I had this idea to explore and honestly could not find a relevant use to even flesh it out, so am putting it out there in case others do.
There are several tools you can use to have your blogs, when they publish posts, to automatically send a tweet out with the link. On this WordPress blog (and several NMC ones) I use the Twitter Tools Plugin. On some other sites I use twitterfeed which does the same thing, but from any RSS feed you want (so I have some drupal feeds that are auto tweeted this way).
But what if you wanted some way to “tag” or track such content? Well, with the more recent version of Twitter Tools (and as a feature on twitter feed) you can edit your own lead in text to published tweets… so mine come out as “CogDogBlogged:” and then the tweet:
Previously, you had to edit this bit of text in the Twitter Tools plugin, but fortunately they made it now an editable option– this is just a small way to “personalize” your message so it does not look like everyone other’s use of the same tool.
So I speculated, what might happen if you included a hash tag, such as say, by blog about Joys of Peanut Butter, so my posts could be aggregated with all of the other PBJ bloggers out there- I can just add a hash tag to this text:
And then you could use an RSS feed of the twitter search on this tag to display the current results.
I was thinking of trying this on say my running blog, so it would be a way via a twitter search I could collect all my tweets that came from this blog… but I could not think why I would use that.
But I am thinking that maybe, perhaps, projects like Jim Groom is doing where multiple blogs are posting, that if his twitter plugin for WPMU can allow individual blog owners to edit this same prefix tag to tweeted posts, they could be aggregated from multiple student blogs and even mixed in, with say, student tweets from other sources, all collected around a class tag.
It’s half an idea (or less)- maybe someone can complete me 😉
I love this idea Alan, and it makes a lot of sense. We are using Tweetable, and we can also use Twitter Tools (though it posts two posts because a copy of every post gets republished in the tags blog, which is annoying). Right now I have it set up that the course blog that is aggregate in all the different student posts via FeedWP tweets a courses posts via Tweetable with the #ww20 hastag baked in.
The problem with this approach is twofold for me right now though. first, the url on the tweet links to the permalink on the course blog, and I would much rather it link back to the permalink on the students blog. The other is, even if you can access the republished post on the course blog, comments are turned off because we are trying to encourage people to follow the permalinks on the blog homepage (which link back to the students original post) nd comment in the students site. So, as usual, comments and FeedWordPress are screwing me up, and my idea about aggregating into a course blog raises as many issues as it does solutions. This method in fact simplifies that by making the student insert the hastag from their own blog, which I like. The only issue with this right now is that I am getting some resistance in the UMW course about using Twitter—despite one of my most impassioned sermons. Anyay, it is a great idea, and I will pursue over the next few days, thanks for thinking about us 🙂
Would it be more useful if the lazyweb came up with a plugin that automatically added hashtags based on your blog post tags? Or maybe filtered those tags and only mad use of the hashtag tags (e.g. so if you tagged your post with: [oneTag, another tag, #hashtag] it would pull out the #hashtag and add that to the autoTweet?)
I dont think it would take to much to hack a twitter tool to do that– makes sense that if you tag a WordPress post with a hash tag that means, add it to my twitter post.
I love the idea.
Update- Looks like the 2.0 version of twitter tools has support for hash tags
http://alexking.org/blog/2009/08/03/twitter-tools-2-0
Not sure yet if it is per post or all tweets. Going to give it a spin
Tony,
I love that tag/hashtag idea. Put a hastag in WP as a tag and it automatically know to include it in the tweet of the post. I love you guys!