The Very Rich Hours of the Lambrights » 23 More Things on a Stick

Thing #27–Twitter

Donovan — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:44:00 +0000

#27 from the 23 More Things on a Stick program is Twitter. As you may have read a few days ago, I am on Twitter. Just follow donovanlambrigh and you too can follow me as I wander about in the great cow pasture of life. Someone recently asked me why I left off the T at the end of my name. That would be because Twitter restricts user names to 15 characters.

stupid twitter… can’t scale… mutter mutter….

OK, I’m better now. The 23 More Things page for this thing has a lot of information about Twitter so I’m going to assume that you already know what it is. I use Twitter mostly at work. At home, I don’t spend so much time sitting in front of my computer and thus can’t always write up the details of my life. I can also use my smartphone to post and I do that from time to time but my poor, pre-Internet generation thumbs just aren’t strong enough to do all that typing. I use the service to post what I’m doing and tasks that have been completed as a way to let the folks in the office know what I’m up to.

Here’s a few things I do to make Twitter more useful:

Use it to update other webtools. All my tweets, for example, also become status updates on my Facebook page. Facebook provided the functionality to set this up; once in place, it just happens with no extra effort on my part. Many Web 2.0 websites offer similar functionality; you can also get many scripts via Twitter that do the same thing for popular websites.
Bypass the Twitter page. If you start using Twitter, you will quickly learn that using the webpage to post and read is pretty lame. There are many, many tools available to let you work with Twitter. Personally, I use Twirl on my computer. For my Windows Mobile smartphone, I use Pocketwit.
Tweet to let people know about blog posts. Whenever I update a blog, I mention it on Twitter and post the URL. This is a little controversial; many in the Twitter community feel that this kind of self-promotion is unethical or at least impolite. I don’t understand that argument. It’s OK to let you know what music I happen to be listening to at a given moment but it’s uncool to say that I just did a blog post on the President’s speech or a project at work? Really?
When tweeting a URL, shorten it with one of the many URL shorteners on the web, such as TinyURL. With only 140 characters, every single one counts. Or better yet, use Twirl, which has this functionality built in.

Have fun tweeting!

Thing #26–Join the Ning

Donovan — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:27:26 +0000

I joined the 23 Things on a Stick Ning. What’s a Ning? Good Question. Ning is a platform for creating personal online social networks. Think of it as your own private Facebook. To create your own network, you just go to the Ning website, register, and use the tools they provide to set things up. Ning provides hosting and has free versions that allow you to get started at no cost. Most Ning users set up social networks around a particular topic or community that wants an easy, no-cost way to enable communication between members.

So, I’m on the 23 Things on a Stick Ning. As you might expect, it’s full of library folks sharing information. It’s not all about 23 Things or Web 2.0. There’s people discussing library careers, books read, and other interesting topics. I’ve posted some information about myself and connected up with a few friends. I don’t know if it will replace my Facebook account, but it’s a fun place to go and communicate with people interested in the 23 Things program.

Thing #25–More thoughts on Bloggers’ Toolkit

Donovan — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:42:05 +0000

A couple more thoughts before I move on to the next thing. I use ScribeFire to post to this blog. It’s a free add on for Firefox that really makes the posting process quicker. Once it’s setup, I just hit a button in the browser to call up a text box where I type the post. It provides all the standard formatting tools and allows me to use WordPress-specific functions. It’s not specific to WordPress, though. If you’re a Firefox user, I recommend it highly.

I’ve implemented Outbrain to let readers rate the blog posts. You’ll see that each post now has some little stars at the bottom. Just click the stars to show what you think. One star means the post was boring; five means you found it excellent. I’m really curious to see if this feature gets used. It’s free and supports itself by adding some links to (presumably) related websites who are no doubt paying for the service. I’m not wild about ads on my blog but these are pretty unobtrusive and the company does need to stay in business.

23 More Things on a Stick–Thing #24

Donovan — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:02:23 +0000

If you read this blog regularly, you will recall that many of the posts in 2008 had to do with the 23 Things on a Stick program. As described in my first post on the topic, 23 Things was designed to help library folk learn about Web 2.0. Each of the “things” was a task involving some new, shiny internet toy. To complete the thing, you had to write up a blog post about the tool and talk about the experience on your blog. I got through all 23 of the things and it was a lot of fun. I already knew about many of the tools but I did pick up a few new ones. And I got some fresh insights on how to use some of the tools I was already familiar with.

Well, there’s a new program following up on the success of the first one. 23 More Things on a Stick picks up where the first program left off with 23 more things for us to learn about. I registered back in the Winter but never found the time to do much. They just extended the deadline to June, however, and my life is not quite as hectic now as it was a few months ago. So, I’m going to take a crack at it.

Thing #24, Refresh Your Blog, asks us to take a fresh look at our blogs. One of the suggested tasks is to update the look with a new template or design. I’m not going to do that because I’m happy with my design and got to it after trying out several others.

I am, however, going to add a new feature to the blog. Like many other netizens, I have been using Twitter to microblog. I’m not going to talk much here about Twitter; if you haven’t heard of it, check out this cool short video introduction. I’ve added a new gadget to the blog so you can follow my tweets here. Now you too can immerse yourself in the minutiae of my daily life. Is this what DARPA was thinking about when they created the internet 40 years ago?

I found the 25 Basic Styles of Blogging slideshow interesting. Like most blogs, mine fits several of the styles, including Life Blogging, Insight Blogging, and Link Blogging.