From Search Engine to Twitter Optimisation

Workshops on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

As described on the JISC Digitisation blog the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) are running a series of free workshops entitled “Improve your online presence“. The workshop series, which will be held in June and July in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, is being coordinated by Netskills. The workshops will “introduce simple and inexpensive search engine optimisation techniques to improve your online presence, web visibility and website traffic“. I will be contributing to the workshop content by running a session on the role of the Social Web in enhancing access to scholarly and cultural content.

The Potential of Twitter

The potential of Twitter was recently discussed in a post entitled How much is it worth to be one of Twitter’s suggested users? which was published in the Guardian’s Technology blog. As described in this post, being included in Twitter’s Suggested Users List can boost one’s numbers of followers, and thus traffic to links included in the tweets being published.

Coincidentally on Friday 5^th June 2009, whilst accessing this blog’s administrators interface in order to delete one or two spam comments which had failed to be detected by the Akisimet spam filter, I noticed that the top three referrers for the day were from the Twitter Web site (from Twitter.com, twitter.com/home and twitter.com/Twitter_tops). On further investigation I discovered that a page on the Twitter Web site which provides links to resources about use of Twitter had included the following link to a post on this blog:

What is Twitter? It’s An Interactive Business Card: http://cli.gs/YL6R4D –Share this article: http://bit.ly/180g9w

Now although this link resulted in driving the most traffic to the blog in over 3 weeks, this was disappointing to me. I had been after evidence that Twitter can provide successful in driving traffic to arbitrary resources, rather than just traffic to an article about the Twitter service.

However a better example was provided by the blog statistics for UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog. As illustrated the statistics for May 2009 showed that, after Google, the second most popular Web site for driving traffic to the blog was Twitter.

In this particular example the most popular post in the month was one on Explaining the Risks and Opportunities Framework- a blog post which was announced on Twitter at 08.55 on 21^st May:

Blog post explaining the Risks & Opportunities Framework published at http://tinyurl.com/p72kld

Evidence, it would seem, that Twitter can enhance the visibility of one’s Web content and therefore provide an example I can use in the workshop. But what of the dangers of using Twitter in this way? Might not Twitter followers resent being used as fodder for marking materials? Isn’t there a danger of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?

Twitter Optimisation

Although some people regard Twitter as being essentially an informal communications channel and a tool for community building we can now observe that it is being used for a much wider variety of purposes. But what are the emerging best practices which one should adopt in order to optimise Twitter’s potential to maximise access to ’stuff’ out there, as opposed to engaging with one’s Twitter community?

Keep it short: Perhaps the best advice is to keep your tweets short to allow other to retweet (RT) the message, perhaps including their own comments.

Acknowledge the limitations: If you do intend to use Twitter as a one -way publishing mechanism (as, for example, the MLA does) then you need to recognise that you should not expect to gain the benefits which fans of Twitter, as described in a post entitled “The person is the point” by Mike Ellis, feel they gain from its use as an individual.

Consider publishing a policy: You may also wish to consider having a policy covering your use of Twitter, as described in a recent post on “Emerging Best Practices For Institutional Use of Twitter“.

Think about your followers: If you are using Twitter as an individual but also wish to promote areas of your work you will need to consider the balance between engagement (chatting with your mates), support (helping your mates), requests (asking your mates for held) and dissemination (telling your mates what you’ve being doing and what you’re proud of). This was an area I addressed in a post on “Twitter Can Pimp Up Your Stuff – But Should It?“.

And if you’re still sceptical that Twitter has any significant role in delivering traffic to a Web site I’d suggest you read the TechCrunch article “For TechCrunch, Twitter = Traffic (A Statistical Breakdown)“.

Twitterers Subvert Daily Mail’s Racist Poll

On Friday I was alerted by one of the people I follow on Twitter to a poll which asked “Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue?“.

I responded by voting Yes, and send a tweet  which said

I’ve just been to the Daily Mail Web site for the first time ever. And so should you – http://bit.ly/w4b6Q

My tweet was then echoed (’retweeted’) around the Twitterverse by a number of people including lucy3point0 and ccsnjf with others picking up on my posts and adding their own commentary (as shown). Other communities picked up on this for, as you can see, there were over 90% of people voting on the Daily Mail Web site that the NHS should allow gipsies to jump the queue!

I was intriguing to see what the final total was (it reached 96% at one point and I grabbed the  screen image shown above – to use in a forthcoming talk – with the total of 94%). But on Saturday I found that allow the question was included in a list of Daily Mail polls, clicking on the link took me to another page on the Daily Mail Web site, and not to the results of the poll. (Ironically another discussion which took place on Twitter on Friday discussed URL shorteners and the possible dangers of  a lack of long-term persistency of URL shortening services – in this case the short URL for the Daily Mail poll is still available – http://bit.ly/w4b6Q – but the page it points to – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/index.html?pollId=1011506 – is not the gipsies poll.

The reason I captured the screen was to make use of this example in a forthcoming workshop session I am facilitating on “Using the Social Web to Maximise Access to your Resources“. I’ll make the point that Twitter can be used to engage a community through a viral campaign for (or against) a particular idea. I’ve an interest, therefore, in how this poll went viral, and also in the ethics of commenting on the poll and attempting to influence the votes.

This story has been picked up on blogs.journalism.co.uk with an article on Twitterers claim victory over loaded Daily Mail gypsy poll. Here I find that :

Brighton-based senior lecturer in experimental psychology Dr Sam Hutton contacted Journalism.co.uk today to reveal that there was also an email campaign among UK-based psychologists who, as part of their jobs, take questionnaire neutrality seriously.

Was this the start of the viral campaign? Or did a number of people become aware of the poll and mention it on Twitter  independently of each other?  And why did this become viral whereas, for example, a poll on Should immigrants be forced to respect British culture? has failed to attract a similar level of interest, despite covering a similar topic which is liable to inflame liberals?  Do successful viral campaigns need to attract the attention of ‘hubs’ to use a concept from Gladwell’s Tipping Point, which Martin Weller mentions in a post, also published on Friday, on “Connections-versus outputs“.

And what of the ethical aspects from those of us who are engaged in  observing, commenting on and analysing the way in which the Social Web is shaping our society?

You should note that my initial tweet did not suggest how people should vote:

I’ve just been to the Daily Mail Web site for the first time ever. And so should you – http://bit.ly/w4b6Q

The wording I used was also intended to intrigue people; anyone who knows me or has read my tweets or blog posts over time will know that I am not in sympathy with the Daily Mail’s views. The tweet was also brief, and so allowed other to easily retweet it i.e. append “RT @briankelly” to the front and add heir own commentary, such as lucy3point0’s “Laugh or cry?“.

However I should disclose that I voted three times in the poll. Despite responding to a suggestion that “If you disable cookies you and refresh the page and vote gain to your heart’s content” by saying that we should keep the high moral ground over the Daily Mail I did vote on two additional occasions (using the Flock and Opera browsers) – as I wanted to see if I could get the error message which a couple of people had encountered. In retrospect I should have ensured that these two votes cancelled each other out.

And finally I’m also linking to, citing and including a screen image of a number of people who have engaged in the debate. Should this be done? Am I infringing copyright (indeed, am I infringing the Daily Mail’s copyright in including a screen image taken from their Web site)?

I am taking a risk management approach to this. Rather than seeking written permission (which may be time-consuming) I have made a judgement as to whether the people I have mentioned are likely to be concerned. I suspect not.  And inclusion of the poll from the Daily Mail Web site? This may be a risk, although I might claim fair use. But won’t it be a greater risk for the Daily Mail if they ask me to remove?  If I do get a letter from their solictors I don’t intend to fight them. But everyone will know they have done this.

“#firefoxcrashes or #firefoxisfine”

Recently the FireFox browser has been crashing on me.  But because FireFox is a Good Thing ^TM I’ve tending to gloss over the problems (we do this for our loved ones, don’t we). But when the browser started to crash consistently when embedded images in this blog I decided enough was enough. I’ve moaned a bit on Twitter about FireFox over the past few days and was interested to see that other people had had similar experiences. So I thought I’d try and find out how widespread this problem might be.

In order to minimise the time and effort in analysing responses  I sent the tweet:

Firefox is crashing frequently. Is this true for others? Respond with #firefoxcrashes or #firefoxisfine. Please RT.

I then used the search capabilities in Tweetdeck to search for tweets containing #firefoxcrashes or #firefoxisfine (bearing in mind that retweets would contain both strings. The response are illustrated in the screen shot (or you can see the live search results for #firefoxcrashes and #firefoxisfine).

There seems to be growing evidence that FireFox is not as reliable as we might have expected. And as I know a number of the people who responded I am confident that these responses aren’t coming from people who think that open source software is some form of communism, but from people who prefer the FireFox browser to Internet Explorer.

The next question might be “what is the cause of the problem?” A couple of people suggested it might be FireFox plugin bloat or maybe problems with specific FireFox plugins.

The final question is “what do I do next?” Tolerating the problem was no longer acceptable, so I wondered whether I should use Google Chrome (which is installed on my PC) as my main browser. But I also wondered whether it would be timely to try out a new browser, But rather than installing Apple’s Safari browser, which a couple of people suggested, I decided to try out Flock.

However during the installation of Flock I also restarted my PC, which had been put in hiberation at the end of the working day for a while. And as there were various plugins I was missing I decided to restart FireFox – which I’m now finding is working fine. So I think I’ll stick with FireFox unless the problems re-occur.

But to me the ease of getting a rapid and semi-structured response from Twitter was the most interesting part of the exercise.  A couple of people responded asking for details of my operating system I was running, FireFox version number, installed plugins, etc. Now I could have set up a SurveyMonkey form to gather such information – but I know that not many would have responded. I feel that the important thing was that the survey was available from within the recipient’s environment – they could immediately respond from whichever Twitter client they were using.

What, though, of the others for whom #firefoxcrashes? What do you intend to do? Opera, Chrome, Safari, Flock – or even the other browser?

Reflections on Use of Twitter at the #CILIP-CYMRU09 Conference

Last week I gave a talk on “Virtual Space for All: The Opportunities and Challenges Provided By The Social Web 2.0” at the CILIP Wales, Welsh Libraries, Archives and Museums Conference 2009. The organisers, Mandy Powell in particular, were keen on building on the success of the amplification of the recent CILIP2 open meeting by encouraging exploitation of the conference’s WiFi network though use of Twitter with the conference tag ‘#cilip-cymru09‘. Although the numbers of twitterers were small I thought it was interesting to observe and reflect on the ways in which Twitter was being used and the possible benefits it can provide as usage grows.

Jane Stevenson of the Archives Hub, MIMAS, University of Manchester, was the main conference twitterer. As can be seen for the accompanying image, Jane provided a running commentary of the talks (in this case my talk) with, on a number of occasions, links provided to the resources being described, such as the link to the National Library of Wales community wiki at www.ourwales.org. What we have here is potentially an accessibility benefit, provided by the textual transcript of a talk.

In contrast a tweet by BeccaDavies, who chaired my session which asked “have we ritualised our reasons for not allowing access to web 2.0 – can we remember why? #cilip-cymru09” provided me with a new insight into my talk (a talk which I have given on a number of occasions recently). Have established a number of unthinking reasons for not engaging with the Social Web?  I’d not thought of it in those terms before.

Bob McKee, CEO of CILIP, in his introductory comments for the panel session, suggested that as well as the physical space provided by libraries and the virtual space which I described,  there is also an internal space, where the learning takes place. A tweet by MartinNHW commented on this remark: “#cilip-cymru09 Bob McKee – re Martyn Wade: space between our ears – echoes of JG Ballard’s inner space – as well as physical and virtual“. Afterwards I heard Bob remark that he hadn’t made the connection with JG Ballard’s ‘inner space’, but seemed to welcome this analogy. Again we are seeing how Twitter can provide differing perpectives on a talk, which can help enrich the learning for others.

We are starting to see a number of posts describing experiments in using Twitter in lectures, such as  Where for art thou Twitter? on the Classroom 2 blog, and The Twitter Experiment – Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas on the Kesmit-ing blog, Classroom idea: Twitter note-taking on Steve Outing’s blog, and Embracing the Twitter Classroom on the Huffington Post. We’ll be seeing much more of this, I suspect.

How Do New Ideas Start? How Do New Contacts Develop?

The Question

How do you ideas start? How can a informal conversation lead to an exploration of new ideas? How do such conversations start? And how does one participate in such conversations, especially with new people?

These were a series of questions which occurred to me a few days ago, following some early morning light-hearted banter on Twitter. I thought I’d share the dialogue and invite comments on the more general issues.

The Twitter Discussions

At 7 am on Friday 15^th May 2009 I got up and downloaded the new tweets on my iPod Touch.  I noticed that James Clay had spotted that the “Latest upgrade to TwitterFon on the iPhone now includes Ads. There will be a paid for Pro version which doesn’t“. As I was using Twitterfon to view the tweet I had an interest in alternative Twitter clients, in case the ads on the new version were to intrusive. In response to my query on alternatives Joss Winn responded by suggesting that “if you’re going to pay, Tweetie is worth every penny“. Now I’ve not met Joss (as far as I know) but, a few months ago started following him on Twitter and subscribe to his blog.

In order to put his suggestion into context, I visited his blog and spotted his (then current) post on “The user is in control“. This post was written in response to Andy Powell’s post about Identity in a Web 2.0 World and contained some comments which reflected my view of how Web 2.0 is requiring higher education to challenge some of the assumptions we have previously taken for granted (in particular that higher educational institutions should regard themselves as automatically the main provider of a student’s digital identity).  As I appreciated Joss’s work in this area, I tipped my hat in his direction with a tweet posted at 07:23 saying “Ta for suggesting Tweetie app. BTW have just looked at your blog & will cite your post on “The user is in control” l8tr today“. I’d made links with a new contact before 07.30 am.

When I arrived at work forthy minutes later Joss had responded with a jocal tweet:
responded shortly afterwards saying “excellent :-) A citation from Brian Kelly surely counts towards the REF!“. And in a similar vein I made fun on the notion that citing tweets would have any relevance to REF (the Research Exercise Framework alternative to the RAE for identifying the merits of research publications:

“A citation from Brian Kelly surely counts towards the REF!” True – so if I cite u, will u cite me? (hmm should have DMed that!)”.

Martin Weller observed this dialogue and joined in by suggesting that “semi-seriously we should work up our own set of metrics of reputation etc so we can compare when REF is done“. Following a few further tweets between Martin, Joss and myself a few hours later Martin published a blog post on “What would ALT-REF look like?“. The blog post included an image (shown below) which captured the discussions:

Discussion

Martin Weller’s suggestion was that an alternative to REF would “take in the sort of distributed identity we have online, so measures activity in blogging, delicious, slideshare, YouTube, twitter, etc. It would need to measure not just activity but influence, impact, etc in some data driven manner“. Whether this idea has any merits might be worth exploring on Martin’s blog. My more specific interest is how the people who may be working together across the “blogging, delicious, slideshare, YouTube, twitter, etc” services might find each and share ideas which, at some later point, might provide significant benefits.

Martin and myself  have already benefitted from the discussions we’ve had on Twitter and from reading and commenting on each other’s blog posts, with the shared understanding we’ve gained having led to a submission for a workshop session at the ALT-C conference which we’ll be faciliting at the conference in September. I have also received contributions to a number of peer-reviewed papers from contacts I’ve met on Twitter.

Thinking about this in more detail, I realise that typically I might start following someone on Twitter if I feel I might gain something from this, such as new insights into digital library developments, use of Web 2.0, digital preservation, etc. If I do find myself following links embedded in tweets or enjoying contributions to a twitter discussion I might look at the Twitterer’s blog (if, as is often the case, they have one) and subscribe to it so I can read their ideas in more depth on their blog. And this might then lead to further sharing of ideas and possibly joint work.

But if you don’t tweet or don’t blog then you are likely to be invisible to me.  This, I’m sure, won’t be of concern to many people! But, more generally, won’t a failure to have a presence in the blogosphere, on Twitter and in other social media which are being increasingly used in certain sectors of the research community result in a failure to have one’s ideas being known about and opportunities to engage with others being missed? Speculation on my part, I’ll admit. And there will be a need to gather evidence. So I’ve provided my anecdote.  Anyone had similar experiences?

(TwitterFall) You’re My Wonder Wall

This year’s Museums and the Web conference (MW2009) marked the first occasion I have attended an event during which the Twitter back channel has been embraced by the conference organisers and by many conference participants and not just the usual early adopters.

At last year’s event (MW2008) we saw many developers making use of Twitter, with a display of the tweets about the conference (i.e. tagged with #mw2008) being shown near the registration area. And as a demonstration of the willingness of the conference organisers (David Bearman and Jennifer Trant) to embrace innovation at the conference a live display of the tweets, which were being aggregated by Mike Ellis’s Onetag software, were shown during Clifford Lynch’s closing talk at the conference. I have to admit, though, that there were concerns about this live, unmoderated display of Twitter posts during a talk: what if personal banter were displayed (”anyone fancy going for a drink later?”);  critical comments about the speakers (”this is a boring talk”) or bad language  or even spam from people who weren’t at the conference.

But whilst such concerns may be legitimate, David and Jennifer showed that they were willing to tak and risk and “just do it”. So when the conference delegates arrived at the auditorium for the conference welcome and opening talk we found two computer displays: one of the speaker’s slides and the other a display of Twitter posts tagged with the #mw2009 tag, using the Twitterfall software, 

And judging by comments made on the conference blog, many people found that this live display of tweets in the opening session provided a valuable way of developing a shared sense of community and active participation which continued throughout the conference, with many newcomers subscribing to Twitter, following the more well-established Twitter users and engaging with the discussions themselves.    In fact use of Twitter at the conference was so popular that, during the opening talk, there was a message displayed showing the the #mw2009 tag was ‘trending’ – and was one of the top ten tags used during the day.

Which is not to say that everyone found the Twitterfall display useful: some participants, for example, did find the display distracting. And once the tag was included in the top tags of the day it, perhaps inevitably, attracted the attention of Twitter spammers, with a tweet from ‘PantyGirl’ - and an associated image being included in the live Twitterfall display.

But despite such concerns, others identified some perhaps unexpected benefits of such displays of live tweets. After I published a tweet one person in the audience, with whom I had worked with a few years ago but hadn’t spoke to since, spotted my image in the display and sent me a direct message suggesting that we should meet up. The ability for participants at a large conference to make their prescence known in this way is a benefit which I hadn’t prevviously considered.

Someone else, who hadn’t used Twitter prior to the conference, reflected that in plenary talks people often lose concentration, even if the talks are interesteding (as the opening plenary talk at MW 2009 was). Having additional channels, in which other participants can share their thoughts and provide perhaps different views can help to provide richer insights into the talks.

But what of the dangers that people might make inappropriate comments. Well at MW2009, apart from the PantyGirl spam (which I suspect most people found inoffensive) I feel that the Twittering participants were aware of the issues and avoided tweets which others might have felt inoffensive or inappropriate.

The benefits of the conference Twitter back channel were also officially recognised in the firanl session at the conference when Jon Pratty provided prizes for the MW2009 Backchannel Stars for Saturday. And I was pleased to be the first in the list of prize-winners for my two tweets:

briankelly Due to lack of unions in museums sector @jtrant& David Bearman have got us working at #mw2009 on a Saturday. Capitalist oppressors.

briankelly: @bsletten is right – photo at http://tinyurl.com/3aessg (expand) could be me. Waiting for groupies to arrive at #mw2009

But what of next year? Clearly many particioants found the Twitter wall display useful, with one participant commenting that  ”based on how well tweets were working @ mw2009 I set up a twitter account for our staff intranet. Public site next? #mw2009“. But this wasn’t true for everyone.  Should this be managed by better use of the physical space, I wonder – perhaps suggesting that those who don’t wish to be distributed by the visual intrusion should sit on one side of the lecture theatre?  Or perhaps, with the growing popularity of iPhones and iPod Touches participants should  simply view the communal wall on their own mobile device?

Further Developments of a Risks and Opportunities Framework

I have previously described a risks and opportunities framework which I will be presenting shortly at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference.

At the Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists conference I described a slightly updated version of the framework, which includes ‘Critical Friends‘ as a means of ensuring that a degree of scepticism is applied to planned innovative services.

The framework is based on the notion that the risks and benefits of innovation cannot be considered without considering its intended purpose.

In order to ensure that the framework does not result in inertia and an avoidance of new developments it is envisaged that the approach will also be applied to existing services, in-house development, etc.

During my talk on “A Risks and Opportunities Framework For Archives 2.0” at the Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists conference I gave an illustration of how this framework might be applied in two contexts related to use of Web 2.0 services: use of (a) Twitter by individuals in an organisation and (b) organisational use of Facebook.

The intended use of Twitter by individuals described at the Archives .2.0 conference was to provide support for a community of practice. The individual should benefit from working in a community and such benefits would should also help the institution.   The risks might include the time required to use Twitter and to become part of a community and the dangers that Twitter is used inappropriately or excessively. It should also be noted that inappropriate use of Twitter could include requiring members of staff to use Twitter against their will or inclination. There might also be risks that to the organisation in terms of its brand (”I hate working here“). Failing to allow staff who so desire to make used of Twitter (by firewalls, policies or more subtle pressures)  could result in a failure to make use of the benefits provided by being part of a (virtual) community and a failure to understand the potential of Twitter for organisational use. It should also be noted that the costs of using Twitter can be small, as Twitter tools are available for free, no editorial mechanisms need to be deployed and no archiving of Twitter posts need to be kept.

The intended use of Facebook by organisation described at the conference was as a marketing tool for the archive or museum. This would have the advantages to the organisation of being able to market to the large numbers of Facebook users and to exploit the various functions provided by Facebook without needing any in-house development work. However there may be risks related to data lock-in, giving permissions to Facebook to commercially exploit content which is up-loaded and disenfranchising users who chose not to sign up to Facebook or users whose assistive technologies may not work with Facebook.  Failing to use Facebook could, however, result it missed opportunities for marketing to large numbers of users and a failure to allow users to engage with the service. The costs of setting up an organisational presence in Facebook should be low, but consideration does have to be given to ongoing maintenance (e.g. responding to wall posts).

Critical friends, such as my colleague Paul Walk’s various posts on possible risks associated with use of Facebook and Twitter, can help to inform organisational decision-making processes, as can discussions on mailing lists, sharing experiences at conferences and blog posts (such as recent guest blogs post on use of social networking tools at the National Library of Wales,  Wolverhampton University Library and Brighton Museum and Art Gallery).

Finally I should add that there will be subjectivities and personal biases in how I’ve described use of this framework.  But let’s acknowledge that such biases and personal prejudices will always exist.

Ask A Librarian? No Thanks, I’ll Ask The World!

On the same day that I came across a thread on “Ask a Librarian” on the LIS-LINK JISCMail list, Chris Sexton, Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services at the University of Sheffield, was sharing her 5 interesting things found on my Twitterfeed today… which included:

Ten years of The Guardian on-line plotted in expletives – very illuminating!

MPs expenses by geographical location- a good example of information from the Guardian’s databank, in a mashup with map and postcode data.

How cats can give us tips to be good corporate strategists – if you’ve got cats, you’ll appreciate this.

How to turn your house lights off using Twitter – will appeal to the really geeky

Bakertweet – a way for bakers to tell the world that their bread has just come out of the oven

I had also come across the first two examples in my Twitter feed. What Twitter provides to Chris and myself, it seems, is not only a mechanism for asking questions to my friends, colleagues and others  who have chosen to follow me, but also finding things out from them without needing to ask.

Do we, I wonder, need to develop Ask-A-Librarian type services any longer when services such as Twitter are now available to everyone for free? And if the response is we need a trusted service, can’t we make use of the existing infrastructure (which need not be Twitter, of course) and wrap a trust mechanism around it? And although on the LIS-LINK list there was a view that “Since IM widgets rely on external systems which sometimes crash, the reliability of any service based on them can be adversely affected” aren’t in-house systems also likely to fail? And will an in-house system provide the potential for a 24×7 coverage?

Now I should add that my speculation on whether a micro-blogging tool such as Twitter could be used as an Ask-A-Librarian type service  is very much ‘thinking out loud’. But it does seem to me that with the large numbers of Twitter applications which are now available it might be worth carrying out such speculative thinking.

Pupils to Study Twitter and Blogs in Primary Shake-up

It was announced in the lead article in yesterday’s Guardian “Pupils to Study Twitter and Blogs in Primary Shake-up” (and note this was the main section of the paper, and not the education supplement).

There have already been a number of blog posts about this headline, ranging from the sceptical (”It’s already bad enough having students checking their mobile phones for text messages every five minutes. Soon they’ll all be Twittering as well!“) to the neutral. But in my initial skim though the search results I couldn’t find any positive responses. So I’ll position myself in this space.

John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers was quoted in the article saying “It [the report] seems to jump on the latest trends such as Wikipedia and Twitter“. So once again, it would seem, defenders of the status quo are dismissive of innovation as being merely trends (the term ‘fads’ is sometimes used in this context) with the implication that is detracts from traditional areas of study.

My view is that there is a need to engage young people from a early age in understanding communications technologies, especially those they are likely to be using before they become adults. And understanding how micro-blogging tools such as Twitter and Yammer (and related technologies such as SMS messages) work, their subtle differences and the ways in which they can be misused is a new media literacy skill which young people need to develop.

Now Andy Powell pointed out that the “twitter terms of service prevent use by primary age children“. But for me this is not a show-stopper: terms of conditions can change and the term “Twitter” may be being used to describes a range of micro-blogging applications and not just the Twitter services itself.

I would expect many in the higher and further education sectors to particularly welcome this news, as ensuring that student arriving at college or university will several years of experience of such technologies should help to ensure that they can make use of such communications and collaborative tools more effectively when begin their studies.

And I find this announcement particularly interesting coming as it does that day after Ewan McIntosh, in the closing plenary talk at the recent JISC09 conference, praised the Twitterers in the audience who were engaging in active learning and discussions during his talk, whilst others were being passive consumers – which is particularly ironic as JISC and many learning developers are actively seeking ways in which innovation can enrich learning experiences. Perhaps in a few year’s time those senior managers will be seeking help from their children – or possibly grand-children – on how to make effective use of such micro-blogging services.

What Are the #jiscbid Evaluators Thinking?

A few weeks ago Gráinne Conole, a professor of e-learning at the Open University, used Twitter to ask for suggestions on how to go about writing a bid for one of the forthcoming JISC calls. And, as I recently described, many useful suggestions were given – despite that fact that this was a competitive process and the suggestions were being provided in an open space.  A great example of a community working in an open fashion, I feel. And the benefits (better prepared submissions, clearer ideas of approaches to project management and dissemination described, etc.) will be beneficial to many stakeholders, including the JISC programme managers, evaluators of the proposals and, eventually, the users of the project deliverables.

But did this happen? Were the bids well-written and had they followed the guidelines? Or was marking the bids a time-consuming and difficult process for the many evaluators who were involved in marking the bids?

Well we can get an insight into the evaluators though processes by looking at the Twitter stream for tweets tagged with “jiscbids”.  I think this tag was originally developed by an informal process, although at one point Amber Thomas (JISC Programme Manager) did suggest that this should be the tag adopted for sharing thoughts on the evaluation process:

#jiscbids dons [corporate hat] i am assuming all other markers are using this hashtag to offer constructive comments on anonymised bids too

Subsequently Sam Easterby-Smith (CETIS) commented that he was:

Finding the #jiscbids tweet feed rather too fascinating… @briankelly MUST do follow up to his blog post from feb 5th – woo

I’ll not, however, discuss the details of the tweets, other than to say that having the opportunity to observe evaluators’ thoughts on the marking process should provide immensely valuable feedback to those at JISC who are responsible for managing the evaluation process. There have been discussions, for example, on whether bids which were over the maximum number of pages allowed should be automatically discarded (possibly before reaching the markers) or whether such bids should be marked down, but could still be funded it the bid is strong enough.

Having been involved in bid marking in the past it has only just struck me that  in my experience there has been very little discussions on the evaluation process itself, perhaps because once the marks are returned to JISC the programme managers will be busy comparing the responses, making final decisions, suggesting changes to proposals, etc. By the time this is all over, I suspect there will be little energy left for reflecting on the evaluation process.

So I hope that someone will find the time and energy to go through the various tweets made by the evaluators (including those which did not have a #jiscbids tag). But as well as identifying aspects of the reviewing process which can be improved, there will also be a need to consider whether the openness and informality which Twitter has provided could be in conflict with a closed reviewing process. I disagree with Mike Ellis’s view that Twitter “needs an edge, a voice, a riskiness” – in some cases this may be true, but in discussing a bidding process or, as my colleague Marieke Guy has recently commented,  in the context of discussing talks at conferences, we need to establish best practices. But I hope the best practices which emerge acknowledge the benefits which can be gained from using services such as Twitter.

Twitter Can Pimp Up Your Stuff – But Should It?

I recently published a blog post entitled “Are You Able?“. Shortly after it was published I wrote a tweet which linked to the post. Although at one stage I had registered with a service which would automatically send a tweet when I published a new post I no longer do this. Rather I’ll send a tweet if I think the post might be of particular interest or is relevant to discussions which have taken place in my Twitter community.

Shortly after I sent out my tweet I received a response from George Brett who had retweeted my post (forwarded my tweet to his group of followers):

RT @briankelly: Are your resources available, reusable, usable, accessible, exploitable and preservable? Is it feasible? http://is.gd/jOWg
6:57 AM Feb 17th from TweetDeck

This was followed by another retweet by digicmb (Guus van den Brekel) tweeted:

RT @briankelly: R ur resources available, reusable, usable, accessible, exploitable & preservable? = ur approach feasible? http://is.gd/jOWg
6:32 AM Feb 17th from TweetDeck

Now at recent Web 2.0 and blogging workshops I’ve facilitated for staff working in museums, libraries and archives I have been asked how one can demonstrate that time spent in using various Web 2.0 technologies provides an positive return on investment. The impression I get is that people in these sectors do need to demonstrate tangible and measurable benefits in order to justify their usage (and perhaps even have firewalls configured so that the services can be accessed).

How, then, might you provide evidence that Twitter can be used to support organisational aims? Well I currently have 777 followers on Twitter, so I might argue that Twitter can provide a cost-effective dissemination mechanism. And as George Brett has 1,109 followers and Guus van den Brekel has 332, there could be over 2,000 users who have received the notification of my latest blog post.

Job done, you may feel, I’ve provided an example of the how Twitter has the potential to maximise access to one’s digital resources, whether this is a blog post, as in this example, an event, a new service or whatever (although I should add that I haven’t said anything about whether those followers still use Twitter or that they may not be people, but spam harvesters).

But yesterday (Sunday 22 February 2009) Mia Ridge sent a tweet saying:

You are not you, you are a brand. ‘no one enjoys someone who posts spontaneously’ http://bit.ly/qGRdk I don’t get the obsession w followers

Mia was linking to a blog post on Being a Useful Twitter User [and receiving followers in the process] which provided advice (”Be consistent and organized”; “Pace yourself!”;  etc.) aimed at helping you to maximise the number of your followers.

I think Mia was quite right to highlight the dangers of such depersonalisation of Twitter. And as the individual and quirk, aspect of Twitter has played a role in its success following a set of guidelines which aim to provide a sterile environment could well lead to a killing of the golden goose.

Which isn’t to say that one shouldn’t ‘pimp up’ one’s blog posts, however. Mia herself tweeted a few hours after her previous post that she “blogged my dev8D talk (http://bit.ly/d9z5y) on happy museums, developers and punters (right URL this time), open to suggestions, comments“.

But rather than Twitter users using the service to post factual information about themselves, their work and their organisation I’d suggest that the emphasis should be on those aspects that you care about and, as Martin Weller suggested recently, the things you love: your iPhone, your musical taste, your football team and the like.

And as Mike Ellis recently suggested that Twitter “needs an edge, a voice, a riskiness” I think I’ll announce this post with the tweet “Pimping up my blog post on the attractions & dangers of pimping up blog posts: http://is.gd/kt2t“.

“Slowly, One By One, The Stars Were Going Out”

I recently asked on Twitter “Who remembers the SciFi short story ‘Slowly, one by one, the stars were going out’?” I went on to add “It’s happening with Twitter profile pictures“.

It turned out that this came from Arthur C Clark’s short story “The Nine Billion Names of God, although I’d misremembered the final sentence which, according to the entry in Wikipedia, actually read “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out“.

The reason many people are blacking out their profile image  is to express support for the New Zealand Internet Blackout campaign. This campaign, which has successfully made use of a number of social networking services (and not just Twitter) in a viral fashion to protest against a new law in New Zealand – the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A’. As described in a post on the Read Write Webblog “this law may have major implications for Internet users in NZ, because it calls for internet disconnection “based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny.“

The use of social networking services as a way of exploiting the network effects in protests against political decisions which seek to impose restrictions on Internet services is not restricted to just New Zealand. I was surprised to learn recently that in Australia, as described on the No Clean Feed Web site: “The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access“.  Regional protests, such as the No Clean Feed Canberra rally held in December 2008 made use of  Facebook event page. to provide details of the rally (with an alternate page provided for those who could not/would not access Facebook).

Now I haven’t blacked out my Twitter (or Facebook) profile, although I would agree that the proposed developments (in Australia as well as New Zealand) are to be regretted. I’ve chosen not to do this as I prefer to reserve any protests I may wish to make to something I feel more strongly about – and rationing such protests should enhance the impact of any campaigns which I may chose to support. I also find that blacked out profile pictures is reducing the usefulness of Twitter, as it is more difficult to see who is writing the tweets.

However that is not to say that I do not want to contribute to the protests, so I am writing this post in order to alert readers of this blog who may not be aware of the New Zealand Internet Blackout campaign (and I know that not everyone is a regular Twitter user and so may not have seen these blacked out images). I also thought it would be worth embedded this YouTube video:

Note that if you wish to join in with this campaign you’ll have to hurry as the dates of the campaign are 16-23 February 2009

Should Projects Be Required To Have Blogs?

The Context

Last week CETIS’s Mark Power started off a brief Twitter debate when he asked “Is the use of project blogs becoming too formalised by JISC? Still strikes me that many set one up simply because they feel they *should*“.

Amber Thomas, a JISC Programme manager, responded by informing the Twitter community that she was “interested in what you all think about project blogs. for lightweight projects we like the idea of enforced transparency” concluding this request with “… thats easier said than done. we don’t expect every project blog frequently but it does provide the chance to aggregate easily“.

The Tweet Debate

The responses received over the next few hours included:

Brian Kelly: @MarkPower I disagree. Project blogs mean words get written, content is public and content is syndicable. let’s encourage such openness!

Sheila McNeil: @briankelly but how much really gets written in project blogs? I think still an onerous task for many

Owen Stephens: @ambrouk don’t necessarily think you shouldn’t mandate, but keep in mind you are mandating a tech/platform not attitude. What to achieve?

Andy Powell: @MarkPower blogging is an attitude not a technology, so simply “setting one up” doesn’t necessarily lead to results anyway

Amber Thomas: project blogging: so … noone says make it mandatory, some say strongly encourage, some say don’t. good blogging good, bad blogging bad. ok

Brian Kelly: @ambrouk bad blogging ok as part of learning proces. Allow mistakes please

Amber Thomas: @markpower scoping a Call as we speak where we want to make it mandatory to use a blog or wiki

Paul Walk: @MarkPower not sure that JISC is culpable – but there are definitely examples of project blogs where you wish they hadn’t felt the need

Amber Thomas: @sheilmcn i guess community engagement and collaboration are one thing, reflection is another, transparency of progress is another again???

Andy Powell: @MarkPower blogging is an attitude not a technology, so simply “setting one up” doesn’t necessarily lead to results anyway

Mark Power: @andypowe11 Exactly right…that’s why they won’t always work for a project and why the use of them shouldn’t be mandatory…not that they

Paul Walk: @ambrouk the attitude of ‘publish early, publish often’ is worth cultivating. But team blogs are often terrible. Encourage – don’t mandate

Amber Thomas: ..but is the issue that they create extra “noise” that makes it hard to spot the real voices amongst the dutiful posts?

Brian Kelly: @ambrouk Project managers should encourage ‘noise’ and use good filtering tools . Noise is better than silence!

Paul Walk:  @ambrouk @briankelly ‘noise is better than silence’ just doesn’t work for lots of ppl – especially researchers. It’s not appropriate for all

Now as Paul Walk’s last tweet was preceded by “@andyramsden nah – that one wasn’t James’s fault surely. The Calamity will come in the second half. The dropped ball came close though” we can see that this discussion was taking place at around 10pm, while people were also watching the Spain vs England match live on the TV. I think from this dialogue we can see that a useful discussion can take place using Twitter, and that JISC are getting their money’s worth from their investment in UKOLN and CETIS, with us (together with a number of others) being on call on Wednesday evenings, even when we are in the pub watching England, once again being beaten!

My Thoughts

But what of the discussion itself? Should projects be required to have blogs? I think the Twitter debate brought out many of the important issues, but as Mark Power commented “twitter [is] not the best for such an in-depth discussion really“. However I do think it is worth exploring these issues in more depth.

I would very much agree with Amber’s comment on the need for transparency for JISC-funded project work and, as a couple of people commented, blogs can provide a simple lightweight way in which projects can make visible what they are doing, what they are thinking and what they are planning – and feedback can be easily obtained using blog comments.

However concerns were raised regarding the time and effort in may take to write blog posts, the associated (writing) skills needed and the dangers of too much information being published. There are also the dangers that blog posts will be written for their own sake, so that contractual requirements or expectations will be achieved to little concrete benefit.

But surely skills in writing useful blog posts will only be gained through experience? And we should remember that blog posts can be useful for a variety of purposes: not only should project managers find blog posts useful in seeing how project work is progressing and seeing how the project is engaging with its user community but benefits can be gained by other project partners (through open sharing)  and by the intended user community. There can also be a public record which might prove useful if project staff leave.

The benefits of syndication of blog posts, which allow the content to be easily viewed on various devices as well as on a range of RSS readers should also be considered. And this is where filtering capabilities and other visualisation tools (e.g. Wordle) may help programme managers and other interested parties to have access in ways which are appropriate to their specific interests.

Having said that, I’d still avoid a formal contractual requirement for project blogging, preferring, instead, an expectation that the benefits of  open engagement with the key stakeholders and ease of use and reuse of the content would be provided. I would hope then that the bidding process would see projects which fulfilled such requirements would be funded. This approach, it should be noted, should also be future-proofed, allowing  new technologies (Podcasting, micro-blogging or whatever)  to be included in the range of options.

So for me, project blogging would be a strong should rather than a must. But how do we ensure that blogs are useful? We all have come across the good, informative and perhaps opinionated blog with a clear voice and a passion which engages our interests – and this is no doubt something we would like to see more of. But how do we get there? And what about the dangers that we’ll end up with bland team blogs? Are such blogs an inevitable part of a learning process and better than no blog at all? Or are counter-productive?

What’s are your view of blogs to support project work?

Twitter For JISC Bid Writers And Web Developers

Twitter and Bid Writers

On Tuesday (3^rd February 2009) Grainne Conole send off a Twitter post:

just about to do presentation at OU on how t get JISC dosh – any tweet suggestions to throw into the pot??? use #JISCBIDS

In response she received a fluffy of useful suggestions, which Lorna Campbell has helpfully summarised:

“Advice ranged from the obvious:

Make sure you read the call. sounds obvious, but you would be amazed at how many bidders don’t!

We’ve all done it – it’s simply not fun, and risky, sending proposal on deadline day. Get into mindset of deadline is week before.

Provide *all* info asked for – such a shame to mark down a bid because it didn’t include risk assessment for example

10 page limit means 10 page limit. Do not put your budget on page 11.

Read the circular. Then read it again. Then do what it asks.

To the astute:

Don’t underbid to be competitive if this means your project will run out of money before the end.

Your background/intro section is too long. Ditch half of it and write a really good use case scenario instead.

Make it clear what funding your proposal would do for the wider community.

To the obscure:

A project with an acronym that alludes to bodily functions or sexual practises will (almost) always remain an unfunded project.“

What a wonderful example of how people involved in writing JISC proposals, those who have been involved in bid-writing previously, potential  markers and JISC programme managers themselves are willing to share their thoughts and suggestions. And, of course, such sharing is good for everyone – better submissions should be prepared which makes it easier for the markers and JISC and the wider community should benefit from the project deliverables.

Twitter and Web Developers

I recently received an email from the manager of an institutional Web development team who asked

“Do you know of any universities which have implemented some kind of iGoogle like home page for their students and  staff?  Something which lets users customise the data sources and layout and presentation of their start page, and which supports both internal gadgets – my courses, my marks, my timetable, etc. – and external ones; my Twitter, my Facebook, my news feed, etc.  It seems like something  someone must have done already somewhere, but who?  Any pointers very welcome.“

The University of Southampton’s iSoton service (which I wrote about a while ago) came to  mind initially, but that wasn’t quite what was wanted. Not being able to come up with any other suggestions (and not wanting to give a negative reply and look stupid!) I turned to my Twitter community and asked:

Any universities provide an iGoogle-style page for staff / students with personalised links to remote (e.g. delicious) & internal stuff ?

Responses appeared immediately:

Response  1:
my old university did. https://my.mq.edu.au/ both for staff and students. various boxes showing your inbox, exam timetable etc.

Response 2:
do you have an example? Would this be as a personalised or general portal? Interesting idea.

Response 3:
OU has a couple of iGoogle widgets….?

Response 4:
Is iSotton (http://www.soton.ac.uk/isoton/) the kind of thing you mean?

Response 5:
check out http://www.uspace.org.uk. – jisc funded igoogle project. (must record I’ve used twitter as a dissemination tool now)

Response 6:
we have some delicious links in our toolbox and looking are a few other things … what about you guys

Response 7:
is it still the case that iGoogle pages don’t have unique urls? (So publishing them to the world is problematic.)

Response 8:
Sussex do. it’s called SPLASH http://splash.sussex.ac.uk/

Response 9:
See also the PADDLE project http://www.chester.ac.uk/ple/ both SPLASH and PADDLE are part of http://tinyurl.com/75khnw

Response 10:
iGoogle/NetVibes/etc examples http://tinyurl.com/5jgucc

And it seems that these responses where of use to the person with the initial query as he commented “Brian, that’s fantastic; thanks for your help” :-)

Discussion

The UK HE’s development community has a well-established tradition of sharing, as can be seen by the popularity of (initially) the Mailbase mailing list service, which was replaced by the JISCMail. But as technologies develop well-established tools get replaced by new, and often more flexible alternatives. I think we are now seeing this with Twitter. But what of the Twitter sceptics, the one’s who invite us to:

Imagine a world in which Twitter did not exist (give it a couple of years…) would you really invent a constantly-updated trivia machine as the best way of communicating with [your] audiences?

Is Twitter a trivia machine? Yes, it can be. But then again, so can email. And did you stop using email when those first Viagra posts appeared in your inbox?

#uksnow and the Mainstreaming of Twitter

In Sunday’s post about the problems with Google search in passing I commented that I have learnt of this problem from Twitter. I went on to add that:

Now I could use this as an example of showing the benefits of Twitter when something significant happens in the world. And I suspect that when the next major incident (bombings, severe weather problems, major accidents, etc.)  occurs we’ll hear stories of how Twitter was used and we’ll have another of influx of subscribers.

Little did I realise that the severe weather problems occurred the following day. And yes, Twitter did have a major role to play. I noticed this first thing in the morning after I switched on my iPod Touch and downloaded my latest Tweets.  There were several updates on the state of the weather around the country. When I got to work I gave an update on the weather at the University and in town (Bath University, being located at the top of a steep hill, has its own microclimate). And I tagged my tweet with the #uksnow hashtag as I’d noticed many others doing.

And later that evening I discovered that people were adopted the convention of using this tag in conjunction with the post code together with a scale of the intensity of the snow. So I should have tweeted “No snow in Bath BA1 0/10 #uksnow” but a few hours later given the update “Snow started at Bath University BA2 4/10 #uksnow“.

This use of Twitter to exploit the wisdom of the crowds at the advent of the snow was driven by Ben March, using an approach which seems to have been inspired by Ben Smith, who built UK Trains Wiki which Tweets disruption alerts for 25 UK train operators.

You can view the snow map which is built from an aggregation of tweets with the #uksnow tag on Ben Marshs’s blog. And a follow-up post on the blog provides links to people who have commented on this approach which includes The Guardian, The Telegraph and UK Techcrunch.

Some people might regard this as trivia – and many of the photos uploaded to Flickr with the #uksnow tag show kids making snowmen, sldeging, etc. But for me this is a great example of community benefits of Twitter. And if I was travelling London today I would be reading the tweets from my Twitter contacts in London.

A recent high-profile BBC news item on Twitter suggested it was becoming popular because of the number of celebrities, such as Jonathon Ross and Stephen Fry, who are on Twitter. Not for me. The reason it’s becoming embraced beyond the early adopters and becoming mainstream is because of the benefits which early adopters  have been talking about for the past year or so.  It provides a sense of community; it can be used for sharing and for alerting.  And I’m pleased that this has happened. Now where have the Twitter sceptics gone?

14 UK Information Professionals to Follow on Twitter?

A tweet from Owen Stephens alerted me to the news that “TFPL blog has 14 info professionals to follow on Twitter Inc. @andypowe11, @paulmiller, @psychemedia, @briankelly, @karenblakeman“.

And yes, a post of the TFPL lists “14 UK information professionals to follow on Twitter” and goes on to suggest that “If you are not on Twitter, and are fed up of listening to everyone go on it, here are 14 UK information professionals whose tweets should be interesting enough to tempt you to dip your toes into the water“.

But this, to my mind, is missing the point of Twitter. You don’t follow someone on Twitter to listen to pearls of wisdom; rather Twitter is about your community and your engagement with the community.

I made a similar comment in a post on the “Directory of (E-)Learning Professionals on Twitter” which described “Jane’s list of “100+ (E-)Learning Professionals to follow on Twitter“.

Now if the blog post had mentioned the briefing documents we have recently published on micro blogs or the various posts about Twitter on this blog then the post might have been more useful to the readers. But when, I wonder, will blogs published by information professionals start to get Twitter?

What Makes A Good API? Doing The Research Using Twitter

My colleague Marieke Guy is involved in work investigating best practice on “What Makes A Good API?“. The work began with a half-day workshop at the CETIS 2008 conference – we were fortunate that the topic we had been invitd to facilitate coincided with Marieke’s current area of work (although, of course, this wasn’t really coincidental, but reflects a growing awareness of the importance of APIs).

The CETIS workshop was entitled “Technological Innovation in a World of Web APIs“. This provided a valuable start for the work, with useful input from a number of important communities: developers who are already making use of APIs (either consuming APIs provided by other services or providing APIs to the services they are developing); project managers who may be considering the potential benefits – and correcpsonding costs – or providing APIs for their project deliverables and  and IT support staff who may have responsibilities of supporting such services once they are deployed into service.

But there’s still a need for further research and for listening into to the discussions which are taking place regarding use of APIs. How should one go about this, was a question Marieke and I discussed recently.

One suggestion I made was to explore the potential of Twitter.  As shown, you can set up a search query in Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck. Will searching for a term such as “API” provide useful information, I wonder?  Well I’ve found one person who is very critical of Skype’s closed APIs, another will has made great progress with iPhone APIs and someone who has responded to a query by stating that Tokbox APIs go out (are deployed, I think) very quickly.

Is the useful? Clearly the approach is not scaleable to all areas of research. But you might expect software developers to be early adopters of Twitter and to use Twitter to discuss their work.  Indeed the final example I gave above was from dbillian, a Toxbox employee.  And as I have previously written about Tokbox I potentially have a contact with someone who may be responsive to queries about, in this case, the APIs provided by the Toxbox video chat service.

Now in a previous version of the Tweetdeck client I could select whether to search across the tweets from the  Twitter users I follow or across all tweets globally. I personally found the former more useful as, in some but not all cases, I would know about them and their interests. However that feature seems to have disppeared following a recent upgrade of the Tweetdeck software.

Will Twitter help in the research, I wonder?  Let’s try it and see.

Ssh – Whisper It But Librarians Are Twittering!

An email message sent on 8^th October 2008 to the Scotslink JISCMail list announced that “The Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC) and CILIP in Scotland (CILIPS) have just introduced Twitter to their suite of Web 2.0 services“.

When I mentioned this recently a colleague made the comment “if you Twitter in a library, does someone Twitter Shhhh! back? ;-)” But librarian stereotypes apart, I think this illustrates how information professions are now beginning to make greater use of Web 2.0 services such as Twitter, in this case to enhance communications with CILIP members and library professionals in Scotland.

As I mentioned recently UKOLN has launched a series of IntroByte briefing documents which aim to provide an introduction to various topics of relevance to the cultural heritage sector.  We have started work on the production of a number of briefing paper which will covers the potential of micro-blogging services such as Twitter, as well as video micro-blogging services such as Seesmic for use in the library and the wider cultural heritage sectors.

We would welcome examples of organisations which are using such tools in the cultural heritage sector which we can include in the documents.  So if your library, museum or archive is an early adopter of such technologies please get in touch with me, either directly (email to B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk) or by leaving a comment to this post.

Twitter For Finding Out What They’re Saying About You

The recent UKOLN workshop on “Introduction To Blogs And Social Networks For Heritage Organisations” was based on a half-day blog workshop which has been run for the library sector (on two occassions) and the museums sector at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference. The workshop has recently been updated to include a session on the potential of social networks, micro blogs and video blogs. 

I described the potential of Twitter – and, indeed, made use of Twitter during the workshop in order to “ask a friend” for suggestions on how to respond to a question I’d received at the workshop: “Do you have any evidence that blogs provide a ROI for museums e.g increased visitor nos.?“.  I’m pleased to say that I received a number of speedy responses on Twitter (with more in-depth responses from Mike Ellis on Skype).  Phil Bradley suggested that I “smile at them and just say ‘yes, I was asked the same thing about the internet itself 10 years ago“ and Mike Ellis told me to “remember that one (actually, two, I believe) of the DCMS measures are virtual, i.e. not just physical that “counts“.

This example proved a useful way of demonstrating to the workshop participants how Skype can be used to support a community of peopkewith shared interests, and is less intrusive than email. I also mentioned how Twitter can be a useful tool for listening to what people may be saying about you and your organisation – and this use seemed to be of particular interest to the marketing managers at the workshop.  So I was particularly pleased when I noticed that my TweetDeck client’s search window for recent tweets containing “UKOLN” listed a tweet from Steve Ellwood which said:

admiring UKOLN briefing docs on Web2.0/blogging etc. http://is.gd/7kcY – as usual worth a look for explaining “What’s it all for?”

Case proven?

Blessed Are The Pithy

On the final evening of my holiday in Thailand I found myself catching up with developments in the world by skimming the rolling headlines on the BBC World news. So, in tweetspeak I found that “Things look good for Obama; Spurs 4, Rednapp happy and economic crisis continues“.

We seem, I feel, to have an ever-increasing need to be able to summarise information quickly in snippets. Yet information professionals are expected, it seems, to write long, well-researched theses for their library and information studies courses.  And this continues in the profession – I can recall when I moved offices a few years ago coming across long reports (which would have been costly to commission) on technologies which failed to have any significant impact. Is this the best way of doing things – commissioning long reports which may be filed without being read?

Where are the information professions who are skilled at being concise? Perhaps they are to be found writing pithy comments in Twitterland.

And infobunny seems to be the type of information professional I feel we need more of. She twitters(where she entertains me with her stories of life with her Lancastrian boyfriend and her gripes of travelling on the train to work), she blogs about life as a legal librarian and she regularly keeps her twitter followers updated with news about new Twitter applications.

With 14,434 Twitter updates infobunny (who is also known as the Lo-Fi-Librarian) is clearly passionate about Twitter and the 856 Twitter followers she has shows that large numbers of users are interested in what she has to say. And as infobunny herself also follows 762 other Twitter users she’s not only a writer, but also reads what others are saying.

Infobunny as this year’s Information Professional of the Year? Why not?

Getting Twitter

I think Twitter has been the first application I’ve come across where people talk about ‘not getting it’. Such comments don’t reflect a lack of understanding of how the software works or how to use the software but what purpose it services and how it can be beneficial to the user. And as we know Twitter fans can be passionate about the benefits it can bring.

A Google search for “getting twitter” reveals an early example of someone who didn’t get Twitter back in March 2007, with a response from DrewB who commented:

Twitter will be huge. Nobody gets it at first. For sure it seems strange and it won’t be for everyone, but what it allows consumers to do will be re-spun in various ways, and soon having open, cross-platform conversations across instant messenger, SMS, blogs and RSS will make one-dimensional conversations like this message-board style blogging malarky seem really backward.

There are now various resources which provide advice on how to ‘get Twitter’ including one from PC World. Rather than repeating ny of the suggestions given in that article I will make a couple of my own suggestions:

Unless your intended use of Twitter is for communications across a closed group (e.g. keeping in touch with your family) you will need to follow a sufficient number of other Twitterers in order to gain the benefits provided by a sustainable community.

If you only follow one Twitterer you are probably a stalker rather than a member of a community :-) This stuck me when one (female) colleague decided to test Twitter by following me (and only me) and having my tweets delivered via SMS. I hate to think what her husband made of the frequency with which her mobile phone beeped when she received my tweets :-)

Twitter probably doesn’t work for lurkers; effective use of Twitter is likely to be gained by people who are willing to tweet.

You should respond to other people’s queries and comments if you expect people to respond to queries you may send.

You need to understand that @ and D commands and how such messages intended for a particular person (@) and sent only to a particular person (D) will be processed.

You should try and understand the various Twitter clients work and, if you choose to use one, learn how to configure it to suit your particular preferences.  

An example of a Twitter client. Tweetdeck, is shown below which illustrates my Twitter stream, tweets I have brought together in a group I have set up (based on people who live in or near Bath) and the results of a local search (tweets from my Twitter followers containing the string ‘JISC’). I also have a global search for ‘UKOLN’ which contains details of all tweets containing this string, although this isn’t included in the screen shot. 

From this I can see some figures on the popularity of social networks at the University of Leicester (Facebook is very popular, it seems), sympathise with Martin Weller who seems to be somewhat reluctantly reading EU reports and, see Talat request for access to a Fedora test application.  Over in the Bath group, I can see t1mmyb providing a suggestion to pip, see discussions relating to repositories between Talat and PeteJ and eavesdrop of music discussions.  Finally looked at tweets from my followers containing ‘JISC’ I can see further sharing of resources between Talat and PeteJ, an announcement of a repository deposit in Facebook using SWORD (this was news to me), my response to a query from AlisonWildish and, finally,  ostephens sharing his frustrations at the lack of RSS feeds on a Web site discussing the future of libraries.

Does this help you get it? If you still don’t get it, perhaps Dave Flanders post on What is Twitter? might help, with its explanation of the role Twitter can play in the development of an online community:

Twitter is small talk: a way of interfacing with other humans in a way that gives out information that may be meaningless in terms of content (“what the weather is like”, “how the sports teams are playing”, “what the hotel is like” etc) but is valuable in terms of establishing set patterns of trusting and communicating further information with one another. 

For Dave, it’s the building of trust relationships which are an important aspect of Twitter – something I’d not really thought about until I read Dave’s post.

On the Demise of the Free Twitter SMS Service

Imagine the following conversation:

“Where are you going?”
“Down to the High Street. I’ve just received a message saying that there’s a guy giving away free £20 notes. Are you coming?”
“No. And you shouldn’t.”
“Why ever not?”
“It’s clearly not sustainable in the long run”
“What!”
“Look, he’s clearly not got a sustainable business model.”
“!?”
“And don’t try and tell me that he might be bought out by Google or Microsoft. You know that’s unlikely to happen. You can’t base your decisions on such speculative thinking.”
“Oh no.” Shuffles back to office.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to work”
“I’m pleased that I managed to persuade you not to be tempted by someone with such clearly flawed and ill conceived idea.”
“**** ***! All the money’s gone – and I missed out, thanks to you. And my friends picked up about £1,000.”

This came to mind after I received a email from Biz Stone on the 14 August 2008 saying that:

Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number. If you enjoy receiving updates from Twitter via +44 762 480 1423, we are recommending that you explore some suggested alternatives.

The message went on to explain the the delivery of Twitter messages (Tweets) via SMS would continue in the US, Canada and India, as Twitter had negotiated business deal with the mobile phone provers in those countries. They hadn’t been able to negotiate a deal in the UK, unfortunately, As the email described “Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US“.

Now when I wrote a post on Use of Twitter to Support IWMW Events in which I described how we used Twitter at the IWMW 2008 event to deliver SMS messages to participants for free using Twitter as the delivery mechanisms and then, a few weeks later, you heard that this service had been withdrawn did you think that that clearly demonstrates that organisations shouldn’t make use of free services with questiopnale sustainability models? Or did you think: “That’s an opportunity not to be missed. Let’s use it while it’s still going.“?

Use of Twitter to Support IWMW Events

Twitter has been used at a number of events recently, often as a discussion channel for participants and, on occasions when a live video stream is available, as a channel to facilitate discussions and questions with remote participants.

However there are potential problems with use of Twitter in this way. If, for example, only a small number of one’s Twitter followers are at the event (or interested in the event) the tweets can be annoying – as I found when I used Twitter to comment on a conference I was attending in Taiwan back in April.

There are other micro-blogging tools which may be better suited for use at events, which I’ll comment on in a forthcoming post. In this post I’d like to comment on the approach taken to use of Twitter to support the recent IWMW 2008 event.

For this event an ‘official’ IWMW Twitter account was set up. This was intended to provide a channel for the event organisers to deliver messages to participants who chose to follow the IWMW Twitter account.  A particular benefit of use of Twitter is that you can configure your Twitter account so that posted from selected Twitter accounts can be delivered as SMS text messages to your mobile phone free-of-charge.

The need for a communications channel for event organisers first occurred to me several years ago, when travel was being disrupted by floods. I asked participants at an event I was attended if they would be willing to give details of their mobile phone number to an organiser of an event, for use in emergencies.  The majority indicated that they would be happy with this and we became aware of the need to have the mobile phone numbers of speakers at our events when a bus failed to turn up to take delegates (including one of the speakers) to the lecture theatre at IWMW 2004.

So we updated our IWMW booking form back in 2005 in order to record mobile phone numbers.  The event organisers had this data available on a spreadsheet, but this could only be used to contact individuals – we didn’t have the backend processes to send bulk text messages to the delegates, and we were not keen on spending additional time and effort on evaluating and deploying software to allow us to do this. But as the middle day of the IWMW 2006 event took place on the 7/7 (the day of the London bombings) we felt this was something we would need to explore at some point.

After gaining experience in use of Twitter over the past year it struck me that this might provide a communications channel between the IWMW event organisers and the participants. And as the participants simply need to sign up for a free Twitter account and can then choose to have posts delivered to their mobile phone it avoids the need for us to store and manage the mobile phone numbers and to establish a service for sending text messages.  Perhaps best of all, the users are in control of whether or not they wish to receive text messages.

Twitter was used to send a small number of posts.  One of these was sent (automatically, using the Easy Tweets service which can be used to schedule posts) at 12.30, at the start of the event, reminding people to send their mobile phones to silent mode.

And we did have one example which demonstrated the potential benefits of this service – I was handed a set of keys belonging to one of the delegates. I sent a message out on Twitter and within a few minutes someone came up to me telling me that he had misplaced his keys. A great example of the benefits of Twitter? Well, not quite, as he wasn’t using Twitter and he came to see me as I was one of the conference organisers :-)

It should also be noted that if Twitter followers sent a message to the IWMW account this could also be delivered to a mobile phone, thus providing a 2-way SMS communications link, without the need to divulge a mobile phone number to conference delegates or organisers – the trusted party, in this case, is Twitter.

Twitter, it seems to me, has great potential in the support of events. Prior to encouraging its use we created a page describing Twitter and how it could be used.  I guess one issue we will need to address is what would happen if Twitter was unavailable during an event? This has been happening a lot recently, and some may argue that you shouldn’t rely on third party services which have proven reliability problems. I don’t agree with this – I regard this use of Twitter as a value-added service and if Twitter is not available we will use the communication channels we used previously. But what do you think?

Come Into My Twitterverse

Some time ago I published a post entitled “Come Into My World” in which I described a Facebook application which could be used to visualise the links between your Facebook contacts. Recently, via a post on the Twitter Apps blog, I discovered a similar application, TweetWheel, which can be used to visualise the relationships between one’s Twitter followers – on, indeed, any Twitter user.

As can be seen in the accompanying image (or by viewing the live data) Matt Jukes is connected to many others of my Twitter followers, whereas the JISC Twitter ID is linked to only one of my followers and the Dulwichonline and RareEdge IDs are not being followed by any of my contacts.

Unlike Facebook, relationships in Twitter are, by default, open for everyone to view meaning anyone can make use of this tool, even if they don’t have a Twitter ID. I think that this is another tool which can be useful in helping to provide users with a visualisation of how they, or others, are using Twitter.

Twitter Saves Lives! The Backlash Must be Due

The front page of yesterday’s Technology Guardian (which I still normally refer to as the Online Guardian) had a very positive article on Making The Most Of Twitter which opened with:

An American student is arrested in Egypt, and manages to send a brief text with a single word – “ARRESTED” – which is picked up around the world, and leads quickly to his release, helped by a lawyer hired by his university back in the US. In Britain, the prime minister’s office decides people should be able to find out what their premier is doing; as of today, more than 2,000 people do. …People fleeing from fires in California say where they are’ that proves more useful and timely than official government information.

The common factor? Twitter, the free (at present) service which lets you send a 140-character message, or “tweet”, to a site where anyone can read it

Such views reflect those of Martin Weller who, in a post on Turning to Twitter in a crisis related a story on Jim Groom’s blog which described:

how a group of people at a presentation at the University of Richmond were suddenly told to turn off the lights and be quiet as a suspicious character with a gun had been spotted on campus. After the initial moment of fright, he relates how a number of them turned to Twitter, and how this turned out to be both soothing and useful

And I’ve remembered that last week a tweet from Josie Fraser pointed to a CNN article which was featured in the opening sentence of the Guardian article (where Josie leads, the Guardian follows!).

A great time for those early adopters of Twitter, with our commitment to initially puzzled colleagues now being vindicated in the mass media one might thing. It’s perhaps reminiscent of the excitement we felt in May 1997, perhaps the last time we felt the people were, at last, being empowered. But why do I feel that the dreaded Boris moment is lurking around the corner?

But what can we expect in the backlash. I suspect journalist have already been asked to dig for a story on the negative side of Twitter. I think we can expect the CEO of a large company (other head of the CBI would be even better) to provide figures on the amount of productivty lost due to Twitter. And, on a personal level, expect the tabloids to cover stories of the teenager who tweeted that their parents were away, and found a large horde descending on the place and vandalising the home (and I know that story was first used with MySpace as the guilty service – but we should expect such stories to be endlessly recycled).

Has anyone spotted the backlash in the press yet? And what other stories can we expect?