Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Lots of hummingbirds in my life this past month. Their whirring was like traffic noise around my house. They even made their way into my eHow articles.
SouthWest Writers is a large organization of writers, most of whom live in New Mexico. This week I presented an introduction to Twitter for the SouthWest Writers group. I explained a few of the reasons why Twitter can be helpful to a writer. The slides are available on SlideShare: Twitter for Writers.
I talked for quite a while (they had to drag me away from the microphone) and the questions were excellent.
A lesson on social media etiquette came my way yesterday while I was participating in a Twitter chat for writers. It starting me thinking about the many changes in sense and sensibility that I’ve adopted, almost unnoticed, since I stepped into the social media world.
Let’s start with yesterday. I’ve been actively researching how writers use Twitter for some time. Tomorrow evening, I’m giving a talk on Twitter for Writers to my local writers group, SouthWest Writers. As part of the preparation for that talk, I’ve joined the #writechat discussion on several Sunday afternoons. Everyone participating in the chat appends the #writechat hashtag to their tweets. The hashtag makes it possible for all the participants to follow the conversation. Sounds reasonable enough, right?
After I’d made several tweets during the chat, this tweet from briandigital came into the chat discussion. I know Brian, we’ve met in real life at some of the Albuquerque geek events. I wasn’t offended by his suggestion that my etiquette for Twitter chats needed rethinking. In essence, he said that prepending every tweet to a chat with an @reply would hide most of those tweets from my followers’ Twitter streams. This seems very sensible advice to me–many of my followers have no interest in writing as a field of study. The simple practice of @replying to another tweet in the #writechat Twitter stream would save many of my followers from a volley of tweets of no interest.
That simple change in etiquette, or sensibility, or consciousness–whatever you choose to call it–started me thinking about other changes social media has wrought in my life.
Much of what has changed for me is because of my work as a Contributing Editor at BlogHer. As part of that job, I have expanded my reading habits to include all sorts of blogs that go beyond the narrow focus on web design and development that formerly populated my RSS reader. My RSS subscription list has expanded. I follow people on Facebook and Twitter and Linked In that I might never have known existed. I learn from them. I now have a different view of politics, technology, gender, race relations, humor, accessibility, pop culture, books, social action, age, parenting, food, green living, and many other topics. Had I not reached out to discover new ideas and new writers on those topics, I would still hold my former limited view of the world.
It’s an expansion I cherish. It makes me a better person. I maintain a narrow focus here on Web Teacher, but my behind-the-scenes thinking has changed significantly.
The process advanced slowly. I didn’t think about it as life changing as each forward step landed. Brian’s small wake-up call on Twitter etiquette yesterday turned the light on the individual pixels to reveal a bigger picture.
What has your experience been?
How can new users of Twitter find people they want to follow? There are paid services that do this for you, but I think it’s better to grow the list of people you follow more organically.
Use Twitter’s people search. It offers ways to search by name, email, or on other networks. This tool gives you a way to find people you already know or have contact with by Gmail, Yahoo or AOL.
You probably know the names of many people who are thought leaders in your field—you’ve read their books and blogs, seen them at conferences. Try entering their names under Find on Twitter and see if you find them. This may or may not find someone who is actually using Twitter, depending on how they entered their information and name in their profile. Sometimes the Twitter people search results aren’t helpful. For example, if you want to follow Opera’s standards advocate Chris Mills you find a lot of people named Chris Mills, but not the guy you want. Opera’s Chris uses Chris David Mills as his Twitter name, but if you don’t know that, you can’t find him using the People search.
Most people whose blogs you read have a Twitter badge or widget on their blog that invites you to follow them. Use those links to find and follow Twitter accounts.
Use search.twitter.com. The advanced search feature has all sorts of useful options. You can search on location: your location to find people in particular geographic areas.
The advanced search offers options to search by word, phrase, hashtag, language, reference, date, attitude, and even whether a user’s tweets contain links. If you have an interest in a particular topic, for example #accessibility, you can search for that hashtag. You may discover some interesting people to follow who are tweeting on the topic.
Many people recommend others to follow on Fridays during the event called #followFriday or #FF. Check those people out when you see suggested names. You will find people who interest you this way.
There are events using tweetchat on various topics. Each chat topic has a hashtag. A chat I enjoy is #writechat. When you log in to Tweetchat you can easily watch all the people chatting on the chat topic and find thoughtful and helpful people you may want follow.
The lovely thing about using tweetchat is that it automatically appends the chat hashtag to the end of any tweet you post during the chat.
As you advertise your own Twitter account and participate on Twitter, people begin to find you. When you receive an email telling you that you have a new follower, use the link to their profile to decide whether you want to follow them. It’s important to check out new followers to your account so you can either follow them back, ignore them without prejudice, or block them if they appear to be spammers.
Related post: Your Twitter Profile
The image above is a Wordle, and shows you some of the things I was talking about here lately.
Below is what I did at eHow in August.
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Not professional quality on my part, but OMG, I love Screenr. This is my second attempt at a screencast, ad lib as you can tell. My first attempt I was too far from the mic.
So easy. I love Screenr. I want to marry it.
Here’s the third screencast I made.
Now that I’m finished gushing, let me tell you what Screenr is. It’s an app to create screencasts for Twitter. It’s free. In addition to instantly tweeting your screencast, you can also embed it as I did here, or upload it to YouTube.
For what I do, which is lots of explaining, this is so perfect. I’ll bet it’s perfect for what you do too. When I compare it with trying to do screencasts with a tool like SnapZ Pro (which is a good tool) this is just so much simpler. So. Much. Simpler.
You can record up to five minutes of screen grab with audio, capture whatever part of your screen you want, pause if you need to. You cannot edit. Therefore, this is not the way to made professional quality work. But it can make many simple sharing chores that don’t have to be top quality much easier.
It uses your Twitter info to set up an account for you at Screenr, where you have and RSS feed for your screencasts and can revisit any of your screencasts if you need them again.
Holy web apps, Batman, this thing rawks!
Teach Naked. What do you think about this idea as a way to teach web design or web development classes? You definitely need a computer lab, but how about the idea for lecture delivery and class discussion?
Sony Plans to Adopt a Common Format for eBooks. This may finally bring the lower priced competition to the Kindle into common use on more campuses where the current standard is the Kindle. Do you see this making a difference?
5 Questions with Chris Brogan. Trust Agents looks like a valuable book for students and users of social media. I probably will never have a chance to actually review it here, so am referring you to this interview.
The Power of the Retweet on Twitter at Webgrrls has a good graphic showing the mathematical effect of a retweet. Appropriate today since Twitter announced revamping the retweet API.