Science Library Pad

Wordclouds from English opengovchat - Dec 15, 2011

Wordle wordclouds from English #opengovchat on December 15, 2011 from the opening announcement to 18h45 (specifically from @Mod_TBS_SCT at 16:58:41 to @dlq 18:45:18).   Text extracted from a Twitter archive I made.  High-frequency words like opengovchat itself, as well as Canada and RT were removed.  In some wordclouds opengov was also removed.  It doesn't keep things with underscores together (e.g. @Mod_TBS_SCT or @TBS_Canada) which is why you get some partial Twitter user IDs.  Also in some Wordle removed the @ signs.

Previously:
December 15, 2011  Canadian #opengovchat - archives & hackfests

Canadian #opengovchat - archives & hackfests

Minister Clement's Twitter chat as part of the Canadian Open Government Consultation is complete.  It was first in French avec le mot-clic #parlonsgouvert and then in English with hashtag #opengovchat

I made an Archivist backup of the tweets in both languages, there are 1102 tweets in the archive, the snapshot was taken 18h45 Eastern on December 15, 2011.  Available in XML and Excel XLSX.

@kady did a CoverItLive liveblog that captured English tweets and Joseph @Thornley made a Storify of the English tweets.

The official archive will be up on December 16, 2011 at open.gc.ca

UPDATE 2011-12-16: Elizabeth Thompson of iPolitics did a very good Storify that sets out blocks of questions and responses.  Mark Blevis used some software to analyse the English chat.  And open.gc.ca published transcripts of the English and French discussions.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-12-18: I made some wordclouds of the English-language discussion.  ENDUPDATE

I have done a short Storify below just on the Q&A about hackfests and contests (including one question from me).

Public consultation on Canadian Open Government

Online consultation is up at http://www.open.gc.ca/consult/menu-eng.asp (en français http://www.ouvert.gc.ca/consult/menu-fra.asp ).

Deadline January 16, 2012.

Input to the online consultation can be by answering the questions and/or uploading a document.

Twitter chats will be hosted by President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement, but not on his account, on the new Treasury Board Secretariat accounts:

La discussion sur Twitter sur le gouvernement ouvert se déroulera le 15 décembre en français de 16 h à 16 h 45 (HNE) Compte: @SCT_Canada Mot-clic: #parlonsgouvert

The English tweet chat on Open Government will take place on December 15 from 5:00 to 5:45 p.m. EST.  Account: @TBS_Canada Hashtag: #opengovchat

The input will be used for both the government's internal planning as well as the action plan to be provided to the Open Government Partnership.

A final report on the findings from this consultation will be posted to this site in March 2012. Your input will help define areas of focus for the future of Canada’s Open Government initiative, including Canada’s Open Government action plan for the international Open Government Partnership.

from Open Government - open.gc.ca - Tell Us What You Think

UPDATE 2011-12-07: Comments from participants as well as weekly summaries will be posted to What We've Heard.  (If you have given Consent for Public Posting when you fill in the online consultation.)  In general each section allows up to 4000 characters for your response.  ENDUPDATE

There is also a press release about the consultation.

Canada's OGP Action Plan will be posted to http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries/canada

The Open Government Partnership tweets at @opengovpart

UPDATE: The questions for the online consultation are available for you to preview before you answer.

Here are the Open Data questions:

Open Data - offers government data in more useful formats to enable citizens, the private sector and non-government organizations to leverage in innovative and value-added ways. This refers to Government of Canada data, which is information that is factual and usually statistical in nature, e.g. the number of people living in various regions of Canada. In this context, please respond to the following questions:

1. What could be done to make it easier for you to find and use government data provided online?

2. What types of open data sets would be of interest to you? Please pick up to three categories below and specify what data would be of interest to you.

   • Agriculture and Fisheries (e.g. farm operators’ income statistics, import/export data for dairy/meat/poultry)
   • Arts, Culture, and History (e.g. radio listening time, soldiers of First World War)
   • Demographics (e.g. consumer price index, university enrolment, Canada’s population)
   • Economics and Industry (e.g. gross domestic product, border wait times, home building starts)
   • Foreign Affairs and International assistance (e.g. immigration application statistics, permanent resident statistics)
   • Health and Safety (e.g. adverse reactions to health products, helmet use, immunization, number of police officers by province)
   • Labour (e.g. distribution of labour force, weekly earnings, hourly wages)
   • Nature and Environment (e.g. insecticide use, greenhouse gas emissions, Canadian tides)
   • Parks and Recreation (e.g. spectator sports, travel by Canadians
   • Public Finances and Expenditure (e.g. budgeted and in-year expenditures, government assets and liabilities, business prequalified to supply goods to government)
   • Science and Technology (e.g. domestic spending on science and technology, spills technology)
   • Other (please specify)
3. How would you use or manipulate this data?

Previously

November 23, 2011  Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government, social media
January 28, 2011  open government in Canada - submit your thoughts to Parliament

See Also

Digital Economy Strategy 2010 Public Consultation

• Consultation Paper
• What Was Said: Idea Forums
• What Was Said: Submissions

Twitter retweets - how to drink less from the firehose

Twitter has a rather well-buried feature that lets you control the retweets that you see in your twitterstream.

As far as I know this can only be done through the GUI, I don't see it listed as a Twitter command.

You can disable retweets per-user, that is, if you want to see text directly entered by someone, but not anything they just retweet, you can block seeing their retweets.

Login and go to the user profile (you can only do it per-user, not globally).

UPDATE 2012-02-20: How to do it in the updated Twitter interface...

On the profile page for a user, click the "head" icon (next to the Following button).  Select menu item "Turn off Retweets" (indicated with red arrow).

ENDUPDATE

For the old Twitter interface:

Find the small circle with "retweet cycle" arrows and click it (indicated with red arrow in image below).  Retweets done by this user will no longer show up in your timeline.  In the example below, if you clicked the circle, anything retweeted BY @scilib (me) wouldn't show up in your timeline any more.

There are also some search commands you can use with retweets.  Unfortunately there is almost no documentation.  Some appear to apply only to RT style retweets, some to both Twitter retweets and RTs.

You can try these parameters in a twitter search:

filter:retweets (show ONLY retweets)

-filter:retweets (everything EXCEPT retweets)

exclude:retweets (everything EXCEPT retweets)

include:retweets (include retweets)

conference technology planning - updated for 2011

Most of the items I wrote in 2009 in my post about conference technology planning are still valid.  Nevertheless I have added a substantial amount of revised content, particularly related to Twitter and mobile devices.

Online

• Identify and promote a tag e.g. example2009
  
  • Make sure your tag is unique, avoids 1 vs. l and similar confusion, and is short
  • Short because you're also going to want it to be a Twitter hashtag e.g. #example2009
  • Consider registering your tag with various services (I don't know that this is a high priority - I believe a lot more in search-based tag discovery than search registration)
    - the service that Twitter uses is What the Trend, but there are some issues with your description being replaced by other updates

• Get a URL, ideally with the tag embedded e.g. example2009.exampleorganisation.org
• Consider creating an event blog, if relevant
• Consider creating an event wiki, if relevant
• Consider creating an event Twitter account, if relevant (use of hashtags may cover this better)
  - if Twitter is an important part of your communications and event, make sure to embed Twitter content (e.g. using a JavaScript widget) on the front page of your site
  - remember people may be joining the Twitter conversation at any time, so don't forget to periodically link to your actual event from your tweets - particularly at the start of each conference day
• Provide sharing buttons (perhaps with pre-written messages including the hashtag) on all pages of your site.

• Provide live video/webcast, live audio, or later podcasts of audio and video recordings
• The more rapidly you can get content online during and shortly after the event, the higher the impact it will have.

Think about lifespan of your online presence.  Do you have a plan for maintenance of the website, blog, wiki and Twitter account?  Ideally these should be part of an integrated comms presence, not just standalones.  For example, it's much better to have the blog on a main site e.g. blog.exampleorganisation.org than on a custom eventexample2011.org site.  If you create a custom domain for your site, someone has to keep renewing that domain... basically forever, unless you want the domain to expire and be taken over by someone else (usually it either turns into a placeholder page or an adult site, since domains are cheap to buy in bulk).

For whatever pages or sites or accounts you create, define the expectations up front: This page will be archived in a year, comments on this blog will close a month after the conference and it will go idle, etc.

Similarly, it's much better to be tweeting from @exampleorg with a hashtag, than to create a special @example2011 account that tweets for a while and then goes silent.  Not only are you losing all the followers associated with that account, at some point if the account is idle you may lose it entirely, and then you have the same problem of someone else taking it over.  (See Twitter Help Center - Inactive Account Policy for more information.)

Remember you are not the centre of the universe.  It's a web.  Find out what social media tools and sites the attendees use.  Be (respectfully) present in those environments and use those tools.  You may find e.g. a particular scientific site is the best place to share most of your information about an upcoming event, rather than creating your own elaborate site.

To reiterate: depending on your community, use the full arsenal of networks available to reach your desired audience.  This may be Facebook, but don't forget LinkedIn, Nature Network, and other sites that may be more aligned with your particular target demographic.  NOTE: This requires considerable care.  There is nothing more disliked in an existing community than an outsider "parachuting in" to promote a particular event / topic / agenda.  Make sure you know the etiquette (yes, there is such a thing online) and conventions of any site you use.

Be aware that post-event engagement is really hard.  I advise against investing heavily in your own custom event social networking site, or even a white-label event social networking site. Make it easy for people to connect to you, and make it easy (through hashtags and aggregation) for people to discover one another. They can do the rest on their own.  A mailing list and a hashtag can be a more effective way of keeping people in contact than a standalone social network site.

• Set up your event in Lanyrd, particularly if you anticipate a lot of Twitter use - this will let people connect with speakers, attendees, and content.
  - There are similar services, please feel free to comment if you have others you've found useful.  Lanyrd is the one I've seen the most recent Twitter buzz about.
• Create an Upcoming event
  • This will also give you a machine code that Flickr users can embed to get a nice "This photo taken at Example event" notice.
  • There is some risk that Upcoming will be shut down by Yahoo, so make sure it is only a secondary part of your online presence.
• Create a SlideShare event to store the presentations

• Use an aggregator to pull in all the tagged and hashtagged activity
  - I'd be interested in recommendations for easy aggregation solutions.  This is a key way to expose content to people who are comfortable with the web, but may not necessarily use Twitter or other tools.
• Consider appropriate tools for shared conference liveblogging.
  - Wikis are usually not a good choice due to edit conflicts.
  - Google Docs can support multiple simultaneous editors.
  - Etherpad  is no longer supported by Google but you can run your own server or use various online versions, which can support multiple simultaneous edits.
  - There are also dedicated tools such as CoverItLive and ScribbleLive that allow liveblogging with moderated questions and Twitter integration.  These work best I think when there is a single reporter in charge of the liveblog, writing notes and fielding questions.  They're primarily Flash-based, so there can be some complexity when used with mobile devices - I also don't know how well the resulting content is indexed by Google (if at all).
• Another part of recording the event is of course the hashtagged tweets themselves that are generated - but this is tricky as tweets very quickly no longer show up in Twitter search (unlike Google, in Twitter search old material simply doesn't show up after a while) and Twitter has changed its rules for online archiving sites.  I think the best you can do is either run local archive software (using e.g. the Twapperkeeper codebase, or run the desktop version of Archivist).  Be aware that you still may not capture all the tweets, but you should get most of them.

• Do some very basic usability for your site: Highlight the dates and location.  Put your contact information (email, phone number, Twitter) up front in a prominent location.  Highlight submission deadlines, registration information (including costs), accomodations. 
• In particular often conference websites have terrible maps.  This is easy to fix.  Use Google Maps and Google Earth integration to highlight your venue and surrounding attractions
  • Since it may he hard for people to use a satellite map to recognise your venue, also consider photos of the exterior of your venue (geotagged in Flickr or PhotoSynth panorama are both good ways to show off the venue) as well as Google Street View and Microsoft Virtual Earth Birds Eye view (if they are available for your location).
• Make it easy for people to get website information into their mobile devices - that means online calendars that can be imported into Google Calendar, Outlook, and iPhone calendar - there's actually a standard format you can use, called iCalendar.  Importable contact info, maps, directions etc. are also very useful.
• Make sure your site is usable on small mobile devices (e.g. iPhones).  You may want to provide a more traditional stripped-down mobile site as well, depending on audience and location (many people in many countries don't have smart phones, but can still view basic mobile sites on their phones).

There's a great list of tools that can help you capture and analyse your event available from the Event Amplifier blog - Curating and Re-Using Amplified Conference Discussions.

We Grow Media also has useful thoughts on How to Extend the Value of In-Person Events with Social Media.

UPDATE 2011-03-16: Lorcan Dempsey wrote on March 14, 2011 about the Amplified Event with a specific focus on remote participation in events.  ENDUPDATE

A note: there can be confusion between a tag and a hashtag.  Usually for a blog you will have a tag that goes in the metadata, e.g. example2011.  Usually on Twitter for various reasons of searching and convention, it will be a hashtag instead #example2011.  Sometimes people forget the hash on Twitter, and sometimes people add it when tagging their blogs.

Offline

• State the event tag and your expectations of audience technology use at the start of each day (something like "be respectful" will probably cover it)
• Prepare presenters who may not be used to live coverage by their audience, for example see How to Present While People are Twittering
  • Also consider having the presenters suggest a single unified location for live coverage - see FriendFeed thread on this topic
• If you plan to record audio or video, check out well in advance what the venue can provide
  • And make sure you get permission from presenters in advance
• Consider using QR Code on badges, either for contact information or to connect to people's websites/blogs/twitter.  Consider adding Twitter accounts to badges (they're short).  Remember to have a small amount of information on badges, in LARGE FONT.  No one wants to lean in and squint to read someone's name.

• If you can set up the venue so that presenters have a screen in front of them where they can see what slide is up, that helps a lot (otherwise various things happen, including presenters are looking over their shoulders, or they forget to advance the slides) - it's also particularly helpful if you have a panel presenting, as otherwise the panel has to basically turn their backs on the audience in order to see the slides
  - it's true that presenters can usually see their laptop but this creates other problems - they point at the laptop screen instead of the actual big screen, they look down at the laptop rather than out at the audience, and they tend to be constrained to stand right in front of the laptop - it's much better if you have a large display screen positioned at the front of the audience
• Be prepared for laptop swaps and last minute presentations on memory keys (or ask everyone to use a standard laptop and send their presentations in advance, in which case, good luck).
• When there are laptop swaps be prepared for some delay as people figure out how to get the laptop display output and the projector in sync.
• If there are going to be people using Mac laptops to present (and there often are), make sure you have one of each of the many many different Mac laptop display connectors available (people always forget their display adapters).
• Be aware many presenters are not great at using PowerPoint and don't necessarily know either how to start it into presentation mode or how to easily advance slides (the spacebar, seriously, just hit the spacebar).  Have someone available to help if they accidentally exit or end up trying to use the mouse menu to advance slides or something.
• Even better, get a little handheld slide advancer, I really like the Kensington 33374.
• If you have a wireless mike, show them how to turn it on, and show them where to put the controller (an inside suit pocket works well for men, or clipped to their belt).  I once did an entire presentation holding the wireless mike controller in my hand since I didn't know where to put it.
• Provide a laser pointer and show them how to use it (the aforementioned Kensington has a built-in one).
• Have extra batteries for everything - mikes, pointers, mice etc.
• Provide a water pitcher and glasses on a table where they're unlikely to spill.  Amongst other reasons, plastic water bottles suck environmentally.
• Provide a space for paper notes (yes, people do sometimes still like to have notes, even if just as a crutch).
• In general, try to either do speaker prep in advance, or set the expectation that the speaker to speaker transition will take a minute or two, even if things are (inevitably) running late.  There's nothing more unnerving as a speaker than being rushed to start your presentation, fiddling with display settings, your wireless mike, etc. all while worrying the clock is ticking.
• Also, when the speaker leaves the stage, make sure they take everything with them that is theirs, and nothing that isn't (I have a tendency to forget my wireless clicker, while walking back into the audience still wearing my live wireless mike).

• Stable WiFi (a somewhat mythical creature I have yet to see) with all procedures in place (e.g. passwords or accounts if the venue requires them).  Make the official SSID (the network identifier) very clear to everyone.  You may also want to mention good wifi security practices - at least mention to people that anything they send that is not encrypted can be read by anyone else on the network.
  - I don't know if new 3G hotspot devices (including the iPhone 4) will make for a better WiFi conference experience, or will just generate interference and confusion.
• Lots and lots of power outlets
• Consider having device charging stations (perhaps sponsored, if you're having a sponsored event) - the three main types of charger cables to have available are USB mini, USB micro, and iPhone/iPad.
• Big LCD or plasma screens are now available at many venues and, paired with e.g. a netbook, can make great places to display timely notices, event photos, and Twitter walls.
• I'm of the opinion that running the Twitter wall e.g. on the main projector(s) between speakers is good (it gives people something to look at while you're getting set up, for one thing, making it less of a rushed experience) but I recommend against Twitter walls during a presentation - particularly if the speaker can't see the screen, but even if they can.  It's just too distracting, and it's a bit unnerving for the speaker not knowing what may come up.
• All of the Twitter walls I've used are problematic - some use tiny fonts, or low contrast, and almost all the Flash-based ones eventually crash.  Also remember to turn off screensaver mode or the Twitterwall will disappear after a while.
  - The one I like best so far is Visible Tweets but there are many options.  Twitterfall and Twitterfountain also provide interesting tweet displays.
• Be aware that anything that is a pure unmoderated hashtag/tag pull, whether a twitterwall or a photowall or whatever, presents the opportunity for inappropriate or awkward material - either from people at the event, or from outside hashtag spammers or tag collisions with other topics.

Other guides:

* Walt Crawford has some fantastic information about conferences in http://citesandinsights.info/civ7i7.pdf
* Some thoughts on the "amplified conference" on Wikipedia, based on ideas from from Lorcan Dempsey, Brian Kelly and others

Thanks to @macjudith for asking the questions that prompted this updated post.

Previously:
My July 8, 2006 posting conference tag goodness with HitchHikr has links at the bottom to my examination of this topic spanning back to 2004.  (This blog was started as a place to put conference notes, so thinking about conference support is in some sense part of its DNA.)

Twitter trend descriptions

If you click on a trending topic and notice that it doesn't have a description, and you know what the topic is referring to, you can head over to What The Trend and tell us! Our trend descriptions are sourced from their site, so it's possible that all or part of your contribution could show up on Twitter.

Twitter Help Center - About Trending Topics

So fair enough, let's have a look at http://whatthetrend.com/

So really quite a good description as the top item, with a rather uninformative suggested update.

Now oddly, Twitter doesn't expose trend descriptions well in its official Twitter app (and I can't find anywhere they're shown on the Twitter website anymore).  Nevertheless, if you go to the trends bar at the top of the app display (a new feature so disliked by some that it has been given a rather amusing moniker), and select the trend, you get to a trend/search screen which has an unobtrusive, unlabelled tag icon in the lower left, which will give you the trend description.

Except the description it gives you, instead of being the consensus description, appears to be the latest update. Which is sort of useless.

The Echofon app also has the same behaviour.  To see trends, go to the Search screen, then scroll down to trends, then tap the blue question mark to see the trend description.

If Twitter really is going to play a useful role in helping us understand what is going on, "trend" descriptions (which are really keyword and hashtag descriptions) are going to have to work better than this.

18,000 tweets and counting - three years of Twitter and how it has impacted my blogging

"created_at":"Wed Jun 06 15:35:14 +0000 2007" (extracted from http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=scilib)

Closing in on four years on Twitter.  I can't remember exactly, but I think I noticed people were talking about it more and more, on blogs and in person, so I decided to check it out.  It took me about six months to figure out how I could use it, to understand what Twitter was for me.  It has aspects of "social bookmarking that works" (that is, that actually shares bookmarks rather than just keeping them to yourself) as well as a social network maintenance layer - a way to keep in contact with people in your network, during the sometimes-long gaps between in-person conversations.  It's also a way to get some understanding of people you have yet to meet, to discover a bit about their interests and personality.

It is not, exactly, a blog killer.  But it has dramatically reduced the amount of routine news or links that I post.  A bunch of factors led to a dramatic reduction in my blogging.  The main one had nothing to do with Twitter - in June 2009 when I posted the blog is quiet and said it was because of "Reason I can't tell you which will be announced soon" it was because I had planned to move to scienceblogs.com.  I was excited about the move.  But then there was some minor setup... and I started second-guessing what I wanted to post, I was uncertain about what to say, now that I was outside of my own space.  I started a few posts in draft, but I was really hesitant to do a completely new launch, on a new site.  Whereas previously I would have had an idea and immediately fired up my browser, I no longer felt that I should just share anything, anytime.  (This was nothing to do with ScienceBlogs, they were perfectly welcoming.)  And so my momentum drained away, and my energies were all channeled entirely into Twitter.  To the extreme that my posts went June 2009... August 2009... July 2010.

Meanwhile, my tweets are up to 500 or more a month, according to the (probably imperfect) stats gathered by TweetStats for my account.

What have a learned, from this long sejour entirely in Twitterland?  First and foremost, I think one loses a lot by not blogging.  Twitter can to some extent maintain a presence online, but it can't expand it or make substantial impact.  Pretty much all of the opportunities that have come to me from sharing online came from sustained blog posting, from long-form sharing of my own ideas, not from tweeting or retweeting.  If you want to share your ideas in a way that will generate substantial discussion and spark interest in a major way, you have to write in the long form.  It's the content creators who are the top of the Internet pyramid - to have an impact you must be writing your ideas, narrating your work.  Not just for others, but as importantly, to better understand yourself, to have an online archive of your thoughts and work over time. 

Nick Charney puts it nicely

As a knowledge worker myself, I feel that my blog is one of my strongest assets: it helps me contextualize my thinking, forms a narrative, is searchable, can hyperlink to other sources, and allows for comments and debate.

From Briefing Notes to Govblogging - January 28, 2011

When I started a work blog in 2004, it was as simple as wanting to be able to google my own conference notes.  The easiest way for me to make that happen was to just stick them in a blog.  I had no idea it would become more than that, notes to myself.

Our communication channels are evolving continuously.  In 2004 the library blogosphere was evolving rapidly, and my RSS reader was my daily go-to place to find out what was going on.  Later, I found Friendfeed was a valuable addition, allowing additional conversation and sharing around a broader spectrum of material than just blog posts.  I used delicious, but I never found it worked very well even as a personal archive - I was much more likely to find what I was trying to remember by trying some keywords in a search of my blog, than guessing what I might have used for tags in delicious, and it was pretty rare that someone would be monitoring delicious closely enough to pick up a link that I had posted.

Twitter does a much better job of "ambient awareness" in a few senses - it lets me know generally what major events are happening (such as the ongoing events in Egypt),  amd it is also a good way for me to find links of interest in specific topic areas (for me: open data, government 2.0, library technology, scholarly publishing).  But it's important to understand, this is my unique window on to Twitter.  I have very carefully selected whom I want to follow (once I hoped to keep it to 200 people or less, now I am vowing to keep it under 500); I also go through my followers daily and block both blatant spammers and people that I think are coming from keyword searches that don't match my main content.  Twitter for me is very much a curated experience - both from me in curating the information I want to see by selecting whom I follow, and in turn from that group, in the content they write and retweet.

There is a major problem though, which is a dramatic loss in findability.  Twitter is designed as an ephemeral stream.  And once you're following a substantial number of people, the river flows very quickly.  I can retweet and favourite a lot faster than I can read.  And once tweeted or favourited, Twitter doesn't make it easy to search, even to record for a long time what you have highlighted.  I use Friendfeed to consume both my tweets and my favourites but it's not a great solution - its search is imperfect and it is in danger of disappearing entirely at any time (it was bought by Facebook and is no longer actively supported).

There are some dedicated tools, such as T-keeper and Archivist, I tend to use those specifically for recording event hashtag traffic though, rather than to capture all of my tweets.  There are also services that will bookmark any link you tweet, but often these want read/write access to your Twitter stream, and I am very reluctant to grant write access to any app.

I would be interested in hearing what workflows people are using to keep track of their tweets and favourites so that they can go back and read things later - I imagine a lot of people are using Instapaper, but I haven't managed to integrate this into my workflow yet.

Another factor driving Twitter use is the fact that it is easily read/write on mobile.  There are lots of good Twitter clients for mobile devices.  On the iPhone I use Echofon, and on Blackberry the official Twitter app, which has some nice notification integration.  As I use my iPhone a lot on transit, Twitter has provided an easy way to monitor what's going on, and to provide feedback.

Specifically in the Ottawa context, Twitter has been a powerful tool for keeping up with local events, reporting from those events, and connecting to attendees before and after.  For example, the recent Third Tuesday about the NCC's use of social media was announced on Twitter, microblogged on Twitter using hashtag #3tyow, and has also been a catalyst for further conversations with Daniel Feeny (@feeny_d) who was the presenter.  I actually worry about a digital divide in Ottawa, as those who are still using only mailing lists and blogs are missing out on a lot of the events and discussion that now are solely on Twitter.

Also, it's important to understand there are three quite different Twitter experiences: the web site, the mobile apps, and the desktop tools. 

Twitter through the website itself is a somewhat limited experience - although more features are now easier to use and better exposed in the new user interface.  It still won't let you post a retweet with a comment, or shorten your URLs for you, or help you post images.  A Twitter web toolkit thus includes not only an open Twitter window, but e.g. bit.ly for URL shortening and e.g. Twitpic for picture posting - a rather awkward, manual integration.  It's actually easier for me to post a link or a picture using Echofon, as there is a Safari "post to Echofon" bookmarklet, and built-in picture posting support.

Echofon (and other iPhone apps) also give visual indication of new @-messages and direct messages (DMs), unlike the web app.  I probably use Echofon more than any other single iPhone app.

That being said, you only get the full power of Twitter with a desktop application like TweetDeck.  Twitter is not just you and the network of followers and followees you have, it is global conversations.  You can track these using Twitter searches that provide RSS feeds, but it is much easier to monitor them at a glance in a tool like TweetDeck (or the web-based HootSuite).  For example, while I get information in my feed about open data from the people I follow, I also monitor the #opendata hashtag in TweetDeck, along with many others.  Selecting hashtags of interest and monitoring them can be a great way to learn about a new topic and keep abreast of new developments.  Don't forget you can use booleans, so you can e.g. monitor information about the three GC 2.0 core tools by using the search "gcpedia OR gcconnex OR gcforums".

Here's what I'm monitoring right now:

• gcpedia OR gcconnex OR gcforum OR gcforums
• #w2p - an Ottawa networking / information event mostly for GC employees - "Web 2.0 Practitioners"
• #goc3 - GC collaboration community
• #goc - Government of Canada in general
• #opendataottawa or #apps4ottawa - the Ottawa open data community and the just-completed contest
• #smbottawa - Social Media Breakfast Ottawa
• datacite - The data DOI service, provided by CISTI in Canada
• #opendata
• #gov2au - very active hashtag of Australian Gov 2.0 developments
• #gc20 - Government of Canada 2.0 and also the hashtag my group, the GC 2.0 Program Office uses, when appropriate
• #ottcafesci - The Cafe Scientifique that the Science & Technology Museum does (unfortunately not used by the other organisations in Ottawa that also do Cafe Scientifique events)
• #psi_policy - Public Sector Information Policy - another view on open data, mostly from a European perspective
• #SC2011 - the hashtag for the upcoming Ontario Library SuperConference
• #3TYOW - Third Tuesday Ottawa
• #resd - a just-completed Resource Discovery Day at Library and Archives Canada
• #mobileappsottawa - a recent mobile apps event in Ottawa
• #ottawahackathon - yesterday's Ottawa Google User Group hackathon

Like I said, a river of information.  But you don't have to try to drink everything from the firehose.  A good start is just to find the people and hashtags that are useful to you and start monitoring them, when you can - maybe even just check in once a day to get a sense of what's going on.  How you use Twitter, and how often, can evolve from there.  For myself, I was happy to have my deep immersion in Twitter for over a year, but I'm happy to be back blogging now as well.

Internet access as a fundamental freedom

We call on the Government of Egypt to ensure that freedom of expression is respected by, among other measures, unblocking Internet sites.

Statement by Minister Cannon on Situation in Egypt - Jan 27, 2011

Nous faisons appel au gouvernement égyptien pour assurer le respect de la liberté d’expression, notamment en cessant de bloquer l’accès à des sites Internet.

Déclaration du ministre Cannon sur la situation en Égypte - 27 jan 2011

Via Twitter, where the Foreign Affairs account is @DFAIT_MAECI / @MAECI_DFAIT (linked from the news release).

Déclaration du ministre #Cannon sur la situation en #Égypte http://ow.ly/3LUbZless than a minute ago via HootSuiteMAECI
MAECI_DFAIT

Statement by Minister #Cannon on situation in #Egypt http://ow.ly/3LU91less than a minute ago via HootSuiteDFAIT
DFAIT_MAECI

In the US, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs (@PressSec)

Very concerned about violence in Egypt - government must respect the rights of the Egyptian people & turn on social networking and internetless than a minute ago via webRobert Gibbs (EOP)
PressSec

And a statement by President Obama

I also call upon the Egyptian government to reverse the actions that they’ve taken to interfere with access to the Internet, to cell phone service and to social networks that do so much to connect people in the 21st century.

In a press briefing, Robert Gibbs frames these as universal human rights

it is our strong belief that inside of the framework of basic individual rights are the rights of those to have access to the Internet and to sites for open communication and social networking.

The US State Department has also been calling for restoration of Internet and social networking access.  Philip J. Crowley, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, tweeted

We are concerned that communication services, including the Internet, social media and even this #tweet, are being blocked in #Egypt.less than a minute ago via webPhilip J. Crowley
PJCrowley

Widely reported, e.g. Washington Post - U.S. warns against blocking social media, elevates Internet freedom policies.

In case you're wondering what happened, here's what Internet traffic to and from Egypt looked like, from Thursday to Friday from New York Times article Egypt Cuts Off Most Internet and Cell Service.

It's reported that with broadband Internet completely blocked, but telephones still partially working, people have turned to dial-up to ISPs outside of Egypt, using old modems: Pour contourner le blocage du Web, les modems 56K.

(Note that Blackbird Pie, which I used to embed tweets, always says "less than a minute ago"; it loses date information.)

syndication of status to and from Twitter

As long as you don't have a private Twitter feed, apps can consume your Twitter via RSS or the API, and either republish the entire thing, or extract selected tagged tweets.

Twitter to Yammer

For Yammer, simply enter your Twitter username into your account preferences, and then any tweet hashtagged #yam will be copied to your Yammer status.  Yammer Integrates with Twitter gives some information.  In the latest version of Yammer, the setting is under Account->Profile...Twitter Username.

Twitter to LinkedIn

In LinkedIn, Edit Profile->Twitter... lets you pull in all tweets, or only tweets hashtagged #in.

LinkedIn to Twitter

You can also push status updates from LinkedIn to Twitter.  See LinkedIn Learning Center - Twitter for more info.

To share updates from LinkedIn to Twitter, check the box next to the Twitter icon on the LinkedIn home page. The first time you do this, Twitter will verify your account name and password. Whenever the Twitter box is checked, that update will publish to your Twitter feed.

Twitter to Facebook

You can add an application (with all the associated security and privacy risks of Facebook apps) called Selective Tweets, once configured you simply use hashtag #fb to get tweets into Facebook.  Another option is http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets/facebook - The Twitter app for Facebook.

Facebook to Twitter

If you want to send postings from Facebook TO Twitter, use http://www.facebook.com/twitter/ - you can choose which types of content you want to be posted.

Twitter to blog/website

If you want to display tweets in a window on a site or a blog, you can use http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets

Blog to Twitter

There are lots of different ways, one is Feedburner Socialize.  See Feedburner Socialize and stats.

Twitter Apps

Be mindful that if you want to send status messages TO Twitter, you have to give the source application write access to your tweet stream.  That means if the source application is compromised, it can be used to post malicious information (e.g. malware links) to Twitter. 

You can see what applications you have added, and what permissions they have, at http://twitter.com/settings/connections - note that Twitter permissions are all-or-nothing, in the sense that you don't get to choose what permissions a connected application has - if it requests read and write, you can only permit it entirely or deny it completely, you can't choose to grant it just read permissions.

Desktop Tools

There are also various desktop tools, such as TweetDeck, that support viewing and posting to multiple different types of status feeds simultaneously.

Previously

This topic is related to the issue of moving content around in an enterprise and consolidating notifications. 

Jan 14, 2011  RSS and enterprise notification architecture

Feedburner Socialize and stats

You can now have Google Feedburner send tweets in addition to creating an RSS feed.

Assuming you have a Feedburner account set up at http://feedburner.google.com/

go to the blog you want to connect to Twitter and select the Publicize tab, then select the Socialize option.

It will let you OAuth to an existing Twitter account.

It tweets post titles along with a goo.gl short link.

See Using Socialize to distribute your feed on social networks for a bit more info.

Of course, be mindful that in addition to giving you granular stats, this also gives Google yet even more information about how people engage with your content.

I didn't want to mix blog post tweets in with the rest of my account, so I made a separate feed

@scilibfeed

The Socialize feature is also related to an upgrade of Feedburner, it now has a new (apparently optional for the moment) interface that can provide real-time stats

Go to

http://feedburner.google.com/gfb

See Google's blog posting Your stats, right away for a bit more info.

 

Collab Culture Camp - as seen by TrendsMap

Trendsmap is a service that extracts and displays geo-located Twitter trends.  You can follow Ottawa trends at @TrendsOttawa or view them online at http://trendsmap.com/ca/ottawa

Here's what Collaborative Culture Camp looked like to them

#goc3 is now a #TT in #Ottawa http://trendsmap.com/ca/ottawaless than a minute ago via Trendsmap AlertingTrendsmap Ottawa
TrendsOttawa

Martha McLean, @mjmclean is now trending in #Ottawa http://trendsmap.com/ca/ottawaless than a minute ago via Trendsmap AlertingTrendsmap Ottawa
TrendsOttawa

Wayne Wouters, @waynewouters is now trending in #Ottawa http://trendsmap.com/ca/ottawaless than a minute ago via Trendsmap AlertingTrendsmap Ottawa
TrendsOttawa

(Tweet embeds done using @twittermedia Blackbird Pie.)