Look for big announcement soon about CogDogx cause just like the ‘i” prefix of a few years ago, an “x” suffix is the new shnizzle

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) December 30, 2011

Of course, the “big announcement” is 404, because I was just playing. But the “x” factor is going to be spreading widely, witness MBSx

The funny thing about twitter is how hard it is to find your own stuff– I knew I had snarked this a while back, but had little hope from twitter itself I could find it (oh twitter, index thyself, willya?).

So I knew I had something of a record in my rowkeeper archive, but what I found was someone retweeting me back in December- this at least got me a chunk of text

which gives me a few useful shards – none of them found on twitter, but whoah, I had completely forgotten I had made an account on Grabeeter — who is apparetnly doing what twitter ought to be doing!

With me forgetting that! Grabeeter has indexed 68% of my twitter spewing. This link is now sitting on my toolbar, because I can barely remember what I tweeted for lunch. And even more, there is an API for tapping into box.

More proof- I am not tweeting much about lunch

And while this post was started with some Snarkx in mind, it ended up with me futzing around with a forgotten tool. Is this some sort of localized serendipity?

My list of words never used here include things like “monetize” or “viral” (oops I just used them). But in terms of trying to get a message out, I am keen to experiment with ways to make it go further.

Yesterday, in one of those serendipity series of events triggered by what might be properly termed as “goofing” off, I came up with what i thought was a clever way to amplify the sharing of a Google form via twitter.

First of all, I am unabashedly in love with Google Forms…

It does in minutes what I previously had to do in custom PHP code/databases, or wrestle with other packages that were clumsy and inflexible. I use GForms for things like surveys, webinar registrations, conference evaluations, collecting input for projects, demos of the “real time” web (audiences are wowed to see the data dribble down the spreadsheet as they watch it). I have created so many forms in the last 18 months I cannot even remember them all.

But filling out forms can be tedious, and I try either to keep the form as short as possible, or try to inject a bit of humanity into the process (or what I think si funny and others may not, oh well).

One oft neglected feature is editing the confirmation message that appears when you are done. If I click “submit” and see:

Thanks!

Your response has been recorded.

My thought is… yawn, stock meaningless message. This is a golden opportunity to make your form personable, and you close with a template response. Yawn.

So this was my tangential silliness yesterday. It started from a semi-rambling post on the future and the past, but wrapped with a memorable clip from the All in the Family shows I watched in the 1970s- the argument between Archie Bunker and his son-in-law about the proper order of putting on shoes and socks.

I was both smiled and pleased when Leslie commented that that same clip was memorable to her. I thought it would be a fun thing to try and get some responses and ask people whether they were more of a “sock and sock, shoe and a shoe” person or “sock and a shoe, sock and a shoe” type.

Very silly.

Meaningless.

That never stops me.

So I quickly created a Google form that is still open. Now the URLs you share for forms are about 3 miles long and ugly. I always use a URl shortener on mine, I use http://bit.ly for this, but rather than accept the alphabet random soup that it generates, I use the customize option to create my shortened URL. The URL is a message, and also, it is easier for me to recall a string I make up compared to “Rh5xv8″. My survey thus as the prettier shorter URL http://bit.ly/sock-shoe (you have to create a free account on bit.ly to do this, well with it since it tracks the usage of your links).

The survey is short (and silly)

And as usual, I thought about that confirmation message. I first re-wrote the text, and had some fun in making it appear like it was not the same message for everyone:

Thank you for digging deep into your soul.

From my detailed artificially sweetened intelligence, I can see that while you answered the poll, there is a nagging doubt whether you may have chosen the truest answer. Good luck in that unevenly distributed future.

But then, here is my self-rated brilliant idea, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could offer a link/button to tweet out the survey link? The challenge is that you cannot use any HTML in the message, all you have is the ability to insert a URL.

Here is the trick. If you want something to be tweeted, you can construct a URL that will bring up te twitter web site, with the message pre-filled in (of course it requires that the user has a twitter account, and is logged in, shoot me, its not perfect).

Like try this: http://twitter.com/?status=I+like+cheese. This will put in your twitter message the life affirming message, “I like cheese” – they can still modify it before tweeting.

What I wanted was the tweeted message to include the link back to the survey, and my own twitter handle, so I could follow action by checking my replies, say something like:

Now you can see that the format for the twitter URL is something like:

http://twitter.com/?status=blahxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

but you have to substitute “%20″ for blanks, and then there are other changes you have to do for things like question marks, etc. This is because the text of the string must be “url encoded” to work as a url parameter.

No problem, there are anumber of tools to do this, I use the handy ones at http://www.functions-online.com/ all the time to test out PHP functions via the web interface. The function we use is rawurlencode. So on the site, I can enter the string as I want to use:

and when I click Run, I get the one to use in the URL

It’s a pretty long URL!

http://twitter.com/?status=Take%20the%20coolest%20survey%20every%20created
%21%20I%20just%20did%21%20%40cogdog%20is%20a%20genius%20http%3A%2F%2F
bit.ly%2Fcool-beans

But it works.

But the problem with this long URL is that used in the Google form confirmation, it would display ugly, flowing way off to the right. So I can run it through bit.ly again- this time I dont care about the random name since it is going out in twitter.

For my form, then this is what someone sees after doing the survey:

And the link thus creates this tweet:

Again, this does two key things- it spreads the link for my survey to other people’s networks, and the inclusion of the “@cogdog” gives me some measure that people are using this.

It’s kind of small, but I was pleased with the concept.

I cannot claim it a raging success, as the survey got about 57 responses at the time of this post, but it went farther than if I had just tweeted it out myself.

Oh, and the results? Very illuminating. More than 3/4 of people are Archie Bunker traditionalists- sock and a sock, followed by shoe and a shoe:

(click to see full sized chart)

And among the responses to the open ended question

• It clearly illustrates that we put ourselves into unnecessarily defined boxes. and also that we dont leave the,
• Nothing philosophical, but now I am probably going to waste a bunch of time watching more Bunker videos. My dad and I used to watch All in the Family together.
• Then there are times when I only wear shoes without socks because my feet get hot and sweaty. I’ve also gone barefoot from front porch to alley and front porch as far as partway down the sidewalk to friend’s car to continue conversation. Weather permitting. Sometimes I prefer to go barefoot into the garden, too. Almost always barefoot in my house.
• I think it reflects how a person conceives of and relates to objects. I’m very curious how many people do sock/shoe and what they say about it. It seems rather illogical to me. It’s the pairing thing. But I’m practical. I relate socks to each other and then shoes to each other for practical reasons. If there’s a fire while I’m dressing, I can run out in socks. My feet get cold easily too, so I get my socks on as quickly as possible, even if there’s no danger of fire.
• I think it reflects how a person conceives of and relates to objects. I’m very curious how many people do sock/shoe and what they say about it. It seems rather illogical to me. It’s the pairing thing. But I’m practical. I relate socks to each other and then shoes to each other for practical reasons. If there’s a fire while I’m dressing, I can run out in socks. My feet get cold easily too, so I get my socks on as quickly as possible, even if there’s no danger of fire.
• no.
• I believe there may be links to election voting preferences!!
• OK, I admit it. I THINK about this every time I put my shoes and socks on… and I do vary it.
• I can decide to do the shoes later and still walk around without looking foolish or lopsided, duh. Didn’t need to view the video because it’s in my mental archive.
• I’m curious: do socksock people tweet more often?
• Volg je dezelfde manier die anderen volgen alleen maar omdat het volegns hen zo hoort of heb je zo je eigen ideeen over wat je doet en hoe je dat doet?
• I heart that scene. That is all.
• The first time I ever thought about this was that All in the Family episode.
• slow and steady, eddy.
• Archie Bunker, along with Homer Simpson, should be required study for all college students.
• I do it both ways, but once had a roommate who told me that it is better to do sock-sock – shoe- shoe in case there was a fire and you needed to move quickly. That poor logic pushed me to sock-shoe-sock-shoe out of spite. I prefer sockless as in sandal-sandal, but barefoot is good too.
• Global vs Sequential tendencies? Meathead makes a good point – in YMCA changerooms, I definitely am a sock and a shoe but every day in my home I am sock and a sock. CONTEXT is everything ;)
• What does it all mean?
• I am confused.
• Didn’t have to watch, I remember it well! Getting deeper: We are one shiney blue marble in space, though looking closer it’s our choices that divide us.
• Since I was linked to this through Alec Couros’ twitter – I’m already thinking the link is related to education in some way. Even if it isn’t really, like this one. But I can make a connection anyway. Like Archie Bunker and his son in law, students have different ways of approaching things. As a future teacher, I need to be aware of the many ways people learn and accommodate the multiple learners in my classroom. I need to realize that not everyone will put on a sock and a sock (a shoe and a shoe) but might mix it up or wear no shoes at all – that is, students will have different approaches to attain a similar goal. This can be turned into a life lesson as well: accept those who are different from you – in the end, we aren’t so different. Or, I could talk about how the process, or the journey is more important than final outcome or destination. We all end up wearing socks and shoes at some point, how we get there is our choice. Okay… before I get even more crazy about socks and shoes and how they reveal some sort of ultimate truth – I’ll just stop myself.
• It proves that something I never even thought of before could be made hysterical by Archie Bunker. Great, great show!
• “Impatience is the source of all violence”- Pema Chodron Read _Being & Time_ and get back to me… ;-)
• Loved the video and the whole concept – made my day!
• I don’t usually wear socks. But if I do, I’m a sock and a sock. Feels weird to have a sock and a shoe and a bare foot!
• Loved the video and the whole concept – made my day!
• I do believe I’m more a sock shoe person but I always put my socks on then my shoes. The bigger question is do we as teachers welcome different approaches? Do we let students try things in different ways? do we honor student attempts? Does it really matter how things are done as long as they are done? I can think of a million ways to use this clip.it’s brilliant. Thanks form the laugh.
• Doesn’t really apply in Canada, we don’t wear shoes indoors. My socks are in the bedroom and shoes are by the door. Long delay between sock and shoe donning.
• 42? honestly?

The survey remains open! be part of this ground tickling research http://bit.ly/sock-shoe

There might be other things to blog about, but nothing seems as exciting or interesting as the Mad Camp Adventures of Digital Storytelling Open Course aka ds106. There is a rive of creativity shared via the distributed blogs, the free form ds106 radio (by the people, for the people, of the people), a budding TV station, live weekly class-casts (yesterday was D’Arcy Norman talking on photography- hoping the UMW folks are working on an archive page for the recordings, hint hint hint nudge elbow wink hint).

All of these are things we think can go beyond the usual slide talkin in Elluminate space that is the norm for synchronous online actvity.

Jim reminded me of another live element we talked about- it was a half formed idea rooted in the regular #_____chats yo see happening in twitter #edchat, #lrnchat, dot dot dot. Others may have a different euphemism for this act.

In those, a designated time slot is announced and people talk about a topic or respond to prompt questions via twitter. It is a loosely coupled open discussion format that plays out in twitter.

We are going to try something more loose and open but the same concept- Thursday is ds106 Tweetathon day- during that day we ask participants in ds106 and anyone else and their grandmother, to tweet out something related to the current work; we’d ask that you do at least one (or all) (several times) every Thursday!

• Tweet Your Own Horn – share the thing or mini project or opus you are working on this week.
• Tweet Someone Else’s Horn – scan the blogs, the radio waves, and give some kudos or suggestions to someone else in the class.
• Tweet For Answers Stuck on how to do an effect in PhotoShop? Cannot find an appropriate sound effect for your video? Stuck on font choices? Tweet your call to the network

Take some time every Thursday to do an extra burst of ds106 connectivity via twitter- just use the #ds106 tag and all will be golden (as in the bag of variety).

It was during last year’s visit when my Mom asked me, full of both innocence and curiosity, to explain Twitter to her- we had a good time after I seeded the request for an explanation out to my contacts, and did they ever respond. We captured that conversation in audio a year ago — see Twitter in Mom English.

This year was the follow-up…. a few months ago, thinking a bit of a nicer version of ShitMyDadSays, I decided to create a Twitter account for Mom, and then I would try and tweet some of the funny or insightful (or both) things she says during our weekly phone calls. You can follow here via @alycecookie.

So tonight, I sat her down to show her how it worked. I showed her the cookie icon I added, and the bio I made up for her:

I showed her some of the @replies people sent her way:

And then we picked a few for her to practice following and replying, making sure we tagged @djakes who spent a year making fun of my spaghetti mixup last year (where I used a jar of salsa instead of Prego for a dinner I made for Mom).

It was fun, and I again recorded our conversation:

http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/twitter-mom-2010.mp3 (10.7 Mb / 12:45)

Mom was a good sport about it, and enjoyed seeing a few messages to her, but it seemed a bit like sensory overload. She usually says, “Oh I never go on the web on my computer, just email” and does not fully grasp when i try to explain how her email (web-based) is on the web. So I figured it was good for a fun evening before we popped a video in the DVD player.

After the movie, as I sat down in my office to compose this blog post, she poked her head in to say, “So, has anyone responded to me yet on the Twitter?” I tried to explain that sometimes it takes a day, but gave it a peek. Sure enough, @jimgroom played it perfectly:

which pleased Mom no end (see her reply).

And it even gets better. She then asked, “You will have to show me how to get this on my computer. I just need to type a thing in the place at the top?”

I think the Twitterverse may have increased by one tonight.

For all the ways one might try to explain twitter via detailed descriptions or examples or metaphor reaching, sitting down and spelling it out for your parents may be the ultimate approach.

Later.

But first, today’s 0.001% thought out message:

A tweet is in the eye of the beholder, so just to be clear, I fully subscribe to the power of what a retweet can do, and to a slightly lesser degree, nod to the effectiveness of a quick method of agreement registered by committing an act of “liking” which used to be “becoming a fan” and is also construed as “recommending” and given the Facebook rate of churn, in two weeks will be some other expression.

But as I become a GOM (Grumpy Old Man), I am seeing a trend perhaps of less reading and less writing. And there is nothing anyone can really do about it, the giant boulder is rolling down the hill. This is just my own periscope, but from where I sit there is less blogging going on, I am seeing less commenting in blogs (and in flickr). Retweeting and liking on heir own are things I can value (and do), but what happens if that is more and more all we do? To me, they are at the lowest end of the Read/Write food chain, they ought to be minnows.

The thing is, this interweb thing is always on the evolving path, and never quite stays what it was.

I remember my own first renaissance era of listserv communities, odd as it sounds, in the pre-web late 1980s and ea;ly 1990s were THE place of interaction and exchange.

There was flame wars and crazy free sharing, there were personalities and ful out debtates, all in plain text. It was the first place I ever “met” D’Arcy Norman, and in many ways it was as social networky as things could be then.

Second renaissance era was the blog days of the early 2000s- it was as exciting, we were all MovablePressing, than WordPressing (and other variants), and more, because unlike a hosted email list, these became places that individuals owned and created in.

It was magical, comments flew, links and trackbacks light up the nets. It was a golden era not fading into the mist. It seemed like it would last forever.

But it never does.

There is always some smaller, scrappier marsupial under your big, webbed feet.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Twitter too may be in or just past its own renaissance era, back in 2007 when it was still “the stupidest thing I ever heard of” (well, it can still feel that way).

Yet….

There even seems to be (and of course I have no stinking data, just a feeling in the gut) some shifts even in the pattern of twitter, as there is such a frenzy to push out tweets, that it feels like people are listening a bit less. I guarantee if you call me out with an @ as a question or a message, I will respond. I am all over my @s. Are you? Is it only if you see them fly by? Are you too @scoble to bother?

And here it is, my weary worry. There will yet be something else we dont know of, some new whiz thing, kid on the block, that will come along, and like now, when people are “too busy to blog” or “don’t have the energy to do the long form”, this new X will have people saying they are “too busy to tweet” or “don’t have the energy for 140 characters”.

And that thing just might be the blue logo-d monster that Tim Berners-Lee warned us about today

“The web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles,” he said. “The web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles.”

Or maybe not. I know there is a whole lot of read/write/webbing going on out there, a huge volume of it. It just somehow is starting to feel different in a way I cannot fully articulate. You can Like this or Retweet it for sure, or just ignore it.

But what do I know, I am just one node in the mix.

UPDATE: Lots of retweets on this plus, 1 person liked it (thanks Seth G!). I like that someone likes it (maybe I will retweet this)

What it is, is a browser plugin/extension (works with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari… there is some irony about the other browser shrinking in the mist of obscurity).

What it does is to figure out in the text of a web page, the name of something that has a twitter account, and it places a little “t” icon into the web page. For example, on a recent post here about open courses, Tweetbeat identifies George Siemens from the text in my article:

(I cannot explain its ability to identify George Siemens as having a twitter account but miss Stephen Downes (@downes– it opens the door for some George vs Stephen fun, but let’s move on).

So it lets me know, when looking at web content, who the companies and people are with twitter accounts. That’s not really compelling. But what is– is when you hover over the “t”, and it loads the latest tweets from that person:

Hmmm, that gets more interesting. Gets me activity streams on people and companies in any web content. Then from the Tweetbeat box, if you click share–

So this uses the new Twitter Tweet this functionally to say “I am tweeting about seeing George’s twitter stuff in this web page.”

One more click- where it says “learn more at Kosmix” — gets you to an entire page about George that seems to be assembled from many bits of Georgeness out there- from Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg, Howcast, Google Blog Search, and more:

Semantic or not?

Well that’s all nice for George, but what about me?

My listing in Kosmix seems to mash me up with a baseball player and a doctor from Louisiana… I do a little better searching for CogDog, but its still awry. (I am looking at the ads and wondering about my cousin Larry (Levine) and his polyester pants… but Alisha Levine is lookin’ HOT.

I guess it pays to be George ;-)

I’m not 100% on the long term value for using Tweetbeat Firsthand, but the relationships it draws, even when not 100% correct, is an interest way to link by assumption or known relationship.

What do you think? Keep or eject?

Twitter has created a new widget that makes it more friendly to provide a tweet this button from your own web sites, blogs, etc. The benefit is that it pops a window up with the twitter functionality, so you are not sending people from the web site.

See the announcement from the twitter blog to learn more. The tweetbutton creation widget makes it easy to generate the code, and has a umber of options to choose from for the appearance of the button and what gets prefilled in the tweet (plus with their new url shortener t.co is one letter shorter than competitors!).

The sample code includes a Javascript link to the library that provides the functionality-

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="none" data-via="cogdog">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

This works well on a WordPress single post template, where it pulls the url for the current page and provides a tweet button where-ever you like it. I put mine in the header tag that displays the blog post.

I also want on my main index page and archives where there are multiple posts. Here is how I set it up.

First I put the Javascript link in the header template, inside the <head>…</head>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

This way we only load this library once, and now can use the code on any web page.

Now on my single post I can use the rest of the widget code to add my button (sans the javascript tags)

<h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?> <a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="none" data-via="cogdog">Tweet</a></h1>

That was easy.

But I wanted more- I would like it on each post on the front of my blog.

That is also easy.

For the main page template, index.template, we cannot use the basic code because it posts the URL and title for the current page in view (just my blog) rather than for each post in the loop. This is easily rectified using the WordPress loop variables, so inside my loop where it is moving through posts, I have:

<h2 class="entry-title"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permalink to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" data-count="none" data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>" data-via="cogdog">Tweet</a></h2>

so I am populating the data-url and the data-text fields with the permalink and post title as WordPress moves through the loops. Try it out on http://cogdogblog.com/ – each post title has its own tweet this button.

I can now add this to archives, search result templates etc.

I like the functionality and am looking at rolling it as well into our NMC fleet of web sites.

We’re trying out a new strategy/approach/technology for our communication via twitter for NMC. Up to know, for an organization, we have the typical approach of having an “official” account @newmediac (Neil M. Cameron got there first – you have to roll with that; my thinking of “newmediac” = new media + maniac).

For our twitter account I use Twitter Tools in our WordPress sites and TwitterFeed for our drupal site to push certain content out. I’ve also set it up with HootSuite to provide a way for other NMC staff to send messages out (HootSuite allows us to do this w/o sharing the account password and to schedule tweets, yes three are a number of other tools to do this).

This works, but it is an approach of having one entity to represent an organization. And this makes sense if you are a Big Giant Conglomerate with Postions Like Social Media Spokesperson or even a PR person.

But we are small, and the nebulous organization account pretty much masks the fact that we are a group of individuals.

So I’ve been experimenting with a new avenue, as suggested by Beth Kanter, called ConnectTweet

ConnectTweet allows the contributors to your central Twitter stream to continue to use their personal accounts that they are familiar with, no new logins to remember. This approach also allows your organization’s followers to discover the Twitter streams of the unique individuals that make up your company.

It works like this- once our @newmediac account is set up on ConnectTweet, I can add the twitter handles of people in our organization (or anyone I like) whose tweets can be selectively be re-broadcasted via our main account.

The method is similar to the way, if you associate your twitter account with your facebook account, that you can filter the tweets that go there by including a #fb tag — in ConnectTweet, if anyone whose account I’ve identified, sends out a tweet with #nmc, our @newmediac account will essentially retweet it, and give attribution to the tweeter.

For example, I tested with this message (yes not all that original…):

and in a few minutes, automatically, @newmedic sends its own message via ConnectTweet:

I rather like this as our NMC staff can more easily, via their own twitter accounts, send a message that goes to a different channel of followers.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by -Christophoros-

Or maybe you see it as spammy, re-tweeting yourself? i dont think so, but we are exploring it over the next few weeks.

I want to thank Ben Hedrington for giving us an early in to try ConnectTweet.

Some of my favorite software moments are accidentally discovering something new in a tool I’ve been using for some time. This happened recently my my current iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie 2. I’m not writing about this app, but I’d heard people rave about it, shrugged them off, then eventually later found out they were right. It is smartly designed.

I’d noticed when looking at someone’s profile that there is a number below their icon… (and actually I was not ego-ing my own profile, its just an example) (seriously) (I swear).

So what is #740,343? Perhaps its obvious, but I wanted to know. Maybe it is some sort of ranking, like I am the 740,343rd ranked tweeter. Yeah, I could only dream to rank that high.

My hunch was/is that it is more or less my database ID in twitter, a user number, and therefore, the lower the number, the earlier you joined. (later– this makes sense when looking at my RSS URL http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/740343.rss)

I looked at a few accounts I know are recent (this year), and sure enough they are in the #16,000,000′s. And then I looked at Cole Camplese‘s profile, cause I more or less followed him in January 2007 when he started blogging about twitter:

Sure enough, he is #690,253 a little before me (scooped again by the Senator from Pennsylvania!).

I cannot even think of the value of knowing this is, besides scratching the curiosity itch.

But next, I was curious about the little card icon– like here in Scott Leslie‘s profile:

Nice, look at the big number– #3,567,831 – courtesy of the great Jaiku walkout, eh? ;-)

But here was a nice feature, clicking the card icon added info from this twitter profile to my address book:

It added his twitter icon, twitter URL, and below the fold, his mini bio in a notes field.

This again, is hardly world changing, or even significant, but it struck me as a nicely, understated feature in Tweetie 2 (and its primary features are plenty enough as is).

So what have you found my clicking mystery buttons? Probably more than me….

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Impact Tarmac

Try it now at http://www.storiesinflight.com/flickrpoet/ — it is similar but again different from Phrasr.

Here’s a quick one I assembled using a classic poem tongue-twister from my youth:

A Skunk Sat on a Stump.
The Skunk Thunk the Stump Stunk.
And the Stump Thunk the Skunk Stunk.

It’s a fun, nifty tool, kids!