This was not the photo I wished I had taken at Northern Voice 2009. There was a moment in the back of the auditorium, during one of the big keynote sessions, when I glance at all the open laptops- more than 50% were open to TweetDeck.

I like discovering new tech tool features just be poking around. In Tweetdeck, when you mouse over the icon of someone’s message, you get 4 useful buttons- one to reply, one to direct message, and one called “Other Actions”… I’ve never even looked at that last one:

There are a bunch of things you can do there! You can follow/unfollow said user, link to their profile, add them to a TweetDeck group, and this is neat- search will create a new column that searches twitter for all mentions of that person (what you don’t already have a column set up to search for jimgroom?).

And that is just one part, Under the “Tweet” menu, I saw one for “Translate”

At first I thought it might allow me to, say translate Jim Groom’s tweets into Russian, but it seems like it does nothing– until you notice at the top where the status reads “This tweet is already translated into your preferred language” [idiot]. Ah, so its purpose is to allow you to read tweets in languages you dont read (which are all but one for me). So I ran a tweet deck search on “Italian” hoping to find something tweeted in Italian and not “OMG I just spilled Italian dressing on Brittany’s pants!”

So here is a tweet in a language I don’t know:

and using the “Other Actions” -> Tweet -> Translate converts it to English for me

Shazam! I can now me maginally less world ignorant, thanks to TweetDeck’s built in translation.

And even more warming, is that in the replies to my question today, I only know half of the responders. That’s right, people I don’t know are trying to help me!

One pitfall can be squeezing a complex request into 140 characters… i like the thought process of stripping it down to the bare essentials, lose the articles, commas, spelled out “and”s and get clever with abbrvs.

Today’s tweet out was:

Know a youtube-ish sharing site for audio? NMC is sharing collection of loops recorded on Lennon Bus, want site for people to share mixes

My nearly perfect hindsight vision sees now I did not fully explain the need, yet i still got a lot of useful ideas. Here’s the full story. At the NMC Summer Conference recently at Princeton, we had a one day event on the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, we called Rock Hall 2.0 where we set out 15 minute time slots on our wiki people could reserve to go on the bus and record a sound track, vocal, or anything recordable to be saved as an Apple Sound Loop. The reference to the Rock Hall was referencing the 2006 summer conference in Cleveland, where we had a jam session at the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame — this is the 2.0 version of that, to be cliche.

So after a day, we have nearly 50 loops, some guitar, drums, vocals, and more. Some are really good, and then there are ones like mine that managed about 3 guitar chords. Recording a loop is not trivial for someone w/o good timing, because it has to be perfect in 8 beats so it can be repeatable or pitch shifted.

The idea is we will make these available, and with software like GarageBand or Logic Studio, people can mix and mash the sounds into original music, and then share it back. Providing the loops is the easy end (we’ll make it a download on our web server), what I was looking for is an ideal online site whern people can post, maybe tag, the creations they make from the loops.

i was amazed at the range and number of responses:

And feel compelled to recognize, thank and respond to all!

• D’Arcy suggested Youtubing it as videos with sound and one photo — interesting approach and would be fine if i were doing them, but am not sure many others would go to that length to publish and post.
• @wmrandth (and a few others) suggested Odeo — wow, its been a few years since I looked (and the site did not come up when I tried a few hours ago) – from what I remember it did have tagging built in, but is it reliable?
• This person (he/she, tell me to should check the profile lazy blogger) also suggested anew one called Yodio that allows uploading or calling in via phone of audio and publishing with images. It might have the features, but again, is a bit more than sharing audio. But I like the way it sounds, and it is a new candidate for my 50 Ways to tell a story site.
• @ckendall suggested 3 sites in 2 tweets- Soundsnap, DivShare, and FreeSound – all perhaps viable, but Soundsnao and FreeSound are geared more towards sharing of the loops, not the mixes made of them. Divshare (and others of its ilk) provide the place to upload mixes. A long maybe on that one -but do the files stay there??
• @woscholar recommended PHPMotion, an open source software that allows a web site owner to run their own variety of YouTube but handles other media formats. I’ve been toying with trying out the software, but it feels like a sledgehammer of a tool here when I am looking for a smal pair of pliers.
• @mmkrill pointed at PodSafeAudio certainly is close to being a “YouTube” for mp3s. if it is easy to use and upload, I may take a return peak. A good maybe.
• Chris Millet was another Odeo suggester. I really did like Odeo in the old days. Maybe.
• @rubaiyat voted for ccMixter, which was in my thoughts earlier – it sits there to house mixes of other sounds. I’d be strong on it, but need to look more closely to see how simple/complex the uploading is.
• Lastly (as of 30 minutes ago) miczl, presumably from Australia if i am guessing URLs correctly, provided a whole wiki page of “free” media resources, and yes, looperman looks useful for sharing the loops, but I am still looking for a holding pen for the content created from the loops.

Again, I am bowled over that the response, again from folks I hardly or dont know (yet). As if it needs reinforcement, in twitter, and for that matter, most place in the read/write/mix/publish/rant web, you gotta give to get. Well you don’t have to, but it sure helps a lot.

I am mulling more over the best way to pull together a collection of audio files created from the loops. No one mentioned my first impulse– my response to almost anything is “tag ‘em in del.icio.us”. This would give people the option to get an mp3 on the web through any service where there is a direct link to an mp3, then with a common shared tag, in del.icio.us a tagged MP3 link comes with a free player, so a shared tag would aggregate them. Secondary tags can create a subset, and all the tags come with RSS for free, so the recently tagged audio could be pulled into other sites. And it would not require creating an account at some other site.

The decision is still hanging out there, and I am very sure there are a long list of possible site/tools that might work. I dont know them, but somewhere out there is expertise/experience in the twitter space– when the stars are lined up, you can often just Tweet and Receive (if twitter is not down!)

The problem was that the version I had and last linked from the original site, was done in a much earlier version of Air, and did not run in the latest version, even after installing the older run time. Some comments on the TwitterCamp site hinted at newer code, but no links worked.

What else to do, except toss out a tweet and say, “help!”.

And Andy Rush came through (actually twice as I missed his first tweetback) with a link to a new version of TwitterCamp on the Google Code site.

And just ran it smoothly this morning:

So to do this, the steps should be:

1. Install Adobe Air on the computer that will run the app
2. Install the new version of TwitterCamp
3. This will be the basic version and should run out of the box. Login with a twitter account and watch the tweets pop in.

To customize the skin, you can follow the same instructions I posted July 2007 noting on Mac OSX you have to ctrl-click on the TwitterCamp app and select Show Package Contents. The 4 graphics you can customize are in the /Resources/skins directory.

I did notice the new version does not come with the config.xml file that allows you to change the default instruction text, but I simply copied the old one into the /Resources directory and it worked (there must be a default string coded). You can simply create this file yourself in a text editor, mine looks like:

<config>
  <message>C'mon out an play in the TwitterBox! 
        Friend me on Twitter @cogdog...
</message>
</config>

and you should be off with a custom TwitterCamp!

Thanks again Andy, you saved me again…

I have seen so many people, myself at front of the list, first see twitter and remark, “That i the stupidest thing I have ever seen on the web (well maybe after the hamsters)… who in their right mind would waste time doing this?”. If they stay at it long enough, they climb the curve above, perhaps on a different slope and maybe not alway at a plateau. But I lost track of how many colleagues I have seen who have done this.

So George’s post today inspired by to create a wiki where others can join the honorary list of People Who Climbed the Twitter Curve. So add your name today at:

http://cogdoghouse.wikispaces.com/TwitterCycle

Hmmm, I bet I will tweet this blog post..

I too think “commandment” is a bit strong, but the metaphor is not the point. And again, if you believe there are absolute “right” and “wrong” ways to be in this web land, then I may have some beachfront Arizona property to sell you. You make your own rules.

But pay heed, less the Angel of Twitter Death (dressed as a pretty blue bird) may come knocking at your door.

Let My Twitters Go!

Okay, enough 10 Cs.

I have two of my own tips to share here. The first has to deal with the disparity of some twitter back and forths. If @johndoe follows me but I am not reciprocating (perhaps I don’t know John?). If he tweets at me, will I ever know? Will the tree make a sound?

I started using Tweet Scan to track mentions of my twitter handle, which in turn provides an RSS feed which I can track in Google Reader:

So this way, if someone I does not follow tweets me, I can acknowledge back, like in this case, @billbrandon. Or I can start following them.

The other tip has to do with taking care of your 140 characters. You may know if you toss a full URL in to a tweet, it makes it a link, and sometimes shortens it automagically via tinyURL. But if you are not careful, if you have a URl with a lot of gunk in it (like “?” and “%” from database generated links), it may choke, and then you end up with a long character string that munges up the display of your followers:

Take control of your tweeted URLs! There are a ton of URL shortening web sites- my favorite approach has been using the TinyURL Creator Firefox Extension.

This means from any page I am looking at I can access the contextual menu (right click on Windoze, c
trl-click on Mac) and select Create TinyURL for this Page:

Then you get the box that shows you the shorter URL and lets you know it has been copied to your clipboard- you can then drop it where-ever you tweet.

But it gets even better. If you are reading say in your web-based RSS reader, or any web page, you can make a TinyURL for a hypertext link — so you dont even need to go to a page to shorten it; just right/ctrl click that link and select Create TinyURL for the Link:

If you generate the TinyURLs yourself, then twitter cannot mess them up! And I make a lot of use of the Firefox extension for emails or web pages where those ugly long URLs just cause havoc.

Those are by two twitter tips for the road. I know there’s more (Sue has a great pile!)

And since this the season of contagious listmaking, TwitDir offers the answers to the idle curiosity question of who are the top 100 people followed, the top 100 updaters, etc. The top people followed are not all that surprising… maybe.

At the top of the heap, with 6934 followers, is Twitterific, makers of the uber twitter app for MacOS. There is some sort of Mac/PC irony waiting there, buy I skip. In second, at zero surprise level is Scoble, pulling off the mazing dual marks of having 6887 followers (that’s a lot of breathing down the neck, eh) and Scoble follows 6054 others. He must get the friends prize for returning the favor in kind. IN third is Brian Shaler, a flash developer from, of all places, Phoenix- with 6709 followers, and he, like Scoble, must need sleep as Brian follows 7317 tweeters.

More odd are the top updaters:

At the top of this list is omankoxxx, who has made 253031 updates, and I have no idea what Oman is up to since its all in Chinese. Also hard to figure out is somacowmedia, having done 120217 updates that are cryptic to say the least:

[monituid:416] http://syndown.com loaded in 0.91327 seconds
[monituid:414] http://sayanythingradio.com loaded in 1.079626 seconds
[monituid:415] http://muchedumbre.com loaded in 0.426668 seconds

which looks very little like typical twittering about cats or lunch; this looks more like a continuous monitoring flow for checking web sites I guess SomaCowCIO gets these updates on his mobile phone?

More telling is that these accounts with incredible updating activity have relatively no followers or following activity. They are too busy updating??

And who can resist doing some ego surfing here- put in your own handle to see if you are “on the list”:

Woo hoo, I am in the top 1000 for followers. Look out Scoble! Yeah right.

At the ego level, you can use it to search for tweets directed at yourself or make that, myself.

So this is extremely useful to track replies people may make to you who are from people you dont follow directly (oh my gosh, I just admitted I dont return the follow favor…. alot). And even more, you can get an RSS feed for this, so you can track ongoing.

But you could also use it to track key words or trends across twitter space. Heck, this site created something twitter itself ought to do.

But crap, they still cannot list your followers in alpha order. WTF is with that? I dont know what twitter is programmed in (smells like Ruby), but how freaking hard is it to toss in a sort() routine. I cannot even determine what order twitter uses to display my followers, on the sidebar or on the “following” link. There is no coding excuse for that. So I can only put on my conspiracy hat and surmise that they dont want you to easily locate the name of someone following you. Pfffffftt on that.

But I digress. Tweetscan us clean, elegant, useful. Sweet!

Tweeterboard is a way of looking at who is influential on Twitter based on their conversations with other Twitter users. There are other services, like Twitterposter, that base influence on how many followers you have. Tweeterboard looks at who talks to you.

Tweeterboard also captures links posted to Twitter to generate a list of the most popular links.

Reputation points are the way influence is measured in Tweeterboard. They’re calculated using some algorithmic mojo that resembles the link analysis algorithms used by search engines. Your reputation points are based on the conversations you’ve had over the last 28 days, which means your score can jump around a lot.

So if you are not like Dean, who is sitting on the front page with 21 points, you can see if you scored– yep, I found I am about 6 points behind Dean:

The bad things is now I know this is out there. Will I compulsively check for my score? While I change my twittering/tweeting for things that score more (use of @, links, replying to people…)? Does this really matter?

In a way it does. This is a slick app that cleverly, in web 2.0 tradition, leverages the data of another web system to do something new. This is not your grandfathers software anymore. Like all of the flickr toys, the del,icio.us hacks, it states loud and clear how a product or service can amplify in value and potential… if you let clever people like Gene Smith augment on top if it… like maybe someone will mashup tweeterboard scores with real time google mapping (do anything now, but create it as a yucky facebook crap-app, please….)

I have a new web addiction. I’d blog more about it, but I need to cheese up my tweeter board scores.

Woooooooo

This came to me during some reflection at the NMC Regional Conference at Tulane last week, not because it was obsessively tweeted. Actually it was seeing and connecting with colleague Kevin Creamer from University of Richmond. We’ve crossed tracks the last few years, some blog comments here and there, and I’ve read a few things on his Pandaemonium blog. Pretty sporadic. We may have had 2 RL conversations, or less.

But following Kevin’s twitter this year, I had this compendium of more bits of Kevin-ness than previously possible. I knew some places he goes for coffee, some activities he does with his kids, the technologies he was researching at University Richmond, his interests in acting, his joy of using an iPhone, and much more. It’s less about the kind of voyeuristic peeking that people worry about happening in online social places, and more than I had this flow of things Kevin decided to share with others.

It is nearly impossible for me to describe this incredible net of flowing, moving information, from a network I choose that provides the input. It is the continual state of subtle bits about the lives and work of people I respect (and like).

But someone did outline this very eloquently- It was Clive Thompson in the June 2007 issue of Wired, writing How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense — a slide I used to death in my “Being There” presentation:

As he wrote (emphasis added)

Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter is cumulative. The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading.

When I see that my friend Misha is "waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop," that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

I cannot even pronounce this “proprioception” word, but as described, it is to me, the most clear explanation of the “twitter effect” and I like “weird, fascinating feats of coordination” and see immense value in “an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me”.

And its this kind of phenomena that is hard to describe to someone who takes one sniff and dismisses the potential in narrowly casting it as people twittering about what kind of pizza they ate or the news that they are washing their socks. There is a lot more than that, though there is a lot of noise. I like some of the banal banter, the people I follow often have a similar snarky sense of “humor”– this is how we are in real life. If that were stripped away, it leaves a mostly naked personality. Maybe.

I can deal with the noise, as long as I get some good signal among that, and I do.

Yes.. yet… there is much more to it than that. When I see the people I follow on twitter, like Kevin, this proprio.. propio…pro…. that “subliminal sense of orientation” thang, provides us a different, higher, or deeper, or just richer, level of conversation to have.

And experience is backing that up.

As a footnote- Wired brings this “p” word back again in the October issue — see number 3 in Three Smart Things You Should Know About the Senses.

That is a quick delete.

In a few days I predict invites bearing glorious news like:

Texas Holdem Galore (txpokerscum) is now following your updates on Twitter..

ViagraPropeciaCialis (thebluepill) is now following your updates on Twitter…

NastyAnimalSex (dontclickhere) is now following your updates on Twitter…

Hughs Law to be proved any day now….