Sunday, 17 January 2010

Tidying Up Twitter: #mfltips



The educational Twitter community is so vibrant it often also feels desperately untidy. Hashtags are a way to track relevant tweet #edchat #mfltips #movemeon etc... The idea is to then do a Twitter search to be able to get a list of all relevant tweets.

Easy? In principle it is, but somehow when I started my #mfltips experiment I came across a few obstacles.

First, despite using the correct tag the contributions from some of my Twitter friends did not get added-and nobody seemed to know why.
Second, some of my #mfltips tweets disappeared from my seismic reader and from the Twitter websites after few days, which means that collating all the tweets had to be done quickly or some valuable contributions might have been lost.

How long do you give for the project to be finished? Is it better if it is ongoing anyway?
The same collating process could be done through a Twibe set-up for a specific project and shared on twitter, but would that disappear too after a while?

Then I found Twapperkeeper via @dejbelshaw. I found it very good for collating all the tweets from the same hashtag, but it could only be exported as a .tar file, which was not very user-friendly.

What did I learn from the exercise?
If your project is of the brain-storming type, use twapperkeeper and share the link.
http://twapperkeeper.com/mfltips/

If you want to publish your project, you are better off “favouriting” the relevant tweets and making a tweet book of your favourites in pdf format using something like tweetbook. The advantage is that the pdf can be converted into other formats that can be edited.

The pdf can also be uploaded to Yudu for publishing as a link or an embedded document


Enlarge this document in a new window

Publishing Software from Yudu


Another way is to embed the original Twapperkeeper file as a website.

Any other ideas?

2 comments:

SenorG said...

Muchas Gracias for the tweetbook link! I've also had difficulty with twapperkeeper catching all the hashtags but it does a pretty good job on #WLteach. Thanks again!

samccoy said...

This is an excellent tutorial on how people can use hashtags. I appreciated knowing the constraints on this system.

Does Twitter Lists help this?

The instructions for publishing these hashtags was helpful also.

I still use Twitter, so I can use this information.

When I use PLURK, I don't have to use hashtags because all conversations are contained within the initiating conversation. You can then post the plurk as a link, or publish it.

Thanks for continuing to help us think and analyze our online interactions.