Web Life | Betchablog

26Dec/091

The Wisdom of Leo

I'm a big fan of Leo Laporte. Leo is best known these days for running the TWiT network (This Week in Tech), a podcasting empire that publishes more than a dozen excellent tech podcasts like MacBreak Weekly, This Week in Tech, This Week in Google, FLOSS Weekly, Windows Weekly, Net@Night and quite a few others, but he comes from a background in traditional radio and TV media. Leo has a wonderful, easy-to-listen-to manner, has his finger on the pulse of the tech industry better than anyone I know, and is always covering the latest, most interesting stories in tech. It's easy to stay current with the latest tech goings-on just by listening to one (or more) of his podcasts. I listen to at least three of them reguarly, and others when I have more time... my drive to work just wouldn't be the same without Leo!

This clip is a recording of a live stream from a talk given by Leo to the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. It goes for about 40 minutes, but if you're looking for some excellent explanations of how and why the media landscape is changing, you really should take a listen to what he has to say.

Some of my favourite quotes from this talk:

On the economics of online advertising: If you think the newspapers and the television stations are in trouble now, just wait a few years, because Facebook and Google offer advertisers the holy grail. When you buy an ad on those platforms, you're buying an ad from somebody who is interested in buying your product. They're pre-qualified. Yeah, I can get 18 million on Seinfeld, but I have to pay for 18 million - I only want to talk to 100,000. On Facebook and Google I get that 100,000 and no more. It's hugely valuable, and they're not going to pay these princely sums for these audiences anymore. That model is dead."

On the future of traditional media: "Newspapers were invented to distribute display ads, and they just stuck some stuff in between the display ads. As soon as display ads don't work, which they're not, it's going to go away... (newspapers) will be the realm of the rich person. We've seen revolutions like this before. When Gutenberg invented movable type in the 15th century, before that, only the very rich could afford a book because it had to be hand-written by a monk. The printing press made all this accessible. Did it kill books? No, but it changed fundamentally what a book is. So if you look really short term, yeah TV didn't kill radio or the movies, we still have all that... but I think we are in a much more fundamental transition... Will blockbuster movies go away? Probably not, but I think you're going to start to see far more small films created by kids with digital cameras. This YouTube generation is going to change everything. I think way we understand movies, the way we understand newspapers is going to go away."

On the role of Twitter: "Twitter is brilliant, but I think it's just the first iteration of what will eventually be an internet nervous system that you'll be plugged into, and the zeitgeist will flow around you at all times. I think there's better ways to do it than Twitter. I think we participate in it as journalists... we're actually the input, we're the ones who are putting content into it, and then people stir it and churn it around. Twitter is at it's best, not when you say 'I had toast for breakfast', but when you say 'Did you read this great article?' If you really use Twitter properly, if you check it regularly, you don't have any fear any more that you're going to miss something, do you? Because you just know. If you follow the right people, the stuff you care about, you just know."

On getting attention online: "The science fiction author Howard Sturgeon said '80% of everything is crap', and I think there's some of you right now that might say it's more like 99% of everything is crap. There's all this stuff now, and how does stuff surface. I believe that the 1% of the great stuff will just surface. As this internet nervous system gets more developed, word of mouth becomes more efficient and great stuff rises. Soon, you will no longer be able to use mainstream media as a launching pad. The answer, I think now, is the same as it should always have been - the best content. The way to get good is by doing great stuff. Do the best stuff you can, do the stuff you care the most about so that your passion shines through, because people love it when you're passionate. And if your passion shines through and you're doing great stuff, I believe that this new internet nervous system will surface you. So yeah, there's a lot of crappy YouTube videos, there's a lot of stupid Twitterers - there's a lot of crap, there's more crap than ever before - but at the same time, there's more great stuff than ever before. Just do good stuff."

As an educator, I think that last quote contains the real truth that we need to be encouraging out of our students, ourselves and our colleagues. "Do the best stuff you can, do the stuff you care the most about so that your passion shines through, because people love it when you're passionate."

Thanks Leo.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged as: leolaporte, technews, twitnetwork, wisdom 1 Comment

11Dec/090

Vote Early, Vote Often!

Yes, it's that time of year again! The annual Edublog Awards are in full swing, and after a few weeks of people making nominations for various blogs, tweets, wikis and social networks across a really broad range of categories, I'm extremely honoured to have had not one, but two of my online projects - Betchablog and The Virtual Staffroom - mentioned for an "Eddie" this year.

These awards (which are great to be considered for, but hopefully not to be taken too seriously!) aim to highlight and recognise some of the great work taking place in the online educational sphere. Education is certainly one sector that seems to have really embraced the use of blogging as a tool for reflection, sharing, helping others and generally assisting teachers and students to "find their voice". I know that I've personally found the act of blogging to be critical in helping me "think out loud", processing ideas in a public space where they can be exposed to the scrutiny, support and suggestions of others. Having a blog has certainly helped me find my own voice and given me a platform from which I can share easily and freely with the world, whether it's some resource I've found, a tutorial I've made, or just some vague idea that's been floating around in my head looking for a place to be expressed. I blog for myself first and foremost, and the idea that someone else might also find some value in any of it is just the icing on the cake, although it is certainly very tasty icing! I really do value the sense of community that my blog has created for me and although I say that I write just for myself, I must admit that it would be quite a hollow experience without the wonderful support of those who read, comment and engage with me.

To those that nominated Betchablog or The Virtual Staffroom this year, thank you! To those that might consider casting a vote for either of them, thank you to you too. But mostly thank you to everyone who reads (and subscribes) to some of these things I've been doing online over the last few years... you are the ones who make it all worthwhile for me.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged as: awards, betchablog, edublogawards, virtualstaffroom No Comments

23Sep/094

Welcome to the Future

No reason. I just thought it was funny.

That is all.

Stay tuned as we resume normal programming...

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Blogging, Humour, Web Life 4 Comments

15Sep/090

Steve Ballmer – Brash, Passionate, but definitely not Stupid

There was an interesting story in today's news about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's outburst at an iPhone-carrying Microsoft employee. Apparently, Ballmer was addressing a company gathering when the employee pulled his iPhone out to take a picture of him. Ballmer went nuts. He grabbed the phone, ridiculed the employee publicly, then pretended to stomp on the device. You can read the full story over on Engadget. There is even an alleged photo taken as Ballmer reached for the device.

Ballmer is an interesting character. Certainly there is plenty of evidence on YouTube of his over-the-top antics as he revs up Microsofties with his ranting and raving, screaming and yelling. And who could forget his chant of "Developers! Developers! Developers!" at a gathering of software developers, as he tried to make the point that Microsoft's success was partly due to its army of, well, developers. It's even spawned a remix version.

Even back on the very early days of Microsoft, Ballmer was seen dressed up as a cheesy salesperson, doing the whole "How much would you expect to pay?" spiel as he promoted Windows 1.0, throwing away dollar bills in an over-the-top display of sales showmanship. If you don''t know much about Steve Ballmer or where he fits into the Microsoft story, I'd recommend you watch the excellent video series by Robert X Cringely, "Triumph of the Nerds". It's a wonderful record of the first 20 years of the personal computer revolution, and if you call yourself a geek, you absolutely should see it.

I got thinking about Ballmer as I read through the comments on the Engadget blog. One person made the comment that Ballmer was stupid. Another came to his defence, noting that Ballmer was overly brash and passionate, but not stupid. The Sydney Morning Herald even ran a story with a psychologist analysing Ballmer's crazy antics, concluding that Ballmer isn't crazy, just an attention seeker.

I actually met Ballmer once. I was at a fairly intimate Microsoft function in Sydney for the launch of Office 2003, and I managed to sit in the very front row directly in front of Ballmer as he gave his address. He spoke to the small crowd in a very reserved tone, talking earnestly about the development of the new software, and giving some background into the challenges and successes of getting it to market. I was actually quite impressed with Ballmer, and was struck by his obvious passion and belief in what he was doing. When he finished his talk, he asked if there were any questions, so I stuck my hand up and asked one. To be honest, I thought it was a bit of a curly question and I was sort of hoping to stump him a little. To the contrary, Ballmer looked right at me and fired back a detailed and well-thought out answer, explaining how Microsoft was addressing the issue I'd raised. He outlined three aspects to his answer and confidently explained each one. There was no fumbling or dodging the question. He knew what he was talking about and clearly had given a lot of thought to the issues I asked about. I was actually a little surprised at just how well he responded, and at the quality of his answer.

I was impressed not only by the clarity and detail of his answers, but also by the fact that, as CEO of Microsoft, the intricacies of how the software works and a detailed answer to the question I asked (which was related to how Microsoft was addressing the issues faced by software training providers and how it was coming up with ways of making it easier for users to learn to use new software versions) were not typically the sorts of things you'd expect the CEO of the company to be so close to. Ballmer is a hands-on kind of guy and he's clearly passionate about Microsoft. And he knows his stuff. As the Engadget commenter remarked, he may be brash and passionate, but he is clearly not stupid.

I've seen the thoughtful, intelligent and focussed side of Steve Ballmer, and I've seen the outrageous, wild and crazy side of Steve Ballmer. Perhaps the yelling and screaming, the running around the stage like a sweaty crazy person, the (pretend) iPhone smashing behaviour, the silly comments about the iPhone, the blunt denigration of anything non-Microsoft, is all a bit distracting from just how intelligent Ballmer can really be.

Most people who read this blog will know that I'm not much of a Microsoft fan, but as the Engadget commenter says, "You know, I like Ballmer - he's brash and in your face but he believes in what he does and has the guts to be passionate about it. I respect that."

Me too. Stay crazy Steve.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: History, Microsoft, Web Life No Comments

13Sep/093

Cache me if you can

I've been in a few conference presentations lately where the topic of geocaching has come up. Usually, the presenter asks the question "who knows about geocaching?" and about three hands go up. The presenter then tries to give a quick explanation about it for those who haven't heard about it - "it's like a treasure hunt", or "it's a game where people hide things for others to find", or other similar explanations. While these summaries are mostly accurate, they don't really give enough information and many people seem interested to know more about it.

Thanks to a long involvement with 4WDing, I've been playing with GPS and digital mapping for a while now, and I've done quite a bit of geocaching over the last few years, including placing our own. When I started I was using a Garmin GPS V, a great little GPS that can basically do it all - multiple datum switching, realtime path tracking, waypoint extrapolation - you name it, it does it. Trouble is, it's not connected to the web, so "going geocaching" had to be a preplanned activity. I had to look up geocaches in advance on the official website at www.geocaching.com, print out all the information sheets, and then manually enter the GPS coordinates into the Garmin. Once the cache was found, when I got back home I had to go back to the website to report the cache found.

Lately, I've been having a lot of fun with a terrific little iPhone app called, simply, Geocaching. On the 3G connected and GPS enabled iPhone, you can pull the device out of your pocket, press the Find Nearby Caches button and it will take your current GPS coordinates, go to the website and find all the nearby caches. Pick one, and the app will grab all the relevant data, draw a map, plot your position and the position of the cache, give you a compass to guide you, and it will lead you right to the cache. Once you find it, you have the ability to report the find directly in the app, making it a seamless end-to-end experience. Although the iPhone app lacks some of the more sophisticated features that a "real" GPS offers, the convenience factor that comes from being able to do the vast majority of geocaches anywhere, anytime, without any special preparation, makes up for these shortcomings. It's not free, but for me, has been well worth the $12.99 it cost me on the Apple app store.

Linda and I were out walking today so, geeks that we are, I pulled the iPhone out and did a quick search to find that there were two caches within 500 metres of where we were. We found them both of course, but on the second one, I made this short video that hopefully explains a little more about geocaching and how it works.

If you haven't tried geocaching yet, give it a go. It gets you out into the fresh air, is an interesting use of technology, and most of all it's great fun. I reckon it offers some terrific opportunities in education, and is a way to integrate technology in a really hands-on way that brings a whole lot of skills together - mapreading, fitness, resourcefulness, even a bit of maths. I've always had a hard time getting it introduced into schools because a class set of GPS units can be a bit expensive, but with the development of apps like Geocaching for the iPhone (and similar apps for other devices, such as Geocache Navigator on Nokia S60 phones) maybe it's not such a stretch for kids to have these tools on their own phones instead.

What's that? What do you mean your school bans phones!?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Geocaching, My Tools, Web Life 3 Comments

18Jul/091

So Much Silicon

Being a bit of a technology geek, one place I've always wanted to visit is Silicon Valley. Stretching southwards from San Francisco to San Jose, the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are home to many of the world's major computing and technology organisations. Birthplace of companies like Apple, Adobe, Google and Twitter, breeding ground for new ideas at universities like Stanford, and host to big annual tech events like MacWorld and WWDC; the SF Bay Area really is a slice of geek Mecca.

So I'm pleased to say that I'll be spending the next week or so here. I'm actually here for the Adobe Summer Institute, a 5 day conference and workshops held at Adobe's San Jose offices as part of their Education Leaders program. We get to spend all week immersing into the serious end of fun stuff like Photoshop and Flash.

This afternoon I visited Wikispaces, a company based right here in San Fran only a few blocks from my hotel. Wikispaces put a message out on Twitter a while back asking for volunteers in the bay area for anyone interested in taking part in some usability testing for some new Wikispaces features. Purely on the off-chance, I dropped them a line and mentioned I'd be in SF in mid July, and Adam from Wikispaces replied back to say sure, drop in and be part of it. So I found my way down to their office this afternoon, met Adam, James and Jess and spent about 90 minutes doing some really interesting usability testing, talking about some cool upcoming stuff in their products and having a great chat about usability, interface design and web navigation in general. It's always good to chat with super smart people doing cool stuff, so I was really pleased to have had the opportunity to drop by.

I had a bit of a wander around Union Park, dropped into the Apple Store on Stockton to leech a bit of free wifi while I listened to some of their free presentations. Then it was back to the hotel for a couple of hours of sleep before going for a walk through Chinatown and up to North Beach. The place was buzzing... but I really do hate traveling alone! There's something about sitting in a restaurant on your own that is just kind of pathetic... Instead, I bought a couple of hot pizza slices and kept wandering, taking in the atmosphere, trying to appear only slightly less pathetic.

Anyway, I'll try to put up a few short posts while I'm here just in case anyone is interested. Big day of sightseeing tomorrow, and still trying to wrangle a visit to the TWiT Cottage on Sunday to meet @leolaporte... not sure if that will come off or not, but it'd be kinda fun if it does...

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged as: bayarea, sanfran, sfo, wikispaces 1 Comment

17Jul/098

Cutting out the Middleman

One of the side effects of the new web is greatly increased disintermediation, or cutting out the middleman. It seems that everywhere you look, entire industries are being turned upside down because the web makes it so easy for people to completely bypass the traditional "middlemen" that we all used to rely on so heavily. Musicians are bypassing record labels and releasing their music directly to their fans. Authors are bypassing publishers and using services like lulu.com to self publish. Homebuyers often know just as much about the real estate markets as the agents. Ordinary people can buy and sell shares without the need to go though expensive stockbrokers. In all of these processes (and many others like them) unless the middlemen add real value along the way, they face eventual extinction. Why would you continue to pay someone to do something that you can just as easily do yourself?

This disintermediation seems to be obvious in three main areas... creation, distribution and promotion.

When it comes to creation, there are plenty of software tools now available that allow average people to create content in ways that were simply not even remotely possible 20, 10, even 5 years ago. When I think back to some of the image manipulation processes that I had to master back in art school - I'm thinking of something like doing a four-colour separation of a photographic image - it was hugely expensive, time consuming and required highly specialised equipment. Today, it's a menu choice in Photoshop.

Same thing with making music. Back in my younger years I played bass in a band, and to get studio time to even record a simple demo tape was horrendously expensive - hundreds of dollars an hour. The tape machines required to do multi track recording were huge beasts of things that cost many thousands of dollars to buy. Today, I could get just as good quality using GarageBand, a program that comes free on every Macintosh computer.

Think about the changes involved in creating content for the web... not so long ago you needed a funny hat with a propeller on it just to make a website. You needed to know about html coding, javascript, FTP servers, file types and naming conventions, plus a whole lot of other techno-geekery if you had any hope of putting a decent website online. It was tricky, and the average person really struggled to do it. But look what the new web, the read-write web, web 2.0 - call it what you will - has done to this process. Blogs and wikis have changed things so dramatically that your 75 year old mum can now run a website using some free tool like Blogger or WordPress. No need to hire an expensive web designer, or buy a lot of expensive gear. Just sign up for a free account, click edit and start creating stuff. It's a total turnaround.

The creation of nearly all media has undergone these same basic shifts. Photographs, music, video, animations, text, page layout... you name it, and the tools to produce it have gone digital and had their costs reduced so far as to be virtually zero. Not all that many years ago, I can remember paying someone about $70 to use a desktop publishing program and a laser printer to design an A4 certificate... these days you wouldn't even consider paying someone to do that. I wonder what that person is doing to make money these days? I doubt he is still able to charge $70 to knock up a simple A4 document! Why? Because most people can now do this sort of thing for themselves. If you have the willingness to learn how to make something, the tools you need to create it are probably available at almost no cost. Barrier one gone.

The second aspect is one of distribution. Once you make something, you need to get it to people. You only need to look at what peer-to-peer music distribution is doing to traditional models of distributing music to see that these are fundamental changes in how these things will work now and in the future. When people can consume music by downloading it, whether legally through services like iTunes or Amazon, or illegally using BitTorrenting or through sites like Pirate Bay or Kazaa, they are bypassing the old model of stamping the music onto disks, packing them in cardboard and shipping them on trucks to shops where people have to go to get them. It's ridiculous when you think about it. When music is digital, nothing more than a bunch of binary bits, the notion of committing them to a piece of plastic called a CD and then distributing it by trucking it all over the country is quite ludicrous. Binary bits are digital... it makes far more sense to push them across the Internet. You don't need to put a CDs in the mail just to give your friend a copy of a song you want them to hear, just transfer it directly to them over the web. Expand that idea out to be a band who distributes their music over the web to thousands of fans, and things take on a whole new slant. In the process of doing this of course, we potentially bypass a whole lot of middlemen - record labels, music publishers, CD producers, trucking companies, etc - unless they see the changes happening around them and respond to them quickly, these middlemen will be left high and dry, expertly servicing a market that no longer exists. The Internet is totally reshaping whole industries, removing the friction from processes that were once held together by chains of middlemen. Barrier two gone.

The last aspect is promotion. Telling people about stuff. Getting the word out. Marketing. There was a time not so long ago that PR people wrote press releases about new information in the hope that journalists would pick up stories and help spread them. The flow of media was controlled by middlemen - journalists, newspapers, radio and TV. We heard what they wanted to tell us about. Our information was managed so that we paid attention to what the middlemen wanted us to know about, not necessarily what we were interested in. If your interests were out on the long tail, you were on your own. Not any more. Social media, social networks, they have allowed individuals to connect and share and converse and spread ideas far more efficiently and far faster than ever before. "Getting the word out" about something no longer requires a highly paid PR expert to write a finely honed press release just to get attention... a 15 year old kid with a webcam can be the next viral sensation on YouTube, generating millions of views at no cost with no middlemen. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, blogs... these tools of the new web - tools of ordinary people - are reshaping and redefining the way we move messages around and how we share and inform each other. In many cases you don't need middlemen to do this, just the right tools and a bit of strategy. Barrier three gone.

I got thinking about this as I booked my own flights and accommodation for a trip to San Francisco this week. After visiting the airline websites, shopping for the best deals and booking myself a seat, I then forwarded the confirmation email to a service called TripIt, which parsed the email and generated an online itinerary for me. I forwarded on the confirmation emails from the hotels and car rentals and TripIt easily worked it all into a well structured itinerary, complete with estimated travel times, links to confirm check-in times, even Google maps giving me directions from airports to hotels. I'm not a travel agent, but I apparently don't need to be... there's an app for that, as they say. If I WAS a travel agent I'd be extremely concerned for my future, and desperately looking for other ways to add extra value to my middleman role.

The real point though, is thinking about how all of this applies to education. So many other fields have been affected by this massive shift away from needing middlemen - travel, music, publishing, public relations, product distribution, you name it. But what about education? Is there such a thing as educational middlemen? If so, who are they? How will they add value in the future? How is the Internet likely to reshape the world of education? Are educators really susceptible to the same shifts and changes that nearly every other industry is experiencing, or are we somehow different? Immune? I doubt it.

Just like a travel agent who suddenly realises that she has hardly any clients booking flights through her, or the book publisher who finds that the last 10 bestsellers were all self published, at what point will educators suddenly realise that the world has seriously shifted and the old rules that once worked so well no longer apply.

Who are the educational middlemen?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged as: disintermediation, middlemen, socialmedia, web2 8 Comments

14Jul/092

Using Twitter to develop a PLN

Another article written for Education Technology Australia. Probably not much new in here for regular readers of this blog, but I thought I'd post it just in case anyone found it interesting...

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Of all the tools to emerge from the Web 2.0 revolution, few are as intriguing as Twitter. When Twitter first appeared in 2006 it was one of those hard to define web tools that, on the surface, sounded silly and trivial. However, in the last few years it has risen to be one of the web’s most powerful simple ideas.

At its best, Twitter is the ultimate real-time communication tool, enabling ideas to spread across the Internet with unprecedented speed and reach. As a mechanism for gaining insight into the “wisdom of the crowds” it has few equals. During the recent elections in Iran for example, Twitter proved its worth as a vehicle for people in Tehran to keep the flow of information going to the outside world, even when official news crews were being silenced and censored by the government. Thanks to Twitter, the truth still had a voice.

At its worst, Twitter can be nothing but an embarrassing parade of personal ephemera, filled with people publicly sharing the most inane and trivial aspects of their lives.

Twitter was created in 2006 as a side project by Odeo Corp, but has since evolved into one of the web’s hottest properties. Thanks to its recent “discovery” by Hollywood stars and TV personalities, Twitter has experienced a massive burst of growth and visibility. It seems that everywhere you turn these days you hear about Twitter, and yet it remains generally misunderstood by most people.

So what exactly is Twitter? Think of it as a cross between SMS, email and blogging. Usually referred to as a microblogging service, Twitter enables users to send out short 140 character messages to anyone who chooses to “follow” them. Some people have thousands of “followers” reading their updates, or “tweets”, each supposedly answering the simple question “what are you doing?” Followers have the opportunity to engage in dialog with those they follow by sending a public reply - usually called an at-reply due to the Twitter convention of prefixing their response with an @ symbol - or to reply in private with a direct message, usually called a DM. These short 140 character bursts of text between individuals are generating thousands of simultaneous conversations that anyone can take part in.

Originally the domain of the geeky elite, Twitter has expanded its reach into far more mainstream uses. Celebrities are using Twitter to build their fan base. Marketers are finding Twitter powerful for spreading the word about new products and services. Companies monitor the flow of Twitter messages to see what people are saying about them. Politicians are using Twitter to converse with their constituents. It seems that many people are finding plenty of uses for a tool that lets you quickly and simply communicate you are doing.

But what about educators? What possible uses could teachers find for a tool like Twitter? As it turns out, quite a few.

The trend in professional development for educators is towards the development of a Personal Learning Network, or PLN. PLNs utilise the principle of just-in-time learning by encouraging teachers to surround themselves with others who share similar interests or knowledge. A teacher with a well developed PLN is able to turn to her network of colleagues to share ideas, ask questions, get feedback or find an audience. Many teachers have limited opportunities to surround themselves with like-minded others, either because they work in a small school, teach a niche subject, or simply don’t have access to people who think like them. Consequently, it becomes easy for many educators to feel as though they work in a vacuum, with limited opportunities to discuss ideas or get advice from others. Attending conferences or professional development days can be really useful, but these are usually limited to a few days a year.

By using a tool like Twitter to surround themselves with a network of other educators, and then using these networks to engage in ongoing conversations about teaching and learning, any teacher can have access to the “brains trust” of a larger groups of people at any time. Twitter can play a key role in connecting people together to form these personal learning networks.

Anyone can sign up for a free Twitter account at www.twitter.com. Upon joining Twitter, they will be provided with a list of suggestions for people to follow, but these are usually a random assortment of Hollywood celebrities, companies, politicians, musicians and sports stars… not exactly the right foundation for building an education-based personal learning network! Of course, there are no real rules about who you can and can’t follow - follow whoever you want - but remember that if you want to develop a Twitter network with an education focus then you should begin by following people who are already engaged in these conversations. During the signup process, Twitter will also offer to search your email address book to see if any of the people you know are currently using the service. If it finds any, it will offer to add them to your network.

The best way to start building your network is by following someone you already know and seeing who they follow. Clicking on the grid of icons will lead you to the Twitter pages of others, where you can read their bio, their latest tweets and see who else they follow. Once you find someone that sounds interesting to you, just click the “Follow” button to add them to your network. The real value of a Twitter network does not become apparent until you add at least 40 to 50 people, so continue this process of finding people to follow until you build this critical mass. When you follow someone, they receive an email notification about it and can then decide whether they want to follow you back or not. Don’t be to concerned or offended if someone does not follow you back immediately.

The other way to quickly develop a network of people is by using a list such as that found at http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com. This list, built using a wiki by Gina Hartman, a teacher from Missouri, contains organised lists of teachers who use Twitter to help make the process of building your network simpler. Similar lists exist at http://twitterpacks.pbworks.com, where you can search for all sorts of interesting Twitter-using communities. Another excellent list of education professionals to follow online can be found at http://c4lpt.co.uk/connexions. Take some time to explore these lists and you’ll soon find plenty of interesting, relevant people to add to your network.

Once you begin to build this network around you, you’ll find a constant stream of new ideas, new links and new tools to explore. People in your network will be sharing thoughts with each other, having conversations that you can join or simply eavesdrop on. With the right group of people in your network you will be exposed to more new ideas and suggestions each day than you would normally get in a whole year of regular PD. You will have a team of people around you that you can ask questions and get suggestions from. You can tap their collective wisdom. You can get perspective from outside your regular contacts. You can find people to collaborate with. You can find an audience for student projects. Having a global network of people surrounding you, enabled by Twitter, opens up a world of professional possibilities for your own learning and sharing. You will get a much better feel for the pulse of the web.

Unlike social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook, Twitter has not become hugely popular with school-aged users and it remains somewhat of a place for “grown-ups”. Many specialist communities have adopted Twitter for their own uses, and education is one field which seems to have truly grasped the value that the service can bring to their community. Because Twitter is driven by short, to-the-point messages, it seems to be a place where content and conversation is valued. If you find particular users talking about trivial things that don’t interest you, or “overtweeting” - tweeting so often that it simply becomes annoying - you always have the option to unfollow them. You have complete control over who you want in your network. It is a very democratic environment… if people add value they find followers.

Once you start to use it more you will probably find the Twitter website a fairly inconvenient way to use the service, so there are some excellent Twitter clients - specialised software for using Twitter in an easier, more integrated way from your computer or mobile phone. There are many to choose from, but TweetDeck, Twhirl, Tweetie and Nambu are very popular. There are also plenty of Twitter clients tools that run on mobile phones - mobile versions of TweetDeck and Nambu for the iPhone, or Gravity for Nokia phones, enabling you to tweet from wherever you are.

If you haven’t tried it yet, give Twitter a go. Try using it to build a personal learning network of people you find interesting. You might be pleasantly surprised as just how powerful this simple idea can be.

Evil Twitter image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorsner/ CC BY-SA-NC

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tagged as: network, pln, Twitter 2 Comments

10May/090

Finding the Needle in the Twitter Haystack

With millions of Twitter messages floating through the Twittersphere each day, you can use the search tool at http://search.twitter.com to find references to ANY word that gets uttered there.

So a search for the word "dog" will find every tweet that contains the word dog, and so on. You can even search for your own twittername and see any time your name is referenced online. Many companies now use this search feature to find out whenever anyone mentions their products or services on Twitter.

The search tool for Twitter is really quite powerful, and can also be used to generate RSS feeds that can then be embedded into other pages and services. There is some awesome potential there.

However, Twitter's ability to search for words being mentioned out there becomes less useful when you search for a really common word, since the search results will invariably turn up lots of stuff you probably don't want.

When you're attending a conference for example, you could find every mention that people make about the event by searching for the conference name. However, it wouldn't be all that helpful just to do a search on the term "conference" since it would catch all the other possible mentions of the word "conference" from a bunch of other conferences you don't want. Using the full name of the conference would probably work, but because Twitter limits you to only 140 characters, it would be silly to devote so many of them to including the conference name... there would be little room left for the actual message!

To get around this problem, Twitter users came up with the idea of using a hashtag.. by adding a # in front of a search term. it's a way to trick Twitter Search into avoiding any results that might contain the keyword but don't have the hash in front of them.

For conferences, there will generally be a designated hashtag containing a # symbol and an abbreviation for the event. People attending and Twittering from the event can include this short code at the end of each tweet, and then a search (and also an RSS feed) can be created to grab a feed of all the tweets that contain the hashtag, regardless of who they come from. This let's people follow the conference Tweets in a single stream.

What if the conference has an unusual name already? A search for a conference abbreviated to "educonf" would probably find most of the references to it fairly easily, since educonf is a kind of "made up" word already. In this case, a search for the generic term "educonf" or the properly hashtagged "#educonf" would probably turn up pretty much the exact same results.

The real need for the hashtag arises when you have search terms based on regular English words that are ambiguous to the search. The added # to the front of them makes them unique and helps them stand out from the generic non-hashed word and stops the generic words from getting caught up in the hashtagged feed. It also carries the added bonus that many 3rd party Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck, Tweetie or Nambu can identify the hashtags and use them to create saved searches, making it much easier to follow the stream based on that tag.

Interestingly, the search feature was never a part of Twitter's original functionality. Twitter search was done with a third-party tool created by a company called Summize, but the huge potential (and possibilities for future monetization of Twitter) became immediately obvious and Summize was acquired by Twitter for about $15M almost a year ago. Now the built-in search functionality is a key part of the Twitter experience, and hashtags play an important role in making that experience even more powerful.

CC Image: 'Haystack Owl'
www.flickr.com/photos/14829735@N00/360683898

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Tagged as: conference, hashtag, search, Twitter No Comments

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