the conference. The most recent tweets are shown in the accompanying screen shot.

Beyond ILI 2011

We were told about changes in ILI conference organisation, with next year’s event being the responsibility of Information Today’s office based in Oxford.  Although I’ve enjoyed previous ILIs, I do feel it will be beneficial to have greater participation from the UK and mainland Europe. I felt that it was somewhat strange, for example, that although there was much interest in use of social media, there was little discussion about privacy issues and the implications of EU privacy legislation related to cookie use.

In light of the changes to the event organisation I would like to conclude by making some suggestions related to use of social media at the event, based on the ideas I’ve described in this post which I hope with be useful for other event organisers.

• Create a TwapperKeeper (or equivalent) archive of event tweets well in advance of the conference. Note that I discovered that a TwapperKeeper archive hadn’t been set up for the #ILI2011 tweets during the opening talk. I created an archive  during the talk, but this meant that tweets made in the run-up to the event will not be included in the archive
• Be aware of the benefits of session-related (or room-related) hashtags for parallel sessions and ensure that you clearly publicise such hashtags if you wish to encourage their use.
• Be aware of  how tweets can be used in the evaluation of an event.

Finally I’d also suggest that event organisers should consider being pro-active in promoting use of the Lanyrd service. It was suggested that participants badges should include their Twitter ID. But in addition, the  Lanyrd page for ILI2011 provides an electronic means for participants to develop their professional network.  No fewer than 24 of the speakers at the conference are listed on Lanyrd, but as there are only an overall total of 42 participants, this means that the majority of the 311 people who tweeted (or the 136 who tweeted more than once) aren’t included in this network.  I think that’s a shame, as I’m a great fan of Lanyrd and have included details of my talk on the Lanyrd page. But that should be the topic of another post!

Don’t Go To #ThatLondon in 2012!

Just over a week ago I had a meeting in London and, due to the early start, I went the day before, which had the benefits of getting a cheap train ticket and a night’s accommodation is cheaper than the full-priced return ticket from Bath. Normally that’s the case, but when I used Laterooms (which, as I’ve described previously, I’m a happy user of), I found that the cheapest room available cost about £300! Eventually I managed to find a room for about £80 but it made me wonder why there was a shortage of reasonable-priced hotel accommodation that night (with one colleague from CETIS having to book hotel accommodation well outside the city centre. It seems the reason was the meeting was taking place during the Wimbledon fortnight – which I would probably have realised if I was a tennis fan rather than a football supporter!

I then realised that we would be encountering these difficulties to a much greater extent if we have trips to London, next year, during the Olympics 2012. And although they take place outside of the normal time for meetings and conferences (27 July – 12 August) we’ll need to bear in mind the various associated events, such as the Cultural Olympiad which culminates in the “London 2012 Festival, bringing leading artists from all over the world together from 21 June 2012 in the UK’s biggest ever festival“, to say nothing of the Rapperlympics, during which “rapper teams from across the globe descend on London to cross swords at the prestigious DERT tournament” of the weekend on 30 March – 1 April (thinks: the Olympic Committee will use anyone misusing the symbol of five interlocking circle -are five interlocking swords permitted?).

It seems then that those of us working in the public sector would be advised to avoided organising meetings and events in London at a time when the city is likely to be even more crowded than normal and venues and accommodation will be expensive.

As I suggested to JISC, this might provide an opportunity to explore ways in which technological solutions may be used to provide alternatives to travel, which may not only be particularly more cost-effective next summer but also provide environmental benefits. Now is the time to be exploring ways in which online meetings and events can become more embedded as alternatives to face-to-face meeting or amplified / hybrid events used to provide interested participants with the flexibility of choosing whether or not to travel (Monday’s workshop on “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use and Impact“, for example, has about 50 registered participants with another 20 remote participants who will be watching the live video stream).

My initial thoughts were clearly based on use of video-streaming and related technologies. But inevitably we will be travelling to London on business purposes next year. How might we be able to share our experiences of possible problems in a lightweight fashion across the sector? It seems to me that the answer lies in Twitter, if we can agree on a common relevant hashtag.

I was reminded of these ideas yesterday after asking my colleague Paul Walk about a recent trip he had to London. On his way he tweeted:

Off to that London. I don’t regret moving away from London but sometimes I wonder how successfully I did…

Paul has used the expression “that London” on a number of occasions, and I wondered where it came from. Paul and I think we remember it from ‘kitchen sink dramas’ of the late 50s/ early 60s (Saturday Night & Sunday Morning’, perhaps). Last night I tried to discover the origin of the expression. This proved more difficult that I had expected – but it was also provided an interesting exercise in the various approaches to resource discovery which I though would be worth sharing.

I had little joy with a search for “that London” using Google. Initially if discovered “that London is the capital of England“! Using search terms such as “Origin of expression ‘That London’” gave no further insights, so at around midnight I asked by networks on Twitter and Facebook for their suggestions. A couple of people discovered the Harry Enfield “The Scousers go To London” sketch from YouTube. Might the expression have originated from this popular comedy programme?

Dave Pattern pointed me in the direction of John Popham’s post on the Our Society blog on “What goes on in “That London?” in which he reflected on the differences in approaches to social action between the north and the south and suggested that:

Maybe the old northern adage is true after all, “they do things differently in that London”, but what they do affects us all.

This usage reflects my interpretation of the term with, as discussed on Twitter earlier today “that London” having a somewhat derogatory connotation.

If we wish to agree on a tag so that we can complain about the difficulties of travelling to London next year, the costs of the accommodation and the difficulties of finding something to eat, could we use the #ThatLondon hashtag, so that we avoid having to mint and then popularise a new tag? But perhaps this tag will be used in too many other contexts (I should add that the tag was mentioned in a comment by Paul Webster on John Popham’s post and I have created a TwapperKeeper archive in order to gain a better understanding of its current and future usage). My suggestion:

The #ThatLondon12 hashtag can be used to share experiences of problems and difficulties related to travelling to or being in London during the Olympic 2012 year.

Any takers? Or should we just use #’ThatLondon?

Meanwhile can anyone with better searching skills than I have find evidence of use of the “that London” term which predates Harry Enfield?

How Twitter Expertise Helps Your Writing and Dissemination

The 31st issue of #JISC Inform has just been published.  The editorial describes how the issue features article which “look at how students are taking an active part in their course design and delivery which in turn is increasing their satisfaction levels” and goes on to add that “if you’re reading this edition through your mobile you’ll see that this and JISC Inform issue 30 are now available as mobile versions too“.

But how should one go about developing Web resources which can be used on both desktop PCs and mobile phones?  Answers to that questions have been described in a Mobile Web Apps briefing paper (PDF format) written by Mark Power of CETIS and described in a post on Mark’s blog. But although the 6-page briefing paper has been widely promoted for the developer community (and the comments on the blog post are from developers) there is also a need to be able to communicate best practices to policy makers and managers too.  This audience is likely to require a well-focussed summary rather than the in-depth implementation details.

In order to help ensure that best practices for innovation can become embedded within institutions UKOLN and CETIS, the two JISC Innovation Support Centres, have been exploring opportunities for collaboration, and yesterday we had a meeting in London in order to agree on appropriate areas for further work after the 1 August.

I was pleased that at the meeting I was able to mention that an article published in JISC Inform was the result of joint effort between Mark and myself.  And when I viewed how the article we had submitted had been published I was very pleased with the visual impact with, as shown, the top tips for providing mobile web service being depicted as iPhone apps.

On further reflection I realised that the tips we had provided (which  were summaries of advice provided in the briefing paper) could –  almost – be provided as tweets. For example:

There is no such thing as the Mobile Web 

leaves a further 100 characters to be used.  And whilst

Design for the usual internet and then make your site adaptable for mobile devices for example decreasing the screen size using CSS media queries and then scaling up for larger devices like tablets and PCs by progressively enhancing access for larger audiences.

is the equivalent of two tweets the final tip:

Use the W3C’s Mobile Web checking service: Compare the findings for your service with your peers as illustrated in a UK Web Focus blog post.

comes to exactly 140 characters! You may argue that additional characters will be need to include the link but a slight rewording provides a tweetable summary with the link:

Use the W3C’s Mobile Web checking service. Compare the findings for your service with your peers as illustrated at http://bit.ly/eZ47Tv

This example has made me realise that for those who feel that it is important to disseminate their work and to be able to reach out to policy makers and senior managers who may not be inclined to ready wordy and detailed reports, having skills in being able to communicate succinctly will be value.  Twitter, clearly, can help to hone such skills, so that when presented with an opportunity to write 500 words you should be in a better position to know how to best present your ideas or arguments.

Unfortunately the JISC Inform editor had to omit our final contribution to the article, possibly because it was too wordy.  I’ll therefore conclude with a tweet:

Survey on institutional plans & policies for mobile web still open – see http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ukoln-cetis-mobile-web-2011

and remind people, in 135 characters, that: Twitter can be full of trivia, just like the Web. But also like the Web it can be a valuable tool to support institutional activities!

Social Analytics for Russell Group University Twitter Accounts

“Students to get best-buy facts”

On a day on which the main headline on the BBC News Web site announces the Government’s Competition Plan For Universities which “could bring more competition between universities and greater powers for students” it would seem timely to publish a survey which makes use of a number of social media analytic tools to explore how Russell Group Universities are making use of their institutional Twitter accounts and to invite discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of such approaches. After all if, as described in an accompanying article “Students [are] to get best-buy facts“, shouldn’t the facts about Universities’ online presence also be provided – especially if you believe in openness and transparency?

Background

A survey of Institutional Use of Twitter by Russell Group Universities was published back in January 2011. This survey provided a snapshot of institutional use of Twitter across the twenty Russell Group Universities based on the statistics provided on Twitter account profile pages (numbers of followers, numbers of tweets, etc.).  The survey was warmly received by those involved in managing institutional Twitter accounts or with an interest in activities in this area, with Mario Creatura expressing the view that the survey provided an “excellent gathering of data in an area that quite honestly is chock full of confusing stats“.

The interest in gathering further evidence of the value of Social Web services continues to grow. A recent study, for example, sought to answer the question “What’s the ROI with advertising on Facebook?” and concluded that “1 Facebook fan = 20 additional visits to your website“.  But what approaches can institutions take to gain a better understanding of institutional use of Twitter?

Use of Social Analytic Services

In a recent post entitled Analysing influence .. the personal reputational hamsterwheel Lorcan Demspey highlighted three social media analytic services. The post described how it has been suggested that the “Klout score will become a new way of measuring people and their influence online“.  In addition to Klout, (which according to Crunchbase ”allows users to track the impact of their opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph“) Lorcan’s post also referenced PeerIndex (which  according to Crunchbase  “identifies and ranks experts in business and finance based on their digital footprints“) and Twitalyser (described in a Mashable article as “provid[ing] detailed metrics on things like impact, engagement, clout and velocity for individual Twitter accounts“) .

Although Lorcan’s blog post addressed the relevance of such service for helping to understand personal reputation I felt it would be useful to gain a better understanding of how these service work by using them to analyse institutional Twitter accounts. I have therefore used the Klout, Peerindex and Twitalyzer social media analytic tools to analyse the twenty Russell Group University Twitter accounts.  The table below summarises the findings of the survey which was carried out on Thursday 23 June 2011. It should also be noted that the table contains live links to the services which will enable the current findings to be displayed (and also for any errors to be easily detected and reported).

Ref. No.	Institution / Twitter Account	Klout					Peerindex				Twitteralyzer
		Score	Network influence	Amplification Probability	True Reach	Description	Score	Activity	Audience	Authority	Impact	Percentile	Type	Full Metrics
1	University of Birmingham: @unibirmingham	55	61	34	3K	Thought Leader	19	31	70	4	3.3%	88.6	Everyday user	View
2	University of Bristol: @bristoluni	49	54	28	2K	Specialist	16	16	68	0	1.7%	75.2	Everyday user	View
3	University of Cambridge: @cambridge_uni	56	63	39	7K	Thought Leader	29	38	0	37	5.4%	94.6	Everyday user	View
4	Cardiff University: @cardiffuni	48	52	26	3K	Specialist	43	47	76	33	0.8%	57.1	Everyday user	View
5	University of Edinburgh: @uniofedinburgh	52	60	35	2K	Thought Leader	14	6	69	0	1.7%	75.2	Everyday user	View
6	University of Glasgow: @glasgowuni	51	58	29	3K	Specialist	40	47	78	28	1.1%	65.1	Everyday user	View
7	Imperial College: @imperialcollege	51	57	30	3K	Specialist	39	24	74	24	2.8%	85.7	Everyday user	View
8	King’s College London: @kingscollegelon	46	53	26	1K	Networker	16	19	53	4	1.3%	69.1	Everyday user	View
9	University of Leeds: @universityleeds	51	59	32	2K	Specialist	23	37	62	12	1.8%	76.4	Everyday user	View
10	University of Liverpool: @livuni	43	48	21	2K	Networker	2	40	0	0	1.4%	70.9	Everyday user	View
11	LSE: @LSENews	39	48	18	797	Networker	33	43	0	43	0.4%	38.8	Everyday user	View
12	University of Manchester: @UniofManc	14	10	10	46	Feeder	27	?	?	?	?%	?	-	View
13	Newcastle University: No official account found
14	University of Nottingham: @uniofnottingham	51	57	30	2K	Specialist	41	41	65	33	1.9%	77.6	Everyday user	View
15	University of Oxford: @uniofoxford	58	65	37	8K	Specialist	58	44	83	52	2.7%	85.1	Everyday user	View
16	Queen’s University Belfast: @queensubelfast	41	48	23	779	Specialist	11	0	53	0	0.7%	53.6	Everyday user	View
17	University of Sheffield: @sheffielduni	54	59	36	3K	Networker	41	44	73	37	2.9%	86.4	Everyday user	View
18	University of Southampton: @southamptonnews	46	55	27	1K	Networker	46	46	57	44	0.9%	60.1	Everyday user	View
19	University College London: @uclnews	54	63	39	2K	Specialist	62	68	71	59	2%	78.7	Everyday user	View
20	University of Warwick: @warwickuni	53	58	31	3K	Thought Leader	52	42	77	45	1.2%	67.3	Everyday user	View

Please note that you will need to sign in to Klout in order to view the findings.

A Russell Group Universities Peerindex group and two Klout groups (since there is a limit of ten entries these are split into Russell Group Universities (1 of 2) and Russell Group Universities (2 of 2) ) have been set up) which should enable comparisons to be made across the institutions based on the particular social media analytic service elected.

It should be noted that since the original survey of institutional use of Twitter by Russell Group Universities accounts for the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester have been identified. The University of Liverpool account (@livuni)  seems to have replaced an older @liverpooluni account which was never used (although it did have over 2.000  followers).  The University of Manchester account (@UniofManc) was set up on 14 March 2011 and there have been insufficient numbers of tweets for the Peerindex and Twitteralyzer services to provide meaningful reports.

About the Social Media Analytic Metrics

In Klout:

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1-100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence.

Network Influence is the influence level of your engaged audience. Capturing the attention of influencers is no easy task, and those who are able to do so are typically creating spectacular content.

Amplification Probability is the likelihood that your content will be acted upon. The ability to create content that compels others to respond and high-velocity content that spreads into networks beyond your own is a key component of influence.

The True Reach does not appear to be defined.

PeerIndex is built up of three components: authority, activity and audience score (all three are normalised ranks out of 100):

Authority is the measure of trust; how much can you rely on that person’s recommendations and opinion on a given topic. The authority is calculated from  eight benchmark topics for every profile: AME (arts, media and entertainment); TEC ( technology and internet); SCI  (science and environment); MED  (health and medical); LIF  leisure and lifestyle); SPO  (sports); POL  news, politics and society) and BIZ  (finance, business and economics). These are used to generate the overall authority score as well as produce the PeerIndex Footprint diagram.

The authority is a relative positioning against everyone else in each benchmark topic. The rank is a normalised measure against all the other authorities in the topic area.

Note that the Peerindex findings for the University of Oxford are illustrated with a comparison being made with the the Peerindex findings for the University of Cambridge.  The analysis suggests that both institutions have a broadly similar ‘fingerprint’ but Oxford tends to focus on news, politics and society whilst Cambridge on technology and Internet.

Audience is indication of an individual’s reach. It is not simply determined by the number of people who follow you, but instead generate from the number of people who listen and are receptive to what you are saying.
Being followed by large number of spam accounts, bots, inactive accounts will reduce an audience score. The audience takes into account the relative size of the audience to the size of the audiences for the rest of community.

Activity is the measure of how much you do that is related to the topic area. Being to active and people will stop listening to you and if you are too inactive people will never know to listen to you. The Activity Score takes into account this behaviour. Like the other scores Activity Score is done relative to the community. If you are part of a community that has lots of activity your level of activity will need to be higher to achieve the same relative score as in a topic that has a lot less activity.

Realness is a metric that indicates the likelihood that the profile is of a real person, rather than a spambot or Twitter feed. A score above 50 means Peerindex thinks this account is of a real person; a score below 50 means it is less likely to be a real person. When Peerindex  comes across a new profile, it gives it a score of 50. Initially, Peerindex doesn’t have the information to make any determination. As more information is gathered Peerindex modifies the number accordingly. Peerindex looks at a range of information to generate realness such as whether the profile is claimed and been linked to Facebook or LinkedIn. Peerindex is continually adding new signals to the realness calculations to improve it. The calculations are modified by the realness metric in order to penalise non-real people. Claiming a profile will boost the authority, audience and activity scores and consequently the PeerIndex as well.

Note that before the  PeerIndex scores are displayed that are normalized. This means every number in PeerIndex is based on a scale of 1 to 100, showing relative positions. An aggressive normalization calculation ias used which helps to discriminate between top authorities. The benefit is that you can more easily understand who the top authorities are. The trade-off is that many users end up with seemingly lower scores. Here’s an example: If you are in the top 20% by authority in a topic like climate change, it means you have higher authority than 80% of other people who we measure within this topic. Your normalized authority score for this topic will be in the range of 55 to 65 (that is, significantly lower than 80). Remember, however, that a score of 60 puts you higher that 80% of people we track in that topic. A score of 65, means you rank higher than 95% of the people we track. Peerindex focuses on tracking the top people on a specific topic, not just anyone.

In Twitalyzer the Impact measure is a combination of the following factors:

• The number of followers a user has.
• The number of unique references and citations of the user in Twitter.
• The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeted.
• The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeting other people.
• The relative frequency at which the user posts updates.
• Twitalyzer’s “Impact Percentile” score provides insight into the relative rank of the individual within the service’s  dataset. A ranking in the 69.8th percentile means that the user’s Twitalyzer Impact score is higher than 69.8 percent of the hundreds of thousands of active Twitter accounts the service is tracking.
• Twitalyzer’s user profiles report 30-day trailing averages for Impact to help visualize how the user’s Impact trends over a longer period of time. This mitigates out weekends, vacations, etc.

Thoughts on Openness of Social Media Analytics Data

We are starting to see a stream of social media analytic services being developed, together with companies offering to analyse institutional use of social media and advise on best practices. There is a danger, I feel, of unnecessary duplications of such analyses being carried out, with funds which could be used to enhance the teaching and learning and research services provided by institutions being used to pay for unnecessary consultancy work. Whilst there maybe legitimate justifications for such consultancy, I feel that factual data which is gathered should be made openly available. In addition I feel that there is a need for open discussion on how social media analytic findings should be interpreted and used.

Issues for the “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use and Impact” Workshop

On 11 July I am facilitating a one-day workshop on “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use and Impact” which will be held at the Open University. The workshop aims to ensure that the participants:

• Have a better appreciation of the importance of the need to gather and interpret evidence.
• Understand how metrics can be used to demonstrate the value and ROI of services.
• Have seen examples of how institutions are gathering and using evidence.
• We aware of limitations of such approaches.
• Have discussed ways in which such approaches can be used across the sector.

Some questions which I hope will be addressed at the workshop (which, incidentally, is now fully subscribed, indicating the interest across the sector in this area) include:

• Do existing social media analytic services, such as those described above, have a role to play in helping to gain a better understanding of how social media services are being used to support institutional goals?
• Can such  existing social media analytic service be used to help identify personal professional reputation?
• Should the higher education sector be developing its own social media analytic tools in order to ensure that the specific requirements of higher education institutions are being addressed?
• What are the dangers and limitations of seeking to analyse and make use of social media metrics and how should such concerns be addressed?

If you have any answers to these questions, or general comments or queries you would like to raise feel free to add a comment to this post.

Is Smartr Getting Smarter or Am I Getting Dumber?

Reviewing Smartr

Back in February in a post entitled Who Needs Murdoch – I’ve Got Smartr, My Own Personalised Daily Newspaper I described the Smartr personalised Twitter-based personalised newspaper service for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

This is an application which I now use on a daily basis to view the contents of the links posted by my Twitter community. It has also provided the motivation for me to make greater use of Twitter lists – the lists I have created recently include JISC Services, UKOLN colleagues, IWMW 2011 speakers and attendees at a forthcoming UKOLN workshop on Impact, Metrics and Social Web.

The accompanying image shows the content of links to resources which have been tweeted by accounts on my JISC Twitter list. As might be expected this provides content which reflects the interests of the particular service and is often content published by the service. It does occur to me that JISC Programme Managers who wish to keep informed of project developments may find it particularly useful to use Smartr in conjunction with a Twitter list of their project Twitter accounts.  However in addition to providing a simple means of getting relevant content to a iPhone/iPad environment I have to admit that my initial use of this application when I am  on the bus in the morning is to view the contents tweeted by all of the people I follow on Twitter, as this can provide serendipitous benefits which are not provided when following official accounts.

Smartr Developments

Recently I updated the app to Smartr 2.0 and started to notice that various people had started to follow me on Smartr, perhaps having read the blog post and a followup post published last month which described how Ariadne Is Getting Smartr.

When someone starts to follow you on Smartr, as with many other social apps, you get an email which provides brief information about how the person is using the service.

As can be seen from the accompanying screenshot of a recent email I received Dave has 182 followers, 134 sources and 5,208 stories. You can also see the stories which Dave has recent read which seem to indicate that he has an interest in road racing – this isn’t of particular interest to me so I decided not to follow Dave.

But the links to stories (which I prefer to refer to as articles) which Dave has recently read, as opposed to links he has recently posted, shows an aspect of Smartr which I hadn’t been aware of when I first started using the application – and whether this is because I was using version 1 or because I wasn’t following anyone within the Smartr app (as opposed to on Twitter) I don’t know.

Is seems that when someone follows you on Smartr they can see the articles you have recently read. What might be revealed in my case?

It seems that the articles I have recently read within Smartr include a post which described how World IPv6 Day went mostly smoothly, with a few surprises, another which asked What impact are your resources making and one on Posterous, From SaaS to PaaS Using an API.

So the 19 Smartr users who are following me can see note only the articles I have posted on Twitter but also the articles I have read (and the time I read them). Is this:

• A great example of sharing resources across one’s community which exemplifies the benefits of adopting a culture of openness?
• A privacy intrusion which should cause concerns?

What are your thoughts?

Discussion

If you visit the Smartr Web site you will see an image of Smartr running on an iPhone with a link to the iTunes store which enables you to download the app. There are links to articles about Smartr but no obvious FAQ. There is, however, a prominent Smartr byline: “See what your friends are reading on Twitter and Facebook” which perhaps suggests that you are making your reading habits publicly available.  But this aspect wasn’t mentioned in the Mashable article when Smartr was first released.  There is not just a lack of an FAQ on the Smartr Web site, there is also no information provided about release dates and the functionality of the two versions of the software which have been released to date.

Smart does have a user forum which is hosted on the Uservoice Web site.  I published a comment on the forum in which I suggested that there was a need for documentation on the functionality provided by the service and the associated privacy issues.  Temo Chalasani, the founder of the company behind Smartr, responded and asked me what documentation I feel is required. Here are my suggestions for an FAQ:

• When was Smartr first released?
• What subsequent versions of Smartr have been published and what additional functionality has been provided?
• What are the privacy implications of using Smartr?
• Can I read the contents of articles posted by my Twitter followers without others being able to see what I have read and when?
• Can I block others from following me on Smartr as I can do on Twitter?

Will I Still Use Smartr?

Smartr does raise some interesting privacy issues – and since this is a dedicated app rather than a Web service  the use of cookies is not an issue, so recent EU legislation in which the requirement for users to opt-in to accepting cookies is irrelevant. Here are some scenarios which may concern some users:

• The parent who follows their children on Smartr in order to see what links the child has been following.
• The child who follows their parents on Smartr!
• The manager who follows members of staff to see what inappropriate articles are being read during work time.
• The journalist who follows politicians and celebrities in order to write articles about their reading habits.

It should be noted that although it is possible for the parents, children or mangers to view the links which may be being posted, Smartr provides something different – the ability to see links posted by others which are being read.

Despite such concerns, I intend to continue to make use of Smartr as I find it such a useful service even though  I am aware that I could follow a link to a Web site which I would normally be embarrassed to be seen reading. But for me the important thing is user education so that users are made aware of possible risks.  I would therefore encourage Smartr to highlight possible risks.  The question though is “Am I being smart or dumb in using this tool?”

Twitter and the #iamspartacus Trend Revisited

Last night I noticed some discussions about the #superinjunction incident on Twitter. I also spotted renewed use of the #iamspartacus tag – the tag which was described on the What the Trend Web site by this summary:

People are protesting at the upheld conviction of Tweeter, Paul Chambers, who bemoaned his local airport being closed for a week by jokingly saying he was going to blow it up. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/nov/12/iamspartacus-campaign-twitter-airport

A TwapperKeeper archive for the hashtag was created by Martin Hawksey on 12 November 2010 and currently has 2,478 tweets. We can view the Summarizr statistics for the hashtag. However since the hashtag is now being used in a different context it would be useful to see statistics for recent usage. Looking at the TwapperKeeper archive is seems that use of the hashtag in its current context began on 20 May 2011 possibly in a tweet posted by @delvestaxis:

If the injunction footballer is now thinking of suing twitter he could well set off a #iamsparticus trend? @salihughes

We can view the statistics for this hashtag since 20 May 2011 and discover that at the time of writing there have been 621 tweets from 421 Twitter users. We can also see the other hashtags which were included in these tweets: superinjunction (77), xxxx (61), suingtwitter (9), yyyy (7), imogenthomas (7), ctb (7), thatisall (6), streisandeffect (6) and iamsportacus (6) (where xxx and yyy refer to the footballer who was featured on the front page of the Scottish Herald today). There were several research papers about Twitter presented at the WWW 2010 conference, including a paper on #iranElection: quantifying online activism. (PDF format), one on From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-Time Search (PDF format) and one on Earthquake Shakes Twitter Users: Real-time Event Detection by Social Sensors (PDF format). I wonder if next year’s conference will feature a paper on political activism and an earthquake in the UK legal system based on this weekend’s Twitter activities?

Ariadne Is Getting Smartr

UKOLN’s Ariadne ejournal has been running since it was launched under the JISC’s eLib programme way back in January 1996. The ejournal continues to provide a dissemination channel for project work, innovation and service developments across the UK’s higher and further education sector and the wider community.

It is true to say, however, that there is a need to develop Ariadne further in to exploit the variety of ways in which Web resources can now be accessed (including access on mobile devices) as well as introducing new functionality in response to users’ requests. A recent survey of Ariadne authors and readers has helped us to identify ways in which we can enhance Ariadne. We are currently working on developments to the Ariadne technical architecture and user interface. However we are aware that not all developments need to be done in-house since there are a variety of services which can be exploited in order to improve one’s own services.

Twitter provides a good example of a service which can be used as an alerting mechanisms for the publication of new issues. We are using the ariadne_ukoln account to publish information when a new issue is published and to provide links to the main articles. If you wish to be alerted in this way we suggest you follow the ariadne_ukoln account.

In addition to this Twitter channel itself we are also exploring other services which have been developed around Twitter which can further enhance access to Ariadne articles. In particular we have recently been evaluating the Smartr service. As described previously Smartr can be regarded as a news reader for Twitter on the iPhone (and iPod Touch). I’ve been using Smartr for a month or so on my iPod Touch and use it to access resources which have been linked to in tweets from various JISC services. If the resources are of particular interest I can then save the article on my mobile device to read later, whether on the device or on a desktop PC.

It occurred to me that this could be a useful tool for reading Ariadne articles on a mobile device, which could be implemented prior to the Ariadne redesign and implementation of mobile style sheets.  Indeed such an approach might also be helpful in gaining experiences of the user interface which can help to inform the design of the style sheets.

In order to explore Smartr’s potential I set up a Twitter list which just contained the ariadne_ukoln feed.  As can be seen, this provides access to tweets from the account. Viewing my Twitter list using Smartr enables me to view the contents of the links which had been included in the tweets, again as illustrated. Also note that in order to ensure that this service delivered relevant content we updated the policy on use of Twitter which now states that the Twitter channel will “concentrate on disseminating edited snippets about newly published articles with occasional further posts on trailing upcoming articles, seeking reviewers, developments to the Ariadne service, etc“.

In response to my post “Who Needs Murdoch – I’ve Got Smartr, My Own Personalised Daily Newspaper!“  Anthony Leonard suggested that “Flipboard is the future” and went on to add “Personalised newspapers / magazine apps embedded around (university) websites may [be ] the missing link to bringing the long tail of news to those who can’t be bothered with RSS readers or Twitter“. I think he is right to highlight the importance of personalised newspapers but what has intrigued me is how an existing Web environment, such as Ariadne, can be made available to mobile devices through use of Twitter tools.

Twitter Export Functionality Returns to Twapper Keeper

On 17 March Twitter updated the terms of service for use of their APIs:

You may export or extract non-programmatic, GUI-driven Twitter Content as a PDF or spreadsheet by using “save as” or similar functionality

In light of these changes, as described on the Twapper Keeper blog, John O’Brien, the Twapper Keeper developer has “decided to bring the “Save as Excel” link back online when viewing an archive. This will allow you to get the currently viewed content into an Excel file for review.“

This will be good news for those who were not able to take action following last week’s post that there were only “A Few Days Left to Download a Structured Archive of Tweets“.

The changes in Twitter policies on use of its APIs will have been a result of a backlash following Twitter’s announcement that it was more rigorously enforcing its terms and conditions which appeared to be inhibiting development of third party Twitter applications such as Twapper Keeper.

It should be noted, however, that the terms of service state that:

You will not attempt or encourage others to: sell, rent, lease, sublicense, redistribute, or syndicate access to the Twitter API or Twitter Content to any third party without prior written approval from Twitter.

and go on to add:

Exporting Twitter Content to a datastore as a service or other cloud based service, however, is not permitted.

The first condition is clearly intended to ensure that Twitter is in a position to commercially exploit its content and services (note back in February there were stories being published which speculated that twitter could be sold for up to $10 Bn). It should be noted that the second condition would appear to prohibit Twitter content from being hosted on cloud services for use by others, even if there is no financial gain.  Twitter, it seems, is turning itself into a silo, with only limited capabilities for data export and reuse. Perhaps it is seeking to emulate Facebook’s approaches in this respect.

Is this an unacceptable approach from a private company which, like Facebook, seems to be seeking to maximise financial gain from content provided by its users?  Should we not be looking to move to an alternative microblogging environment, such as Status.net, which Wikipedia states: “While offering functionality similar to Twitter, StatusNet seeks to provide the potential for open, inter-service and distributed communications between microblogging communities. Enterprises and individuals can install and control their own services and data.“

I think we ought to be very careful before making such moves.  In part this is because of the importance of one’s social network to effective use of such social web services and also in light of the importance of the variety of tools and services which have been developed around Twitter and its ease of use on a variety of devices and environments – including watching TV programmes such as Question Time, for which use of Twitter as a back channel is now well established.

But in addition we need to consider whether, in light of the current political and economic climes, we should be over critical of organisations which make money out of services we use for free. We should also recognise that services developed in UK Higher Education may also prohibit commercial exploitation of content.  For example the policies for the University of Bath’s Opus institutional repository states that:

The metadata must not be re-used in any medium for commercial purposes without formal permission.

This policy was created using the OpenDOAR policy tool. My understanding is that the policy described above is intended to prevent others from commercially exploiting repository metadata.  Is this fundamentally different from Twitter’s statement that:

You will not attempt or encourage others to: sell, rent, lease, sublicense, redistribute, or syndicate access to the Twitter API or Twitter Content to any third party without prior written approval from Twitter.

I think it is unfortunate that Twitter have chosen to make it more difficult for others to make use of twitter content, whether for commercial gain or not.  But if a broad aim of higher education is to help stimulate the economy, shouldn’t we be permitted (perhaps, indeed, encouraging) others to reuse our content – and if this generates income to fund such initiatives, should this be a problem?

A Few Days Left to Download a Structured Archive of Tweets

On 21 February 2011 John O’Brien, developer of the Twapper Keeper twitter archiving service announced the “Removal of Export and Download / API Capabilities“. In a subsequent video interview John explained the reasons for the removal of this service, which arose following Twitter announcement that it was enforcing its policy that third party services are not allowed to syndicate or redistribute tweets. Following Twitter’s ‘cease and desist’ email the removal of Twapper Keeper’s export capabilities and APIs will take place on 20 March – a few day’s time.

It is clear that the popularity of the Twapper Keeper service (which has a total of 2,410,061,623 tweets across 21,475 archives) has demonstrated a clear need for Twitter archiving – and it seems that Twitter wishes to be able to commercially exploit such popularity. I would guess that other services, such as Martin Hawksey’s iTitle Twitter captioning service is another example of an innovative approach which Twitter will be seeking to exploit commercially.

Last year’s JISC-funded developments to the Twapper Keeper service included making the software available under a Creative Commons licence. If you visit the Your.TwapperKeeper.com site you will be able to download the software which can be run on your own server. Clearly you would not be able to simply replicate a public Twapper Keeper service, but if Twitter’s terms and conditions are aimed at stopping public redistribution of tweets it would appear possible to install the software on an institutional Intranet – although I should admit that IANAL.

It should the pointed out that the Twapper Keeper service will continue to archive tweets which can be accessed via the HTML interface – what is being lost is API access and the ability to download a structured archive of tweets in for example, MS Excel format with columns of the tweets, Twitter userid, date and time information, geo-location information, etc. Such structured information is, as Twitter is very aware of, valuable for developers who wish to carry out richer data analysis or provide additional value-added services on top of the conventional Web-based display of tweets.

It is still possible for a few days to download such structured archives from Twitter. I have recently looked at the details of my TwapperKeeper archives. I have decided to keep a local archive of tweets associated with a number of talks I have given. However I don’t intend to keep a structured archive which are primarily of interest to event organisers (such as the ALT-C, JISC and CETIS conferences). I have also decided to keep a record in the list below of the decisions I have made. Note that an example of a local archive can be seen for the seminar I gave last year at the University of Girona.

Archive Type	Name	Description	Policy	# of Tweets	Create Date
#Hashtag	#a11y	Accessibility (a11y)	Archive not kept as this subject based archive is not directly related to my key areas of work.	42427	04-25-10
#Hashtag	#accbc	CETIS/BSI Accessibility SIG meeting.	Local archive not kept as I was a speaker at this recent event.	154	02-28-11
#Hashtag	#altc2009	The ALTC 2009 conference	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be relevant to the event organisers.	4737	08-28-09
#Hashtag	#altmetrics	New approaches for developing metrics for scholarly research	Archive not kept as this subject-based archive will primarily be relevant to others with an interest in the subject area..	158	01-15-11
#Hashtag	#Ariadne	The Ariadne hashtag – which may be used for UKOLN’s Ariadne ejournal.	Archive not kept as this subject-based archive will primarily be about topics other than UKOLN’s Ariadne ejournal.	11897	09-21-10
Keyword	Ariadne	Archive of tweets contains the string ‘Ariadne’	Archive not kept as this subject-based archive will primarily be about topics other than UKOLN’s Ariadne ejournal.	25598	09-21-10
@Person	ariadne_ukoln	Tweets about the Ariadne web magazine.	Local archive kept.	882	05-28-10
@Person	briankelly	Tweets about Brian Kelly	Personal archive kept.	6471	03-19-10
#Hashtag	#CETIS	The CETIS service, based at the University of Bolton.	Archive not kept as this organisational archive will primarily be of relevance to the host institution.	2836	09-24-10
#Hashtag	#CILIP	CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.	Archive not kept as this organisational archive will primarily be of relevance to the host institution.	4494	09-24-10
#Hashtag	#CILIP1	Campaign on future of CILIP organisation based on CILIP’s 1-minute messages.	Archive not kept as this campaign-based archive will primarily be of relevance to the host institution.	357	06-13-10
#Hashtag	#CSR	Comprehensive Spending Review	Archive not kept as this subject archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	79799	10-15-10
#Hashtag	#falt09	ALTC Fringe	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	219	08-28-09
#Hashtag	#heweb10	Tag for the HigherEdWeb 2010 conference	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	8723	09-28-10
#Hashtag	#ipres10	Tweets for the iPres10 conference, Vienna, 19-24 Sept 2010.	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	2	08-27-10
#Hashtag	#ipres2010	Archive for the IPres 2010 conference to be held in Vienna on 19-25 Sept 2010.	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	1397	08-27-10
@Person	iwmwlive	IMWM live blogging account	Local archive kept.	1373	04-30-10
#Hashtag	#jisc10	JISC 2010 conference	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	2059	04-02-10
#Hashtag	#jiscpowr	Archive of tweets related to the JISC PoWR project provided by UKOLN and ULCC	Archive not kept due to low numbers of tweets.	6	07-09-10
#Hashtag	#jiscpowrguide	Archive of tweets about the Guide to Web Preservation published by the JISC-funded PoWR project and launched on 12 July 2010.	Archive not kept due to low numbers of tweets.	2	07-09-10
#Hashtag	#ldow2010	Linked Data on the Web 2010 conference	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	524	04-25-10
#Hashtag	#loveHE	Times Higher Education campaign to support Higher Education in UK.	Archive not kept as this campaign-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	12066	06-12-10
#Hashtag	#mdforum	UKOLN’s Metadata Forum	Local archive planned.	119	12-10-10
#Hashtag	#morris	Tweets about Morris dancing	Archive not kept as this social archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	17813	10-16-10
#Hashtag	#oxsmc09	socialmediaconference	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	1063	09-18-09
#Hashtag	#PhD	Tweets for researchers using the #PhD tag	Archive not kept as this subject-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	28527	09-24-10
#Hashtag	#s113	Workshop session at ALTC 2009.	Local archive kept (will be edited to remove irrelevant tweets posted after event had taken place).	227	09-03-09
#Hashtag	#scl2010	Scholarly Communication Landscape (SCL): Opportunities and challenges symposium, held at Manchester Conference Centre on 30 November 2010.	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	39	12-02-10
#Hashtag	#ucassm	Social Media Marketing Conference organsied by UCAS.	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	223	10-18-10
#Hashtag	#udgamp10	What Can We Learn From Amplifed Events seminar, given by Brian Kelly, UKOLN at the University of Girona. Local archive available	Local archive kept.	395	09-01-10
#Hashtag	#ukmw09	UKMuseumsandtheWeb	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	750	12-05-09
Keyword	ukoln	Tweets about UKOLN	Local archive kept.	1948	03-19-10
#Hashtag	#ukolneim	UKOLN’s Evidence, Impact, Metric work	Archive not kept due to low numbers of tweets.	45	11-05-10
#Hashtag	#w3ctrack	W3C Track at WWW 2010 confernce	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	179	04-30-10
#Hashtag	#ww2010	Misspelling of WWW2010 hashtag	Archive not kept as this event-based archive will primarily be of relevance to others.	833	04-29-10

It should be noted that this list is based on Twapper Keeper archives which I created. There will be a number of other archives which will be of interest to myself and colleagues at UKOLN which may also be archived locally.

Also note that a number of event-based Twitter archives (such as the #s113 archive of a workshop session at the ALT-C 2009 conference) will contain irrelevant tweets due to the hashtag being used for other purposes. Such irrelevant tweets may be deleted from the archive

Institutional Use of Twitter by the 1994 Group of UK Universities

A survey of institutional use of Twitter by Russell Group University Web sites was published on 14^th January 2011. But are the approaches taken across that sector typical of the UK HE community? In order to observe approaches across a wider group of institutions the survey was repeated across the 1994 Group. This group, which was established in 1994 “brings together nineteen internationally renowned, research-intensive universities. The Group provides a central vehicle to help members promote their common interests in higher education, respond efficiently to key policy issues, and share best methods and practice.“

The survey was carried out on 18-19^th January 2011 and, as with the initial survey, recorded the number of followers, users followed and tweets published together with details of the location and biographical details of the institutional accounts and the provision of links to the Tweetstats service which provides statistical information on the average number of tweets posted per month .

Note that following comments made on the initial survey it was felt that it would be useful to include information on the number of Twitter lists which the accounts are included in (as described in a post on Who Needs Murdoch – I’ve Got Smartr, My Own Personalised Daily Newspaper! we may start to see Twitter lists being used in a number of interesting ways(.

In addition information on the background provided on the Twitter Web site is included, as this may have implications for accessibility, and details of the date of the first tweet have been included. The statistical information provided by the Tweetstats service was extended to profile the Twitter clients used to post tweets. Also note that the information was gathered from the Web interface while not logged in to Twitter and that the full URL of the link to the institutional Web site is provided (rather than the partial URL which is displayed which was published in the previous survey).

Ref. No.	Institution	Nos. of Followers	Following	Tweets	Nos. of Lists	First Tweet	Tweetstats	Background Image
1	University of Bath: @uniofbath  Name: University of Bath Location: Bath, England Web: http://www.bath.ac.uk/ Bio: News from the University of Bath	5,339	73	1,642	290	19 Jan 2009	Tweetstats for University of Bath:  Average: 65 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Tweetdeck (50%), Web (42%)	Logo and brief textual information
2	Birkbeck, University of London:  No single central account but multiple accounts listed.
3	Durham University: @durhamuni  Name: Durham University Location: Durham, UK Web: http://www.dur.ac.uk/ Bio: Shaped by the past, creating the future	4,302	2	208	233	2 Aug 2008	Tweetstats for Durham University:  Average: 6 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Twitterfeed (100%)	Purple background
4	University of East Anglia: @UEA_news  Name: Uni of East Anglia Location: Norwich, Norfolk, UK Web: http://www.uea.ac.uk/ Bio: The University of East Anglia is an internationally-renowned university based in the cathedral city of Norwich in the UK.	3,256	129	307	158	26 Mar 2009	Tweetstats for University of East Anglia:  Average: 13 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Web (53%), TwitThis (46%)	Plain blue background
5	University of Essex: @Uni_of_Essex Name: University of Essex Location: Colchester, Loughton, Southend Web: http://www.essex.ac.uk/ Bio: The University of Essex is one of the UK’s leading academic institutions. We are one of the UK’s top ten universities for both teaching and research.	2,259	237	876	112	27 Feb 2009	Tweetstats for Uni_of_Essex:  Average: 38 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Tweetdeck (39%), Facebook (36%), Web (21%),  Google (3%)	Photo with text of URLs for other social Web accounts
6	University of Exeter: @uniofexeter Name: University of Exeter Location: Devon, UKWeb: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/ Bio: Exeter is a top UK university which combines world leading research with very high levels of student satisfaction.	1,829	1,720	608	71	28 Jul 2009	Tweetstats for University of Exeter:  Average: 33 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Tweetdeck (50%), Twitterfeed (24%), Web (9%)	Photo montage
7	Goldsmiths, University of London: @goldsmithsuol  Name: Goldsmiths Location: New Cross, London, SE14 Web: http://www.gold.ac.uk/ Bio: The latest news and events from Goldsmiths, University of London. Regularly updated by real people in the Goldsmiths Press Office!	2,883	458	428	174	13 Feb 2009	Tweetstats for Goldsmiths, University of London  Average: 15 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Tweetdeck (59%), Web (24%)	Photo
8	Institute of Education, University of London: @IOE_London  Name: IOE Location: London, UK Web: http://www.ioe.ac.uk/ Bio: News and events from the Institute of Education, University of London	699	279	226	29	22 Jan 2010	Tweetstats for Institute of Education, University of London:  Average: 13 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Web (73%) NOTE 1	Photo, logo and textual information
9	Lancaster University: @lancasteruni  Name: Lancaster University Location: Lancaster, UK Web: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ Bio: News from Lancaster University	2,886	136	290	198	20 Mar 2009	Tweetstats for Lancaster University:  Average: 10 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Web (57%) NOTE 1	Logo
10	University of Leicester: @UniofLeics  Name: University Leicester Location: University of Leicester, UK Web: http://www.le.ac.uk/ Bio: Twitter channel for the University of Leicester	758	49	141	49	9 Oct 2009	Tweetstats for Leicester University: Average: 14 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Web (95%)	Logo
11	Loughborough University: @lborouniversity  Name: Loughborough Uni Location: Loughborough Web: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/ Bio: None	423	14	164	43	5 Aug 2009	Tweetstats for Loughborough University: Average:  9 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Tweetdeck (80%), Web (7%)	Photo
12	Queen Mary, University of London: @qmul  Name: Queen Mary Uni Londn Location: London, UK Web: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/ – with tag info Bio: News and events and some other musings from Queen Mary, University of London.	2,644	1,250	799	150	28 Jan 2009	Tweetstats for Queen Mary, University of London:  Average: 30 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Tweetdeck (59%), Web (25%), bit.ly (6%), Facebook (4%)	Photo and logo
13	University of Reading: @UniRdg_News  Name: Uni of Reading Location: Reading, England Web: http://www.reading.ac.uk/ Bio: Keep up to date with all the latest news from the University of Reading!	625	143	176	42	19 Jan 2010	Tweetstats for the University of Reading: Average: 8 tweets per month.  Twitter clients: Web (60%)	None
14	University of St Andrews:  @univofstandrews  Name: Univ of St Andrews Location: St Andrews Web: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Bio: University of St Andrews – Scotland’s first university	2,352	118	299	158	2 Feb 2009	Tweetstats for University of St Andrews: Average: 12 tweets per month.  Twitter clients: Tweetfeed (78%), Twhirl (8%), Seesmic (5%), Web (2%)	Blue background and logo
15	School of Oriental and African Studies: @SOASNews   Name: SOAS News Location: Web: http://www.soas.ac.uk/ Bio: None (Note I was informed on 12 March 2011 that the @SOASnewsroom and @SOASfeed are the official SOAS Twitter feeds)	(122)	(2)	(0)	(3)			Default
16	University of  Surrey:  @uniofsurrey  Name: University of  Surrey Location: Guildford, UK Web: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ Bio: Tweets from the University of Surrey	4,058	473	710	216	???	Tweetstats for University of  Surrey  Average: 24 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Cotweet (72%), Tweetie  (5%),Web (3%), Tweetdeck (2%)	Photo and logo
17	University of Sussex: @sussexuni  Name: University of Sussex Location: Brighton, UK Web: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/ Bio: University of Sussex is a top 10 UK research intensive university set in beautiful downland on the edge of Brighton, with over 11,000 students and 2,500 staff.	5,866	1,171	1,824	321	16 Feb 2009	Tweetstats for University of Sussex:  Average: 74 tweets per month. Twitter clients: Web (50%), Hootsuite (43%), MobileWeb (3%)	Photo
18	University of York: @uniofyork  Name: University of York Location: York, UK Web: http://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/ Bio: The latest news and events at the University of York, UK	2,822	113	394	222	30 Mar 2009	Tweetstats for University of York: Average: 17 tweets per month.Twitter clients: bit.ly (58%), Web (40%)	Photo
	TOTAL	41,320	6,367	9,092

Note the the results from use of the MyFirstTweet service were inconsistent due to problems with the service itself. It is also unclear as to whether the correct page will be displayed by following the link provided.

Also note that the results for SOAS were not included in the subsequent discussions and analyses.

Discussion

The previous survey documented examples of emerging best practices including suggestions on:

• Content provided in profile information (the bio: field).
• Location information.
• Links to the host institution.

This information is not repeated here.

Metrics

A summary showing the range of various Twitter metrics for the 1994 Group is given below:

• Numbers of Twitter followers: The numbers ranged from 423-5,866 (in comparison with a range of 865-12,265 for Russell Group Universities).
• Numbers of Twitter users followed: The numbers ranged from 2-1,720 (in comparison with a range of 33-5,089 for Russell Group Universities).
• Numbers of tweets: The numbers ranged from 141-1,824  (in comparison with a range of 192-1,167 for Russell Group Universities).
• Average numbers of tweet per month: The numbers ranged from 6-74 (in comparison with a range of 23-91 for Russell Group Universities).

Further Thoughts on Emerging Best Practices

The previous survey highlighted some suggestions for emerging best practices based on observations on how Twitter is being used across Russell Group Universities. This suggestions will not be repeated here. Instead comments will be restricted to some of the additional features which were surveyed:

• Background image and content: In the previous survey it was pointed out that “many of the institutional Twitter accounts had branded the Twitter home page, some with just a background image but others … with additional textual information and link information“. However such approaches may, arguably, act as barriers to people with disabilities. There will be a need for institutions to understand and address such concerns.
• Twitter clients used for posting: The Tweetstats tool provides information on clients used to post tweets. It may be useful for those involved in managing institutional Twitter accounts to monitor the various clients used in order to be able to identify tools which may prove particularly useful for institutional tweeting.
• Dates of first tweets: The date of an initial tweet may give an indication of when an institution began tweeting (although this may not be when a institutional Twitter feed was officially launched).  However such information may indicate when Twitter became prevalent as an institutional tool.  many of the institutions seem to have launched their service in early 2009 – it would be interesting to see if that related to an event shortly before that date.

I hope these comments will prove useful for those involved in managing institutional (or department) Twitter accounts.

Twitter Posts Are Not Private: What are the Implications?

The article published on the BBC News Web site yesterday seemed unambiguous: “‘Twitter messages not private’ rules PCC“.  This news item summarised news published by the PCC, the Press Complaints Commission, which ruled that “Material that is published on Twitter should be considered public and can be published“. The context was a complaint by a Department of Transport official that the use of her tweets by newspapers constituted an invasion of privacy – apparently the official, who was named in the article, had tweeted about “being hungover at work“. But even though she had a clear disclaimer that the views expressed by her on Twitter were personal, her tweets were published in the press. An article in The Guardian provides further information – it seems that the Daily Mail and the Independent on Sunday) published this information.  I must admit that I find it unsurprising that the Daily Mail has used this as an opportunity to have a dig at the public sector. But what are the implications of this ruling for the rest of us? Some thoughts:

• It’s pointless saying one’s (public) tweets are personal if you tweet in a professional capacity. The press can publish such information and use this as an opportunity to have a go at you and your host institution.  This is the standard type of advice which is given to students using social media, but perhaps we forget to think about the implications for ourselves.  Twitterer emptor Caveat Twitterer! – as perhaps the various footballers and cricketers who have been fined for tweeting inappropriate remarks would echo.
• This news does seem to validate reuse of tweets. Martin Hawksey, who developed the iTitle Twitter captioning service will no doubt be relieved that it seems he does not need to obtain permission before reusing public tweets as will developers of Twitter archiving services (and note that in the JISC-funded developments to the Twapper Keeper Twitter archiving service for which UKOLN provided the project management we did identify that privacy concerns did need to be considered).
• However it should be pointed out that this ruling came from the PCC – it is not a legal ruling.

Good news which seems to validate reuse of tweets or a dangerous intrusion into personal space? What do you think? Should all organisation be providing guidelines not only on institutional use of social media but personal use, such as EDINA’s guidelines which were published recently (with a Creative Commons licence) which states:

EDINA, as part of the University of Edinburgh, is your employer and as such you have a legal and moral responsibility not to bring either organisation into disrepute. Maintaining the reputation of EDINA, EDINA projects, services and staff members plays a crucial part in ensuring the continuing success of the organisation. Comments, particularly those with a strongly negative or unprofessional tone, can have serious unintended consequences. It is therefore important to remember that what you say about your work, even in personal social media presences, can reflect upon EDINA.

Please exercise common sense over whether or not the space you are posting to (whether your own or as a guest post on another person or organisation’s blog or social media presence) is an appropriate space for discussion of work or work related matters. If in doubt, you can always ask your line manager for advice.

The Hounding of the Baskerville article in the Independent on Sunday is worth reading to provide a context to such discussions.

Who Needs Murdoch – I’ve Got Smartr, My Own Personalised Daily Newspaper!

At about 7am this morning I noticed an interesting Facebook status update from Kerim Friedman, an anthopologist I’d met in Taiwan a few years ago. The status update came from a tweet from @Kerim:

If you use Twitter as your news reader, you really should try the “Smartr” iPhone app: http://smartr.mobi/ Nicely done!

This sounded interesting so I installed the app on my iPod Touch – and was impressed.  As described in a pithy summary in a post on Mashable a few days ago “Smartr is a news reader for Twitter on the iPhone“.  The post went on to add:

Instead of seeing tweets, the Smartr user views a Twitter feed filled with news snippets. “It’s a lens on top of your Twitter Feed,” says Factyle founder Temo Chalasani.

Users can click on updates in the filtered Twitter stream to read a Smartr reformatted, ad-free version of the article, share it with Facebook, Tumblr or Posterous, and choose to save it in-app or via Instapaper or Read it Later.

I tried it and was impressed.  Later at work I created a Twitter list of official Twitter channels from a number of JISC services of particular interest to me. This provides a stream of official summaries of work from the various services, including links to further information, as illustrated.  As can be seen this provides a summary of various reports, blog posts, news items, etc. In effect this provides the metadata for the resources and a link to the resources. But what of the resources themselves?  The links need to be followed and, if like me, you use a device such as an iPod Touch you may download your tweets (and email messages and blog posts) before you head off to work to read on the bus, but aren’t able to follow any links whilst offline.

Smartr, however, follows the links to resources in your main Twitter feed or feeds in any Twitter lists you have created – i.e. it provides access to the data rather than the metadata. As illustrated the app provides a summary of the first few lines of the resource, which can then be viewed in full and also saved for reading later.

I’m impressed. In particular I think it will be useful for use with official Twitter feeds for which there is likely to be some consistency in the links which are shared, unlike the Twitter feeds from one’s followers which is likely to be a mixture of work and social links being shared (and if you follow people from around the globe they may be sharing their social interests during our working day).

This use of official Twitter accounts for resource sharing and ease of access on mobile devices is very interesting – and goes against the suggestions from Ferdinand von Prondzynski, former President of Dublin City University and forthcoming Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Robert Gordon University who, in a post on Institutional Tweets criticised typical institutional  use of Twitter since “all tweets are …. announcements, either of some research project or other or of something the university wants to sell“; Twitter, he seems to feel, is a social medium and such only be used for conversations and not broadcasting. I disagree – Twitter, like all IT applications, is a tool and if it can be used successfully in novel ways I would applaud such innovation.

But, like Robert Murdoch’s The Daily newspaper for the iPad, is such innovative use proprietary?  Not necessarily as it’s based on open data (tweets and links) and applications to read such information can be developed on any platform and there are other applications, such as paper.li, which provide similar functionality.  For me Smartr seems  to provide strengths in being designed for a mobile device and I can see myself using it until competition catches up and provides similar functionality for my Android phone.   But to not make use of it because it is not cross-platform would deprive me of a potentially useful service.

Still unsure? Why not watch the video which is available on YouTube and embedded below. And if you’d like to install it visit the Apple iTunes store.

Assessing the Value of a Tweet

Earlier today Phil Bradley published a post on “The value of a tweet“. The post was about the way in which a tweet can be retweeted, especially by someone famous with lots of followers: i.e. Neil Gaiman, @neilhimself, with his 1.5 million followers (note I’d never heard of him!), in order to generate traffic to a resource (in this case a series of photos on the value of libraries). The tweet which had the value was:

which was retweeted following a request from @arktemplar. The tweet from @neilhimself helped to raise awareness of Phil’s series of retro posters on the value of Libraries  across the Twitter community, as can be seen from Twitoaster.  As Phil described in his blog post he saw a huge increase in traffic to his Flickr set, as can be seen from the graph.

But how do we assess the value of Phil’s original tweets which referred to the Flickr photos and the subsequent retweets?

Is the value in the content of the 140 characters? In part, but the value of the content is enhanced by the esteem by which Phil is held within the Library sector, the knowledge that many people will have of Phil’s passion for libraries and the online community  which Phil is an active member of, which is based around his Twitter account, his blog and his other online accounts such as his Flickr and his Podcast accounts. Phil also knows how to make effective use of such services, so his use of the #savelibraries Twitter hashtag will have helped in the dissemination of the tweet to people who don’t follow Phil directly. In addition his use of a bit.ly short UIRL enables statistics on clicks on the URL to be accessed (by appending a + to the bit.ly URL – i.e. http://bit.ly/eI5m2e+).

But do the original tweet and the subsequent retweets have value in themselves or is the value in the impact they have?  The tweets could have some financial value if, for example, they linked to a pages which contained ads. But this isn’t the case here.  Surely, then, the value is in raising awareness of the value of libraries across large numbers of users, with the aim, clearly, of trying to address the cuts in UK public libraries.  Now how much would such a campaign cost if it was carried out using old media? I’m not in a position to make such comparisons but I can’t help but feel that Phil’s tweets, his use of the new media and his engagement with his online community have provided a valuable return on the investment for his series of Twitter posts.

Institutional Use of Twitter by Russell Group Universities

Previous Surveys of Institutional Use of Twitter

Back in July 2009 Liz Azyan published a UK University Twitterleague which listed the number of followers for various official University Twitter accounts. In September 2009 Liz followed this with a List Of UK University Twitter Accounts.

In May 2010 Duncan Hull published a post entitled The University of Twitter, UK: A Quick Survey. which summarised Twitter usage by the 20 Russell Group Universities – these are universities which:

“represent the 20 leading UK universities which are committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector.”

As Duncan pointed out “they are exactly the kind of places you would expect to be embracing and experimenting with new technology“. In response to Duncan’s post Paul Dobson provided further analysis of Twitter usage by Russell Group Universities.

Finally I should mention a recent article on “Top 10 of Social Media in HE” published by the Science Guide blog which provides a summary of Twitter (and Facebook) usage across leading European Universities. This post points out that “Having a closer look at how universities from different countries perform in communicating via Twitter and Facebook, it is easy to see that Great Britain dominates the ranking” :-)

Institutional Use of Twitter by Russell Group Universities

Building on such previous work, a survey of institutional use of Twitter by Russell Group University Web sites was carried out on Monday 10^th January 2011. The survey recorded the number of followers, users followed and tweets published. In addition links to the Tweetstats service are given which provide additional statistical information on Twitter usage, together with a summary of the average number of tweets posts per month. A record was also made of the location and biographical details of the institutional accounts. This information is published in the following table.

	Institution	Nos. of Followers	Following	Tweets	Tweetstats
1	University of Birmingham: @unibirmingham Name: Birmingham Uni Location: Birmingham, UK Web: http://www.birmin… Bio: News and events from the University of Birmingham	4,681	222	1,011	Tweetstats for University of Birmingham:Average 40 tweets per month
2	University of Bristol: @bristoluniName: Bristol University Location: Bristol, England Web: http://www.bristo… Bio: News, events and general announcements from the University of Bristol	4,040	33	1,164	Tweetstats for University of Bristol:Average 91 tweets per month
3	University of Cambridge: @cambridge_uniName: Cambridge University Location: Cambridge, England Web: http://www.cam.ac… Bio: News and Events from the University of Cambridge	11,759	211	923	Tweetstats for University of Cambridge:Average 43 tweets per month
4	Cardiff University: @cardiffuni Name: Cardiff University Location: Cardiff, UK Web: http://www.cardif… Bio:	6,764	43	862	Tweetstats for Cardiff University:Average 25 tweets per month
5	University of Edinburgh: @uniofedinburgh Name: Edinburgh University Location: Edinburgh, United Kingdom Web: http://www.ed.ac.uk/ Bio: Official news and events from The University of Edinburgh	4,092	177	666	Tweetstats for University of Edinburgh:Average 25 tweets per month
6	University of Glasgow: @glasgowuni Name: Glasgow University Location: Scotland Web: http://www.glasgo… Bio: Official news and events from the University of Glasgow	6,007	122	716	Tweetstats for University of Glasgow:Average 26 tweets per month
7	Imperial College: @imperialcollegeName: Imperial College Location: London Web: http://www3.imper… Bio: Imperial on Twitter – follow us for campus alerts and daily highlights. Send your tweet tipoffs to twitter@imperial.ac.uk, or talk direct via @imperialcollege	6,210	2,248	889	Tweetstats for Imperial CollegeAverage 42 tweets per month
8	King’s College London: @kingscollegelonName: King’s CollegeLondon Location: London UK Web: http://www.kcl.ac.uk Bio: News from King’s College London. King’s is a multi-faculty research-led institution and one of the world’s top 25 universities.	865	139	192	Tweetstats for King’s College London:Average 21 tweets per month
9	University of Leeds: @universityleeds Name: University of Leeds Location: Leeds, UK Web: http://www.leeds…. Bio:	3,161	188	573	Tweetstats for University of Leeds:Average 44 tweets per month
10	University of Liverpool: @liverpooluni: Obsolete Account	1,450	0	1
10	University of Liverpool: @livuni Name: Uni of Liverpool Location: Liverpool, UK Web: http://www.liv.ac.uk/study/ Bio: This is the official Twitter channel of the University of Liverpool. Any questions? Tweet us!	2,900	405	1,352	Tweetstats for University of Liverpool:Average 50 tweets per month;
11	LSE: No central single Twitter account found. However several official accounts exists e.g. @LSEpublicevents and @LSENews
12	University of Manchester: No central single Twitter account found
13	Newcastle University: No central single Twitter account found
14	University of Nottingham: @uniofnottinghamName: Nottingham Uni Location: Nottingham Web: http://www.nottin… Bio: A twitter channel for Nottingham University	3,179	1,850	1,662	Tweetstats for University of NottinghamAverage 74 tweets per month
15	University of Oxford: @uniofoxford Name: Oxford University Location: Web: http://www.ox.ac.uk Bio: Twitter stream of the University of Oxford	12,265	48	380	Tweetstats for University of OxfordAverage 74 tweets per month
16	Queen’s University Belfast: @queensubelfast Name: Queen’s University Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK Web: http://www.qub.ac.uk Bio: Queen’s has a record of academic achievement which stretches back more than 150 years. It offers a world class portfolio of research & educational opportunities	1,127	91	369	Tweetstats for Queen’s University BelfastAverage 23 tweets per month
17	University of Sheffield: @sheffielduni Name: Sheffield University Location: Sheffield, UK Web: http://www.sheffi… Bio: Founded in 1905, the University of Sheffield is one of the UK’s leading Russell Group universities with an outstanding record in both teaching and research.	5,869	5,089	744	Tweetstats for University of Sheffield:Average 30 tweets per month
18	University of Southampton: @southamptonnewsName: Uni of Southampton Location: University Road, Southampton Web: http://www.southa… Bio: The official twitter channel for the University of Southampton.	1,876	302	796	Tweetstats for University of Southampton:Average 30 tweets per month
19	University College London: @uclnewsName: UCL News Location: London Web: http://www.ucl.ac… Bio: News from UCL – London’s Global University	2,523	190	940	Tweetstats for University College London:Average 44 tweets per month
20	University of Warwick: @warwickuni Name: Warwick University Location: United Kingdom Web: http://www.warwic… Bio:	6,334	715	1,137	Tweetstats for University of Warwick:Average 40 tweets per month
	TOTAL	83,562	12.073	14,376

Note the @lsepublicevents (which is described as “Free public lectures and debates at LSE, with high profile speakers from government, politics, business, academia and civil society. http://www.lse.ac.uk/events” was not included in this list of institutional accounts as his seems to be a departmental Twitter account. However, for the record, this Twitter account had 10,542 f0llowers, was following 1,162 account and had posted 3,470 tweets.

Discussion

Institutional use of Twitter is relatively new, so best practices are not yet well established. Surveys of Twitter usage can help to identify patterns of usage from which in may be possible to observe emerging best practices.

Profile Information

The information on the Twitter profile can help to understand how institutions regard their use of Twitter.

• Institutions which make it clear that the Twitter account is an official channel or is providing official news : Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton.
• Institutions which define the scope of the Twitter account as covering news and/or events: Universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, KCL and UCL.
• Institutions which provide marketing information in their Twitter profile: KCL, Queen’s University Belfast and Sheffield.

Location Information

A variety of location information was provided in the profiles:

• City and UK: Seven Eight instances: Birmingham, UK; Cardiff, UK; Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Liverpool, UK; London UK; Leeds, UK; Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK; Sheffield, UK
• City and country: Two instances: Bristol, England; Cambridge, England
• Country only: Two instances: Scotland; United Kingdom
• City only: Four instances: London; Liverpool; Nottingham; London
• Road and city: One instance: University Road, Southampton
• No location: One instance: University of Oxford

Location information could potentially be used by automated harvesting tools or by location-sensitive applications. Note it was also noted that non of the Twitter accounts provided location information in a machine-readable format.

Links

The following institutions provided links to their institutional Web site from their Twitter profile:

• Links to home page: Universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Nottingham, Oxford, Sheffield, Southampton and Warwick and Queen’s University Belfast, Imperial College and KCL
• Link to news page: UCL
• Link to Study page: Liverpool
• Link to about/help information: None

Note that links to an institutional Web site from a popular service such as Twitter may help in enhancing an institution’s Google ranking. [Note as described in a  comment to this post, this is unlikely to happen due to use of the NOFOLLOW attribute.]

Also note that a link to a help page could provide information on how the Twitter account is being used.

Metrics

A summary showing the range of various Twitter metrics is given below:

• Numbers of Twitter followers: The numbers ranged from 865 -12,265.
• Numbers of Twitter users followed: The numbers ranged from 33-5,089.
• Numbers of tweets: The numbers ranged from 192-1,167.
• Average numbers of tweet per month: The numbers ranged from 23-91.
• Numbers of institutions not apparently using an official Twitter account: Three institutions to not seem to have an official Twitter account and one institution is not using what seem to be an official Twitter account.

Note that:

• The number Twitter followers may be some indication of value. However this number is likely to be influenced by the size of the institution:
• An institution may wish to develop a policy on following other Twitter users. There is no need to follow other Twitter users, especially if the Twitter account is used for one-way broadcasting of information. If Twitter accounts are followed this will allow direct messages (DMs) to be sent between the institution and the user. Also not that it is possible to configure a Twitter account so that new followers are automatically followed back.
• The number of tweets posted will be affected by the date the Twitter account was created. The average number of tweets posted per month may be a more useful way of comparing usage patterns across institutions.

Emerging Best Practices

The following suggestions are proposed for best practices for institutional Twitter accounts:

• An appropriate profile should be provided. This could be used, for example, to clarify the status of the Twitter account, the scope of usage and to promote the host institution.
• The location of the host institution should be provided, in text and as geo-located metadata, in order for tweets to be available to location-aware services.
• Twitter profiles should provide links back to appropriate pages on the institution’s Web site.

Note that it is probably also desirable to provide a policy on use of an institutional Twitter account. It may be desirable to link to the policy from the Twitter profile, so that users can easily discover the scope of the Twitter account, policies on following users and policies on responding to messages.

Also note that this post does not seek to address the question as to whether an institution should have an official Twitter account. That question, and related issues such as the purpose of the account, who should manage it and how it should be resourced, will be very dependent on institutional factors, including issues such as the relationship with other communication channels, possibly including Facebook.

Finally it should be added that it was observed that many of the institutional Twitter accounts had branded the Twitter home page, some with just a background image but others, such as Cardiff University, with additional textual information and link information (though this is not hyperlinked). However it should be noted that information provided on the Twitter background will not be available to those who use a dedicated Twitter client so there will be a need to provide relevant information in the Twitter bio field.

Your Feedback

I’d welcome feedback and comments on this survey and the accompanying suggestions. Is the data I’m provided correct? Are the suggested emerging best practices appropriate? Are there other suggestions which could be provided? I’m always welcome snapshots of Twitter statistics for other institutions (from the UK and beyond), although note that in order to provide meaningful comparisons, data should be provided for an official institutional Twitter account and not for departmental accounts.

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NOTE: Information on the official University of Liverpool Twitter account has been received (which could not be found easily on Google). The table and summary information have been updated.  Also note that the totals in the table were collated after the post was initially published.

Evidence of Personal Usage Of Social Web Services

Gathering Evidence on Personal Use of Social Web Services

A recent blog post on “My information consumption habits or how having a smartphone changed the way I work” by Aaron Tay alerted me to tools which can be used to provide an insight into personal usage of various collaborative and communications tools. As the title of Aaron’s post suggests such analyses can help to confirm, or perhaps identify, changes in personal working practices.

Evidence of My Use of Twitter

We may think that we know how we use various tools, but might we be mis-remembering?  The MyFirstTweet service tells me that I posted my  first tweet on 14 March 2007 : a boring post about filling in  my expenses – just like everyone else, I had no idea of what Twitter was about and what benefits it might provide. However I might like to think that I quickly spotted Twitter’s potential and have been a regular user since then.  However the Tweetstats service gives a different picture:

Interpreting the Evidence

It seems I made little use of Twitter during 2007 (peaking at 25 tweets in August 2007). It was only in January and February 2008 that I made significant use of Twitter, with 105 and 130 tweets. But this was not sustainable and there were no tweets in the following three months (although this, subsequently discovered,  was incorrect due, I suspect, to a failure for the tweets to have been archived).

Ignoring the uncertainties of my Titter usage over the missing period it seems that regular Twitter postings began in July 2008 – and from the archive of my tweets on the Backupmytweets service I discovered that this seems to have been when use of Twitter at events and event hashtags was starting to take off in the JISC environment: “AT the JISC Innovation Forum, Keele Univ., listening to Sarah Porter. #jif08“.  And looking at the Twitter statistics for my colleague Paul Walk I see a similar trend, with little usage in 2007, but growth beginning in February 2008, around the time that I started to make significant use of the service.

Incidentally there was a gap in the data for September – November 2008 which made me suspect that my apparent lack of usage from April – June 2008 was due to a glitch in the system, and this was confirming by looking at my Twitter archives from which I can see that I had posted to Twitter during these months. Indeed April 2008  was the month I attended the Museums and the Web 2008 conference and first started to make intensive use of twitter at and event, as illustrated by my social tweet after arriving at the conference. So having started writing this post based on an assumption of the importance of gathering evidence I’m now having to flag the fact that evidence can be flawed (I assume the missing data might be due to the teething problems Twitter servers experienced due to growth in usage).

Since 2008 I have tweeted every month.  But this evidence suggests that for over a year after first using Twitter I hadn’t found a particular use for the service.  Perhaps this is likely to be the case for other social networking services – there is a need for there to be a significant user community before the benefits can be appreciated.  Or, alternatively, perhaps there was a need for better Twitter tools to be developed. Initially I made use of the Web interface, but in July 2008 I was mainly using the Twhirl desktop client and by November 2008 TweetDeck was my preferred desktop client (and, from the archive of my tweets I found that on 8 July 2008 I commented that “Tweetdeck 0.15.1 beta is much better than 0.15 :-)“).

Reflections on Implications For Use of  Other Social Web Services

The above graph suggests that in the case of Twitter it was only after two years of first using the service that it became embedded in my working practices.  I wonder if this pattern will be reflected in my uses of other Social Web services.  And if this pattern is replicated across other early adopters of services what might the implications be for the service providers?  Perhaps such patterns will demonstrate the importance of building a critical mass of users quickly and the need to ensure that funding from venture capitalists is available to fund the service while its usage if still low?  But what of developments funded in the public sector?  Is a two year funding cycle which may be typical long enough to build up sufficient momentum to demonstrate the value of services whose effectiveness may be dependent on large numbers of users?

Gap Analysis: They Tweeted At #online10 But Not At #scl10

Twitter Was Popular at #Online10

Last week I attended the Online Information 2010 conference, held at Olympia in London on 30 November – 2 December.  Unfortunately due to other commitments I could only attend on the first day.  But I was able to get a feel for the discussions on the next two days by watching the #online10 column in my Tweetdeck Twitter client – and I was able to do this during what would otherwise have been unproductive times such as standing on an overcrowded bus going to work.

At the time of writing Summarizr informs me that there have been 4,342 tweets from Twitter 1,022 users. This evidence suggests that Twitter had an important role to play at the conference, enabling those users to take part in discussions centred around the various talks presented at the conference as well as enabling conference delegates to cultivate and develop professional relationships. Without Twitter, for example, I wouldn’t have met @Ankix and, over a meal and a few pints in the Warwick Arms with longstanding Twitter colleagues @karenblakeman,  @hazelh and @akenyg and @stephanbuettner, another new contact, shared experiences of the implications of the cuts across the library sector in the UK, Sweden and Germany.

Little Use of Twitter at #SCL2010

On the same day that I gave a talk at Online Information I was also presenting a pre-recorded video at the Scholarly Communication Landscape: Opportunities and challenges symposium which was held at Manchester Conference Centre, Manchester. For this one-day conference Summarizr informs us that there had been only 38 tweets from 6 Twitter users, but only my colleague Stephanie Taylor (who was supporting my video presentation) and Kevin Ashley, DCC Director  and speaker at the symposium) tweeted more than once. So whilst the far fewer numbers of tweets for this symposium will be due in part to it being a smaller event, running for a single day, the lack of any participation from the audience is, I feel, interesting.

The page about the event informs us that the symposium aims to “investigate the opportunities and challenges presented by the technological, financial and social developments that are transforming scholarly communication” with the programme going to add that “Online social networks are playing an increasingly important role in scholarly communication. These virtual communities are bringing together geographically dispersed researchers to create an entirely new way of doing research and creating scholarly work.“

Quite.  But this one-day event, which was open to all staff and postgraduate research students at the University of Manchester, seems to have been unsuccessful in providing an opportunity for participants to try out for themselves Twitter,  an example of a popular online social network which is playing an increasingly important role in scholarly communication, as we saw from the evidence of its use at the Online Information 2010 conference. But rather than point out what the non-users of Twitter may have been missing (such as the active learning and the community engagement which I described above) it might be more interesting to reflect on the more general issues of how non-users of a service can be identified and how one might gain feedback from non-users of a service.

Gap Analysis

Getting feedback from users of a service can be easy – you know who they are and you will often have communications channel with them in which you can invite feedback. But getting feedback from non-users can be much more difficult – although such feedback can be immensely value in understanding reasons why a service isn’t being used and ensuring that enthusiast users don’t give a misleading impression of the benefits.

It might be useful to speculate why services aren’t being used.  Possible reasons for the  lack of Twitter use by the audience at the Scholarly Communication Landscape  symposium could be:

• Technology problems: lack of or problems with a WiFi network could be responsible for a lack of event-related tweets.
• Technology limitations: Potential Twitter users may feel that use of a Twitter client at an event is too complex.
• It’s trivial: Twitter might be regarded as a trivial activity.
• It’s rude: Use of Twitter at an event might be regarded as being rude and inconsiderate to other participants and to the speakers
• Personal/profession balance: Twitter users may use it for personal rather than professional purposes.
• Failure to see relevance: Participants may fail to see the benefits of use of Twitter at events.
• Relevance not applicable: Participants may appreciate potential benefits of use of Twitter at events but feel such benefits are not applicable for them.
• Style of working: Use of Twitter (or networked technologies) may not be relevant to personal styles of working.
• Organisational culture: managers or others in the organisation may frown on such usage.

These are some of my thoughts on why Twitter might not have been used at the symposium, and you may be able to provide additional suggestions.  But how do we find out the real reasons as opposed to our speculations?  And how do we apply approaches for gap analysis to other areas besides use of Twitter? For example, in light of the subject areas which may have been covered at the event, how could we gauge views on the areas such as openness and institutional repositories? How can we gather evidence in order to inform policies on, say, deployment and use of new services or approaches?

Increasingly I’m beginning to think that these type of events should be much more than dissemination channels and provide feedback mechanisms to provide responses, enable aggregated views to be analysed, etc. For an event aimed at staff and postgraduate research students at an institution, such as the Scholarly Communication Landscape symposium which was open to all staff and postgraduate research students at the University of Manchester it would seem that there was an ideal opportunity to gain feedback on the opportunities and challenges in the areas of scholarly communications. And those opportunities and challenges will be shared by many others in the higher education sector.

My concluding thoughts:  events can provide a valuable opportunity for gathering feedback and comments on the areas addressed at the event. There is an opportunity to gather such feedback  using simple technologies which may be very costly to gather in other ways. Open sharing of such feedback can be beneficial to the wider community.  So let’s do it.

Or to provide a more tangible example.  One could ask an audience from one’s host institution if they would be interested in using an communications tool such as Twitter or Yammer to support work activities. Or perhaps whether staff would be willing to make their professional outputs available under a Creative Commons licence.  An example of how this might be approached is given below.

Asynchronous Twitter Discussions Of Video Streams

Twitter Captioned Videos Using iTitle

Martin Hawksey’s software for using Twitter to provide captions of video continues to improve.  At UKOLN’s IWMW 2010 event we used the iTitle service to mash together videos of the plenary talks with the accompanying Twitter stream. As you can see from, for example, Chris Sexton’s opening talk at the event, you can go back in time to see not only what Chris said (nothing new in providing a video of a talk) but also what the audience was tweeting about at the time – and you can also search the tweets in order to go directly (once the video has been downloaded into the local buffer) to what may be regarded as crowd-sourced video bookmarks – for example a search for “finance’ shows that at 9 mins 35 seconds into the video there was a comment that “Does anyone seriously think HR, Finance, Payroll and Student Record Systems can be run as Shared Services??! #iwmw10?“.

Asynchronous Twitter Captioning

That is an example of being able to replay the Twitter discussions which took place during a live event. But what if you wanted engage in discussions of a recorded presentation? Back in June 2010 Martin published a blog post which described uTitle, a development to his Twitter captioning service in which “Convergence @youtube meets @twitter: In timeline commenting of YouTube videos using Twitter [uTitle]“. In the post Martin said that “Having looked at synchronous communication I was interested to extend the question and look at asynchronous communication (i.e. what was said about what was said after it was said)“.

An example can be seen from the uTitled video of the When The Ax Man Cometh video, which was originally published on Seth Odell’s Higher Ed Live webinar and featured an interview with Mark Greenfield. I felt that this interview, which Mark has described on his blog, would be of particular interest to those of us working in the UK’s higher education sector as it raises challenging questions about the future of Web and IT services in higher education (and note I should thank Martin for processing the video using uTitle and Seth and Mark for giving permission for the video to be used in this way). In particular it asks the audience to consider the implications of idea’s published in a book on A University for the 21st Century written by James Duderstadt, President Emeritus at the University of Michigan:

• Higher education is an industry ripe for the unbundling of activities. Universities will have to come to terms with what their true strengths are and how those strengths support their strategies – and then be willing to outsource needed capabilities in areas where they do not have a unique advantage.
• Universities are under increasing pressure to spin off or sell or close down parts of their traditional operations in the face of new competition. They may well find it necessary to unbundle their many functions, ranging from admissions to counseling to instruction and certification.

Although this book was published way back in March 2000 the view that “Universities are under increasing pressure to spin off or sell or close down parts of their traditional operations” is particularly relevant to those of us working in higher education in the UK in 2010.

So if you do want to join in a debate (as opposed to simply passively watch the video) you can add comments to the post on the Higher Ed Live Web site or you can use uTitle to give your thoughts  in real time using your Twitter account. An example of the interface can be seen below in which, in response to Mark Greenfield’s assertion that “For profit companies can adapt more quickly then Universities” I respond “If true, don’t we need to accept need top change rather than accept as inevitable“.

Discussion

Rather than discussing the content of Mark’s talk in this post I’d like to give some comments on the use of Twitter for making asynchronous comments about a video clip.

The first comment is that if you do this as you watch a video your Twitter stream is likely to be confused.  Unlike use of Twitter at an amplified event you will be tweeting on your own, and you will not be taking part in a real-time conversation with others centred around an event hashtag.

Also, unlike a live presentation, it is possible to pause the video while you compose your tweet – and even fast forward to see how the ideas in the talk develop and then rewind and give your tweets. On a pre-recorded video we can benefit from the 20/20 hindsight which is not possible in real life :-)

I am also uncertain as to how people will feel about adding comments to such a video, especially those doing this when no comments have been published – there might be a concern that you will look stupid making a comment which the speaker addresses later on.

I should also add that when I made my two comments I used a second Twitter account in order to avoid spamming my Twitter followers within strange tweets.  (Note that as the account had not been validated by Twitter at the time, the tweets were not being displayed in the Twitter search interface – Martin retweeted the tweets in order to ensure that the uTitle display contained some comments).

I’d like to conclude by asking two questions:

• Is there a demand for a service which provides captioning of pre-recorded videos?
• Should Twitter users claim second Twitter accounts which can be used in conjunction with automated agents (such as uTitle)?

Conventions For Metrics For Event-Related Tweets

According to Summarizr there have been 6,927 tweets for the #altc2010 event hashtag, which compares with 4,735 tweets for the #altc2009 event. We can therefore conclude that there has been an increase of almost 50%  in Twitter usage. Or can we?  If we had carried out the analysis immediately after the event the numbers would probably have been different.  And use of either of these hashtags now, when talking about a past event, will have a different context to using the hashtag during the event, when such tags provided some level of engagement with the Twitter community centred around the event’s Twitter stream.

In order to make meaningful comparisons there is a need to be able to filter the tweets in a consistent fashion.  Fortunately the Twapper Keeper service allows tweets to be filtered by various parameters, including a date range.  And since the Summarizr service uses Twapper Keeper to provide its statistics it is possible to use Summarizr’s metrics in a consistent fashion.

But what date range should be used? An initial suggestion might be for the day(s) of the event. But this would fail to include discussions which take place immediately before and after an event. In addition this could also mean that tweets from an international audience not being included, such as tweets from an Australian audience which take place the following day. Such confusions over dates might apply particularly to events held in other countries since the times used in Twitter are based on GMT.

In order to avoid such confusions when I cite statistics from Summarizr I now include tweets posted during the week of an event, typically starting on the Sunday and finishing on the following Saturday.  For an event lasting for a day I start on the day before the event and finish on the following day.

The syntax for obtaining statistics from Twapper Keeper  over a date range is:
http://summarizr.labs.eduserv.org.uk/?hashtag=hashtag&sm=mm&sd=dd&sy=yyyy&em=mm&ed=dd&ey=yyyy

where:

sm is the start month (from 1 to 12)
sd is the start day (from 1 to 31)
sy is the start year (e.g. 2010)

em is the end month (from 1 to 12)
ed is the end day  (from 1 to 31)
ey is the end year (e.g. 2010)

For example the following URL will give statistics for the #altc2009 hashtag between 6-11 September 2009:

http://summarizr.labs.eduserv.org.uk/?hashtag=altc2009&sm=9&sd=6&sy=2009&em=9&ed=11&ey=2009

and the following statistics for the #altc2010 hashtag between 5-12 September 2010:

http://summarizr.labs.eduserv.org.uk/?hashtag=altc2010&sm=9&sd=5&sy=2010&em=9&ed=12&ey=2010

This provides the following statistics:

	ALT-C 2009	ALT-C 2010
Nos. of tweets	4,010	6,238
Nos. of twitterers	650	666
Nos. of hashtags tweeted	125	277
Nos. of URLs tweeted	554	683
Nos. of geo-located tweets	0	35

This indicates that there has been of 56% in twitter usage between comparable periods in 2009 and 2010.

Note that the statistics for the numbers of geo-located tweets demonstrate that in 2009 nobody was providing geo-located tweets for the event hashtag. This data could easily be lost if Twitter users today started to refer to the 2009 event and had started to make use of geo-location.

To sum up my proposal:

• The start date for a one-day event is the previous day and the end date is the following day.  This will address internationalisation issues due to engagement for those in other time zones and cover discussions just before and just after the event.
• The start date for an event lasting longer than a single day is the previous Sunday and the end date is the following Saturday.  This will address internationalisation issues due to engagement for those in other time zones and cover discussions just before and just after the event.

Is this a convention we can agree on, to ensure that meaningful comparisons can be made?