CogBlogged Tagged ‘twitter’

Via the vast richness of the Stoyrtelling twitter stream, I picked up today a link to FlickrPoet a rather neat built on flickr tool. FlickrPoet allows you to enter a block of text, be it a poet or your last evaluation report, and it builds a visual representation of the words with photos from flickr. 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!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by davisayer There are some grand mysteries that are still un-resolved, Mr Owl… Over at the neatly named The Clever Sheep blog I came across Rodd Lucier’s eager idea YELP! to try and score a landing as a Twitter trending topic: Maybe it’s just the hundreds of teacher-learners I follow on Twitter, but it seems to me that there is no other group making such widespread use of this micro-blogging platform for personal and professional learning. Well I have no data, but given the gazllions of people who are out there, and vapid celebrities with 4,000,000 (sheep? not so clever) followers… well I am hard pressed to really believe that educators are one of the highest percentage users of twitter– studies have “shown” that professors dont tweet and teens dont tweet, hmm who does? I don’t discount that there is a very strong, vibrant semi [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Ruben Bos I’ve been cruising through a techno funk, a semi-periodic time when I am just finding the motivation gas tank leaning towards “E” and have refrained from blogging about not blogging. And I am not doing that here. After the trip to Doha, I have a half baked, half written rant on being tired of conferences (that one will be left on the vine, it is old territory). But sometimes, something new just comes along to revive the interest- I’m not sure if this is it, but this morning I caught WordPress Matt’s announcement of Post and Read via Twitter API — and hinting at how blogging is seeing a companion burst by riding the twitter wave (not the google one): The other day I talked about micro-blogging and mega-blogging and shared my view that new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by lynchseattle I’ve read and pondered some of my colleagues concerns when they find some creepy account or nefarious avatar follows them on twitter. They have to deal with blocking or reporting or just feeling slimy. My own approach is quite simple, but I’d never presume to suggest it is the best strategy for others. I have no idea who follows me. None. cc licensed flickr photo shared by abbey*christine You see, I turn off email notification of new followers, so there is no time wasted looking at their profile, trying to figure out who the person is or whether they are creepy or wonderful. It does me no harm if some spammer, scam artist, weirdo, or just stalker is listening to me tweets. I don;t see ‘em or hear ‘em. And I don’t choose in turn whom I follow based on some expected reciprocity [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My mom is visiting me for the next 2 weeks. This morning, she said, “Can you explain this ‘twitter’ thing to me over lunch?’. I could not resist rushing out to tweet it ;-) which got some interesting responses, including one from Dean Shareski, who asked me to record the conversation. So at lunch time, I sent out a repeat request, and first sat Mom down at the computer to watch the Common Craft Twitter in Plain English video cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog and then turned on the recorder to capture our conversation (it was great because tweets were coming in as we were talking) Here’s what twitter can accumulate for the related tweets: http://search.twitter.com/search?ands=mom&ref=cogdog Here is our conversation Telling Mom About Twitter (15.8 Mb mp3)

Twitter is being taken over by humans. I’ve asked a lot of people, even people who do serious research on twitter activity, about something I’ve casually observed over the last few months. I have no data, no real backing to what is merely a casual observation. It seemed a while back, that the icons people chose for themselves on twitter were often cartoons, symbols, graphics, logos… I knew some people that would change icons more frequently then clothes (it seemed). Lately I noticed, as I scan tweetdeck, that people (well the ones in my network) have really gone to showing their own face: I have staunchly remained with the same icon I started with in twitter, not even succumbing to the Green Protest Phase (I tried to tell people I turned my avatar brown in protest of everything wrong in the world. No one noticed). I remain my dog profile [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by mikebaird Twitter retweets are an interesting phenemona; another example of the informal communication started by users– to RT means more or less to forward another person’s tweet out to your own network. On one level it seems to be an action of acknowledgment, say, if I retweet something that Joan tweeted, I am saying what she tweeted is important. Another level is the act creates amplification of ideas, and spreads it to different sub networks that usually extend beyond the range of the original. People with a lot more analytical skills than me have been analyzing retweets- danah boyd shared a draft of a paper she co-authored with her Microsoft Research colleagues- Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter. Social and viral media “scientist” (his title) Dan Zarella has shared a lot of research on The Science of ReTweets and his work [...]

modified from cc licensed flickr image by mag3737 I was pleased to be invited to give a keynote on Friday at Tulane University’s Tech Day… they run a great free event open not only to the Tulane community but they offer it to other local institutions: Tech Day is an opportunity for the Tulane community to come together and celebrate the technology that makes life on our campus what it is. It is a day of toys, tech, food and fun. We will have academic and technical presentations as well as games and door prizes. Come show your licks at Guitar Hero or your moves in Dance Dance Revolution. Or come learn about the new trends in technology and education with presentations from our faculty and the vendors that provide us with the technology you use every day. Tech Day is free and open to the public. A few months [...]

Darn, I should have gone by my usual route of trying things before I blog about them. In a previous post, I speculated about using WordPress and the Twitter Tools Plugin to add a hashtag to posts to either aggregate them (among multiple bloggers) or segrate them (for a single blogger with several sites). My idea was to insert the hash tag on all posts. Tony Hirst speculated it would be better if on each post you could optionally add a new, different tag. I looked at the newest version of Twitter Tools plugin and noticed that there was a field now to add a hashtag. My first thought was “this is nice, but what good is it to add the same tag on every post?” So I set out to use this on my side blog, my I Hate Running one. I set it up so that every post [...]

It seems as easy as Spot. I was playing around with blip.fm and had the eye brow arching experience of seeing media jump around the net. I see people blip in twitter, and I made an account a while ago, but barely dip in. It’s more or less like being your own DJ in a place that is kind of like twitter for music. You use the search box to find a song and if it is found, you can “blip it” meaning, the music starts playing (I have no idea where the music files are but they must be legal, right?), and your selection goes on the blip stream with every one else. So I was in a rockin mood and looked for the great Irish rocker Rory Gallagher (bingo!) and better, one of my favorite songs of his, “Bought and Sold”. So I can hear the song. But [...]