Category: technology stewardship

Twitter as Search Engine or Community Seed

Photo by choconancyThe folks over at BrandonHall, the learning folks who blog lots of interesting links, pointed out a value of Twitter that not all of us may have seen yet. Twitter as a search engine. This was interesting to me because I’m co-leading a short online workshop introducing social media in a global international development network. The question always comes up “why would we be interested in something like Twitter. One application I try to show is Twitter as social listening. But I never really conceptualized it as search.   So I thought I’d put it to the test.

First, I searched for something for me. Chocolate, of course. But you have to have a question in mind to make the search meaningful beyond curiosity. I wanted to get a sense of how many people were tweeting about chocolate, and if their tweets were about their obsession, or if there was valuable information about chocolate flying around the tweetosphere. (Is that a word?)

Well, the answer is yes and yes. The first page of results were from tweets that happened within a two minute time frame. LOTS of volume. For example, flamingo_punk Wrote: “Mmmm! Chocolate mini-wheats rock my socks.” There were lots of passionate chocolate tweets like this. On the information side I found:

  • SavingEveryday: Off to work! I leave you with this: An ounce of chocolate contains about 20 mg of caffeine…
  • recr: @MortgageChick They say it takes 21 days for a ‘change’ to become a habit. try subing coffee or lattes with hot chocolate. worked for me.
  • 2chaos: NYSE commentator: “If the last depression brought innovation, like thechocolate chip cookie, I hope this gives us more than the snuggie” Ha 
That last one bolstered my outlook of the current economic situation. Ha! is right! But chocolate is a wide ranging topic so using Twitter to search and listen would give you many results and you could aggregate that information to watch trends on a topic quickly. 
So what happens when I search for a narrower topic that might be of interest to my workshop colleagues, such as “climate change” or “agricultural research?”
Climate change gave me on the first page a lot of links and serious tweets about the issue. Clearly, climate change advocates have taken up tweeting. Note the twitter names — they are using their twitter IDs as a part of the communication issues strategy. It is like a breaking news ticker. The volume of tweets on this topic (the first page of returns were all posts within 15 minutes) indicates this may be a very useful “social listening” resource for organizations working on climate change. 
I thought agricultural research might be a bit thinner. I was wrong.  But the timing is much different. The links on the first search page were between 1 and 20 days ago, but they were far more focused than the wide ranging chocolate tag. Interestingly, I knew about 20% of the tweeters on the first two pages — it is a much smaller network. There were also tweet replies @ users within the first two pages, showing connections between those tweeters.  So I start to wonder, is there an audience for agricultural research tweets yet? Is it in the growth phase while chocolate may be overwhelming in the amount of ongoing tweets?
All in all, this 25 minute exercise told me a lot about Twitter as a social listening tool. For me, watching a twitter search stream over time is a form of scanning one subset of the world and what it is thinking about that topic. I am not quite as clear about how searching Twitter as a one-off search can pay off. The time frame is so short, or if you want to go longer, you have to awkwardly search back through page after page of tweets. It is not yet easy. If you captured the stream via an RSS feed and than analyzed it later as a search, that might be easier.
Still, I’m fascinated by the listening site. Watching tweets can tell me about both what people are tweeting, but more interesting to me from a work perspective, is who is tweeting about a topic and how connected tweeters are around a topic.  Is a Twitter topic a seed for a new community?   Can a community or a network emerge around a shared tweeting topic like it can around a social bookmarking tag? Is a trend of tweets a community  indicator? It certainly is when people use a hashtag to tweet event or topic related tweets. 
How would a community technology steward use Twitter? Would they want to encourage some sort of community usage of keywords or tags? Would they want to go more focused with a hashtag? Ah, but now I’m roaming far outside of my initial “twitter as search” question. See how tantalizing this is?
Do you use Twitter as a search engine? If yes, how is it working out for you?

P.S. Edited in later — some additional Twitter Search resources, thanks to all you fab commentors. I’ll keep coming back and editing them in. 

Crowdsourcing Conference Note-Taking

I’m still working on my NorthernVoice09 conference recap, but I had been meaning to check out the amazing Raul/Hummingbird604’s live blogging of the conference. I had not realized Raul was using Coveritlive WITH Twitter. So he was tweeting his live coverage and pulling in any other tweets with the #northernvoice09 hashtag at the same time. VERY clever.
photo by Tris Hussey, cc on Flickr
Take a peek at one of them:  Rob Cottingham on Teh Funny. The mashup of Raul’s intentional notes and the audience’s reaction, while not always coherent, is very cool. However, I can’t judget since I was there. It would be interesting to hear from one of you who was not there how coherent this crowdsourced live blogging is. This is another example of using the network. One person can’t do it all, even the amazing Raul. Having done a lot of liveblogging in the past, I know how much energy it takes!

I wonder what would happen if a smaller, defined group did this with a specific session tag. Does a group create a more coherent record, or the network? (EDITED IN LATER: Check out Beth Kanter’s great blog post on working with conference backchannel which could be considered unto itself conference capture or note taking.)

Just to recover, the peripatetic Raul is committing to one day a week of slow blogging. Raul, you MUST read Barbara Ganley’s blog!

Photo of Raul – ©Tris Hussey, 2009. Non-commerical use permitted with attribution

Community Orientations Podcast with Shawn Callahan

Our friend Shawn Callahan has been following the work on the book – for years! He has been privy to various drafts and has recently been using the Community Orientations in his work with communities.

Recently he realized he wasn’t so clear on orientations 7, 8 and 9 so this past weekend we hooked up on Skype and talked through them. Here is Shawn’s post and the podcast.

As we talked, I was interested to hear about the exercise he did with the orientations, and see how it compared to how I’ve been using them. Here is what Shawn wrote:

BTW the community orientation exercise simply involved getting the participants of the workshop to plot on a radar chart, which I’d drawn on a whiteboard, where they thought the community was currently and then do this again for where they would like to see the community of 12 months time. It generated a terrific conversation and a feel of mutual purpose. Here is what the result looked like.

I had not thought about using the orientations for community plans or aspirations. I had been using them as a diagnostic for technology stewards to a) become aware of key community orientations and b) then use that to plan or tweak the community’s technology configuration. But both make a lot of sense to me.

Thanks, Shawn!

Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities

Ward Cunningham interviews my co-author John Smith (along with Etienne Wenger and I) about our upcoming book  “Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities.”

One of the things that John says in this video is the importance both of a view of a community from the inside AND the outside. This is why I love it when communities sit within wider networks to make this possible.

As we work through the final layout, it is starting to actually feel real. YAY!

A humorous presentation of Blogs vs. Wikis

Beyond the cleverness of this video, it is interesting to note that the creator decided to focus on the control aspect as the key difference between wikis and blogs. I’d like to suggest that control is not simply a technical issue, but one of culture and practice as well. Openness or tight control can exist in either tool.

The real question is, how do we get real about the role of control and/or openess is our work! Enjoy the video.