Tame The Web

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/story?id=5388404&page=1

Frustrated, she logged on to Twitter from her BlackBerry and typed “Damn Internet down in my house. Arrrrrgh. Can’t fix until Thursday. Shoot me.”

Twitter kicked in. Wallace didn’t know that Comcast had a digital detecting unit searching the Internet diligently looking for unhappy customers who needed help. Frank Eliason heads that unit for Comcast and saw her rant. “She clearly needed help. As soon as I saw her post I started tracking her down.”

Eliason went to great lengths to find Wallace. He located her Web site, found who owned her domain name, tracked down her business partner, who then called Wallace and said Comcast was looking for her.

Wallace was astounded. “I didn’t know there was a Frank Eliason. I called him, and he explained to me what he does. He surfs the Internet looking for people complaining just like me, finds out what the problem is, and he does his best to fix it and fix it fast.” Wallace was up and running again by 5 p.m. that day.

Wow. Just Wow. Another example that suggests we should be monitoring all sorts of tools for mentions of our libraries or calls for information assistance.

Via Warren’s SLJ Learning 2.0 blog:

One twitter tool I have found facinating is monitter. The page has three columns where you can enter search words you want to monitor on twitter - your library name (or your name!) perhaps. Then as it finds tweets containing those words, the column will fill up and add those tweets as results.

I went immediately, added some location data and some keywords:

Of course, I see my tweets, but also some interesting things: folks discussing the Hesburgh library, our local CBS affiliate, and some discussion about my hometown Mishawaka, Indiana. Check this one out.

Here’s the GIANT size image at Flickr.

Via Linda Braun, I followed the links and found out that many of the characters on one of my favorite TV shows are on Twitter! 

File this under PR and Marketing 2.0:

http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/25/twitter-blacklists-mad-men-characters-some-of-them/

Update: Twitter has responded back to me on the issue. Apparently it wasn’t a spam issue, but rather a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice that Twitter’s support team responded to, co-founder Biz Stone tells me.

I guess AMC didn’t like others playing the roll of its Mad Men characters besides the actors who play them on TV. Expect some backlash against the network.

Update 2: Blogger Ben Kessler has a full list of the Mad Men characters on Twitter. It looks likejoan_holloway was also suspended, but several others were not caught.

Update 3: In an apparent act of defiance, a new account for Peggy_Olson has been created with an underscore in her name and a profile that reads “Also known as @PeggyOlson.” One of hertweets reads:

I worked hard. I did my job. But the boys at Twitter are just as churlish as the boys at Sterling Cooper. Such a pity that they’re so petty.

Update 4: The suspended Mad Men accounts have been restored. Apparently, Deep Focus, AMC’s web marketing group persuaded the cable channel that free promotion is a good thing, according to Silicon Alley Insider. A tough sell, I know.

This is a good illustration of the growing pains big media is moving through as social media becomes stronger. Does AMC want to be known as the channel that crushed fan-created content?

Twitter breaks down barriers in the Classroom:

As an experiment, Parry made Twitter a class assignment and got his students to engage in microblogging as homework. He observed how Twitter became the link that connected conversations inside and out of class. “Because the students had the shared classroom experience, when something came up outside of class that reminded them of material from class time, it often got twittered,” he notes. “This served as a reinforcement/connection between the material and the ‘real world.’” He also discovered that it changed classroom dynamics in a positive way, encouraging more respectful and productive interaction between students by turning the class into a community.

I’m finishing up syllabi for the fall and I’m thinking this might be a good thing to try with my two sections of LIS768. Remember this article from the Chronicle?

Jason B. Jones, an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, uses his iPhone to post a message to Twitter after every class session as “a way to jot down a little reflection about the class — how it went, things that were frustrating or worked really well — so that I can remember them later.” Students who see the messages often give him a reality check, though. “If I thought something didn’t go well, I’ve had people say, Actually we understood that fine, we were distracted by something else or we were just tired,” he says.

Blackboard plans to add a Twitter-like messaging tool to its course-management system, which is used at hundreds of colleges around the country. The company recently announced plans to acquire NTI Group, a company that sells text-message notification systems to colleges for use in emergencies. NTI’s systems don’t have all the features of Twitter, but they could be used in similar ways.

“We’re going to incorporate that technology at the classroom level,” says Michael L. Chasen, president of Blackboard. For instance, he says, “Professors could send a message to their entire class to let them know that class has been canceled this week.”

And this is useful as well:

Another idea, provided by Doug Belshaw on his teaching blog, is to use Twitter for quick questions from students about assignments, readings, and the like. The problem is that you could receive these tweets 24/7. To eliminate that possibility Belshaw suggests the following: “Unlike a direct message which can only be seen by the recipient, placing @user name directs the ‘tweet’ (Twitter update) at the intended recipient whilst allowing everyone to also see it. This facilitates virtual ‘classroom discussion.’ Anytime someone responds to you using the @ symbol, it is logged in the ‘replies’ section of your personal Twitter page” (4 ). Belshaw extended this notion, noting that students are not limited to just the class to answer questions. He writes, “As with the personal learning network (PLN) facilitated by Twitter in the edublogosphere (usually through the TwitterFox plugin for Firefox), students can also ask questions of those they only know online” (4 ).

Several faculty have shared their experiences with Twitter in their blogs. Karen Miller Russell (5 ) used it in her communications class, taking her lead from Kaye Sweetser’s social media class (6 ). Both are instructors at the University of Georgia. As Russell explains, she set up a Twitter account, locked it so that only her students could follow, and then invited students to register. She asked that each student do five posts to the account over a 48-hour period. The posts could be about anything. As Russell reported, the class, far exceeding expectations to merely experiment with a new medium, actually generated a list of how Twitter could be used in advertising, public relations, and marketing: “Participate in conversations, build relationships — not the ‘hard sell’; get feedback on ideas, programs; data mining (learn about interests, trends, issues, etc.), including polling the audience; announce sales or promotions; make appointments; provide event updates and live coverage of events; and build a trusting community” (5 ).

I would love to hear some experiences from educators who have used Twitter in their teaching.

http://hloy.edublogs.org/2008/08/17/benefits-of-elearning/

Nice post by Heather about using Twitter to tap into the knowledge of her group.

One of our assignments was to Google the benefits of eLearning and share our findings with the class. Of course, I have to be different and I was curious to see what members of my PLN thought benefits of eLearning were in relation to their experiences. So, I used Twitter to pole my network and asked:

“I’m taking an online course & we’re to gather 3 benefits of eLearning. We’re to use Google, but I figure asking you guys is more practical. Benefits from your own classroom experiences or participation in global projects are what I’m really looking for…any words of wisdom?” These are the responses I received. I was hoping for more, but these were great.

Amanda Clay Powers writes:

i’m following 51 people on twitter. today one of them “tweeted” that it was shawerma wednesday at shaherazad, our local mediterrenean restaurant. i love shawerma wednesday, but i’d forgotten all about it.

when i signed up for twitter it was an experiment. i looked for everyone at msu and in starkville–there weren’t many–and “followed” all of them. and then they “followed” me. i started getting updates about when exams were happening (and what people were doing to de-stress!). then mpbonline and the clarion ledger started following me. mississippi public broadcasting is doing some pretty cool things, it turns out.

then i went to ala in anaheim this year and found some friends to follow there. i roomed with warmaiden who was hooked in with lots of cool library-type twitterers. so now i’m following folks that are doing really interesting emerging technology library-type things. and they twitter about them. it turns out you can get a lot of information–or at least a tiny url–into the 140 character micro-blogging limit.

now i get updates on emerging technologies, news from public radio in mississippi, along with a peek inside the undergraduate’s mind. and i got my shawerma today for lunch for just $3.50 thanks to willbryantplz.

so now i have to figure out if it can work for our library. what kind of information would people want who are following a library’s tweets? who would be following them? or would it just be an rss feed we could put on our site somewhere with updates? the clarion ledger and uiuc undergrad library both do that. but what would our patrons want to know? here’s a list of potentially good information:

1. when anything is closing early or closed for a holiday, etc.
2. when the network is down.
3. when we have an event in the library (?).
4. when we have an interesting workshop in the library (?).
5. when we post pictures on flickr (?).
6. when printers are down or other equipment.
7. news at the library.
8. when podcasts are released.
9. major new resources/databases at the library.
10. new blog entries?
11. hmmm…?

http://www.cloudtrip.com

Again, via ALA Direct! Check out all the choices, including http://posterous.com/

From Sean:

From WNDU coverage of a trial in LaPorte.  (http://www.wndu.com/home/headlines/25752679.html)

Apparently, WNDU is Twittering a running commentary of the day in court via a cell phone and Twitter.

I’ve been testing Twinkle… it too does things with the localization features of the iPhone 2.0 software. I’ve discovered Twitter folk near me in Mishawaka…but sadly Spider Lake is devoid of Twitterers right now.

This is fun, a little silly, but also a serious: what will localization do for us in the coming years?

I have a new post up at ALA TechSource:

http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2008/07/the-ala-annual-tweet-report.html

And, I must confess: I thoroughly enjoyed participating in the ALA Annual 2008 Twitterverse that sprang up for those few days in late June. It fascinated me to see the power of such a simple and, yes, overburdened, tool. Micro-blogging has found a place amongst LIS workers and even through outages and downtime, the tweets from ALA marched on. “I credit Twitter for helping make this my best ALA yet. More connected. Too many people to see, places to be, but I read tweets,” responded Brenda Hough to my tweeted requests for “interviews” for this post. The call via Twitter and at TTW prompted many useful, hilarious and telling responses. Others helped out via comments at TTW and in personal email.

Looking at the tweets and responses, patterns emerge of how the tool was used and how people responded to it.  The functions of Twitter at a conference such as ALA include:

• Reporting On Sessions
• Meeting Up & Making Plans
• Commentary & Transparency
• Finding New Ideas
• Simply Fun Observations & Connections

Read the whole post for an examination of each of those functions. But, also give some attention to some other functions of Twitter: too much noise and the potential to do harm - that’s the “playing nice” part. I think for TechSource I took the happy road, because I was very “up” on how folks were using the tool at ALA. Maybe I should have included a bit about what a colleague calls “the dark side.” I would hate to see people get hurt because of snarky tweets during conference presentations or in general. I always remember something Jessamyn West blogged: Use your powers for good. I hope we use our Twitter powers for good.

Will Richardson read my mind:

Whether it’s some people getting a little snippy from time to time and then other people making a way-too-huge-a-deal about it, or whether it’s two very smart people like Gary and Sheryl blowing out a Tweet-a-minute micro debate about the state of education in this country, or whether it’s people trying to live Tweet hour-long presentations that turn into like 347 updates, I’m finding anything that hints of substance just too scattered, too disjointed to read, even with the wonders ofTweetdeck. It’s like trying to eavesdrop on the conversation of a bunch of people with really bad cell phone reception, hearing a part of one response ’til it cuts out into the other. Frustrating.

And I can’t help feeling like it’s just making all of us, myself included, lazy. We’ve lamented this before, this “fact” that the whole community is blogging less since Twitter, engaging less deeply, it seems. Reading less. Maybe it’s just me (again) or maybe it’s my long term attachment to this blogging thing and my not so major attachment to texting, but it feels like the “conversation” is evolving (or would that be devlolving) into pieces instead of wholes, that the connections and the threads are unraveling, almost literally. That while, on some level, the Twitterverse feels even more connected, in reality it’s breaking some of the connectedness.

Read his whole post here: http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/what-i-hate-about-twitter/

As a response to Will, I think a few things are happening. Lots of folks are using Twitter and talking about how they are using it (guilty here). It’s the tool du jour (or maybe FriendFeed is?). But I also see that many of us have slowed down blogging. Could be summer. Could be other newer tools. it could also be that there are hundreds if not thousands of biblioblogs out there, making the conversation broad and deep but also HUGE to try to follow.

What do you think?

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6573999.html

“Twitter is just one of the Web 2.0 technologies that we are using to engage students within our traditional Web page (www.pasadena.edu/library),” says Mary Ann Laun, assistant dean of library services at Shatford. “We highlight events, interesting stats, and curious facts in an effort to call attention to some of the great things happening in the library. From announcements such as ‘the system is down, ask for help at the Reference desk’ to special events, we have fun conveying quick messages to students.”

Twitter can also help promote a blog, whether you’re an individual or an organization—like YALSA. The Young Adult Library Services Association (a division of the American Library Association) uses a service called Twitterfeed to automatically generate tweets from its blog posts (twitter.com/yalsa). The result: instant content for YALSA’s Twitter profile—no extra work required—and extended marketing of the YALSA blog.

Missouri River (www.mrrl.org) is another Twitterfeed user. In addition to its blog posts, the library uses the service to import its Flickr photostream. The alternative would have been costly, according to Robin Hastings, Missouri River’s information technology manager.

“We find that [Twitterfeed] has saved us from having to create the infrastructure for a dedicated alert service that will get announcements out to patrons in the format they want—text, IM, or email—or pay someone else to do the announcing for us,” says Hastings. “[Twitter] is a new channel of communication to our patrons that is easy to use and free.”

Don’t miss the whole article!

http://www.macmerc.com/news/archives/4541

http://twitter.com/RCPL/statuses/799720298 | http://twitter.com/RCPL

http://www.randolphlibrary.org/

Luria Library Twitters, originally uploaded by mstephens7.

Another nice example of one of the best uses for Twitter in the library setting - alerts.

http://twitter.com/lurialibrary

http://library.sbcc.edu/

Updating presentations today…adding this — can someone remind me how I found this?

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/ugl/

http://twitter.com/askundergrad