CC Image courtesy of toolmantim on Flickr

Twitter

I signed up to Twitter in August 2010, the motivating factor being that it was a form of social media that wasn’t blocked at my then-job at a contact centre. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and it was no use to me whatsoever – all of my friends were on Facebook and I wasn’t in a job that I wanted to pursue as a career.

It wasn’t until I start my graduate traineeship that I started to realise the potential that Twitter held for me. Over the last few months I’ve been trying (with mixed success) to use it for networking and sharing ideas. But there are a couple of issues that I’ve still yet to get over:

• Twitter is all a bit scary. In between the RTs, MTs, DMs, etc. it’s hard to know what you’re looking at and who said it. With hashtags and links all over the shop, some tweets can be plain bewildering.
• Most people I follow on Twitter, I don’t actually know in real life, so it is intimidating to address them directly. My problem is that I tweet as if I’m talking to myself – I find it hard to get involved in conversations and shy away from “interrupting” other people’s Twitter dicussions.
• Everything moves so fast on Twitter. A couple of hours ago seems like ancient history on the Twitter timeline. The immediacy of it is great if you want a question answered quickly but it can often leave me feeling like I’ve missed an opportunity. Take the other night, I scrolled right down on my timeline and saw lots of fun tweets for #replaceonewordwithlibrarian. Scroll back up and it appeared I had missed the party. Although I’m sure noone would have been too offended if I joined in a little late, I felt too shy to.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is a fantastic tool and all of the worries I have about it are actually its strengths: it’s brief, fast and effective. I need to get over my own false perceptions and issues and get stuck in, start conversations and get involved. I’m so scared of breaking some kind of ‘twitiquette’ that I operate in an isolated little bubble and I’m not getting the most out of the medium.

Even though it’s aimed at using Twitter for libaries not librarians, I found this slide-deck by LibMarketing really useful in highlighting common mistakes. Also, Phil Bradley has a list of resources on Twitter for librarians , some of which are a bit dated, but I’ve found incredibly helpful to jump in and out of.

RSS

 I’ve dabbled in RSS in the past, I had a nice feed going for news a year or so ago, but again it’s something that I’m not using to it’s full potential. First stop in my efforts to get a handle on RSS feeds is to Google Reader and I’m already signed in with my Google account so I just click the orange ‘Subscribe’  button and start searching for blogs that I read regularly. Once I’m up and running, I can add the feed to my Firefox bookmarks toolbar and just click on it to have all the latest posts from sites I’m subscribed to.

Since I’m using WordPress for this blog I’ve been following others that way and using the WordPress reader. RSS seems like a more universal way of bringing the things I’m interested in together. I’ll certainly be using this much more in future.

Storify

This is something I’ve heard mentioned and seen briefly but not actually played around with myself. As a little test, I signed up and created this here Storify about the #replaceonewordwithlibrarian game on Twitter I mentioned earlier. Obviously because I was searching for something that only happened on Twitter, this isn’t a particularly good example of how to get the most out of this tool as you can bring in stories from a wide range of sources. I did find an article on the Huffington Post website and a Facebook link related to the story though (check out the amazing photos on the Greene County Public Libraries Facebook page, what a great idea!).

One thing that I have learnt from this little experiment is that you can only search 150 of the most recent related tweets. Since I was making it this morning, I missed out on a lot of Tweets from when the game was in full swing. Other than that, Storify was really easy to use. Hopefully I’ll have something meaningful to make a Storify about in the future.

I didn’t got around to playing with Scoop.it  or Paper.li but those are some more social media tools I hope to get to grips with soon.

Esther Lim, CEO The Estuary, San Francisco

Welcome to the Social Media Experiment, a website documenting Bath Spa University’s presence at the internationally renowned X Media Lab, held in Bath, March 2012. NESTA (the UK’s leading independent expert on innovation) has identified Bath as one of the UK’s top ten creative hotspots; it is also a centre for digital innovation and new product development with a wide range of companies based in the city.

X Media Lab and Bath Digital Festival (BDF) events ran for the first time in 2012 and both proved a resounding success, putting Bath firmly on the map as a hotspot for digital creativity and technical innovation. X Media Lab was the centrepiece of the city-wide BDF, bringing leading creative visionaries from across the world to talk to over 300 conference attendees about how digital is transforming the entertainment industry. Twenty lucky digital startups won a place in the sought-after mentoring Labs, held at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios and initial reports back from participants, show that this has already had a transformative effect on their companies.

Social Media Experiment Project

Project Director, Katharine Reeve initiated the Social Media Experiment to collaborate with X Media Lab Directors, Megan Elliot and Brendan Harkin. A crack team of final year undergraduates from the Digital Publishing course and from the Creative Media Practice course covered the events in real-time and created legacy material.

We wanted to test the potential of the creative and promotional possibilities (and limitations) of an integrated social media content and delivery strategy, across channels such as Twitter and YouTube. This incorporated film, photography, digital surveys, and interviews (with Ed Vaisey MP, international speakers and mentors, Lab teams, and representatives of Bath council, BANES).

Social Media Strategy

A team of Digital Publishing students developed an integrated strategy for covering both the events and the digital experts attending, across a range of platforms from YouTube, Instagram and Flickr to Storify, Facebook and Twitter. They ran a survey and made infographics to pinpoint digital hotspot locations globally, and engaged with physical and virtual attendees. One student was the official photographer supplying images for the xmlbath2012, and Bath Digital Festival Flickr sites. Our content was shared worldwide across social media channels.

A measure of its success, was the conference announcement that our #xmlbath2012 hashtag was trending globally. The publishing industry’s top tweeter, Sam Missingham, joined our team, tweeting live from the conference to her 14,000 @thefuturebook followers.

Film Content

A key feature of the project was to develop a variety of film content which could be distributed internationally over social media channels. Mike Johnston, Executive Producer (also Senior Lecturer in Creative Media Practice at Bath Spa), developed the film content, and ran the film team. This team included Film Director, Holly Tarquini (also Coordinator, Bath Film Festival); a team of graduates and undergraduate students from the Creative Media Practice course and a Digital Publishing student.

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Artists at X Media Lab

A team of artists (Anthony Head, Tim Vyner, with Simon Spilsbury from the Creative Foundation) from Bath School of Art created new artworks for X Media Lab Bath using digital technology for live drawing and large-scale projection onto buildings.

Watch the video of their day here.

Collaboration

Apart from the satisfaction of making something multilayered and meaningful, the team of students from Bath Spa’s School of Humanities and Cultural Industries gained incredible experience working alongside international experts to cover the entire conference weekend in real-time and beyond. Legacy material will include this website created by publishing student, Anna-Marie Young; a short documentary film; and further commissions. On behalf of the student and staff team, I would like to thank X Media Lab and BANES for bringing this unique event to Bath (also Phil Castang for organising it, and David Maher Roberts of The Filter, for getting things going in the first place).

Margaret Heffernan, writing about XML Bath for the Huffington Post, summed this inspiring event up perfectly as being: ‘the most startling array of funny, clever, edgy technologists assembled in the UK.’

Liz Cookman covered the Social Media Experiment from the student perspective for Bath Spa University digital student magazine, Milk.

What next? We are covering ExPlay Games festival, Bath Film Festival, and TEDxYouthBath during November 2012 with an expanded team of 30 students.

Katharine Reeve, Director, Social Media Experiment

@kreeve

Subject Leader for Publishing, Dept. of Creative Writing and Publishing, School of Humanities and Cultural Industries, Bath Spa University

Introduction video:

When you view an article on Mashable’s website, there are tags at the bottom of the article based on the main “topics” associated with the article. This is similar to tagging in SEO for pictures, etc. Example, and article on Apple iPad gives you six topics to follow: Apple, iOS, Verizon, Retina Display, iPad 2, and iPad. Clicking on one of the topics prompts you to a screen where you sign up through email, Facebook or Twitter for membership, populating your profile with your “friends”. Mashable automatically fills your picture and bio from Twitter or Facebook.

Before you elect to follow certain topics, you are given a prompt in logging with contacts pulled from your Facebook or Twitter list. Having entered in Beta I only had two contacts at first, @jbruin, a Mashable writer, and @alexpriest, a good friend from school. I followed Vadim, the Mashable community manager and @julieodell my second fave Mashable writer. When new members join you receive a red notification in your “activity” tab that they are following you: @blake did this and I followed him back. You can add services to connect to. I added LinkedIn:

This is a Generic Topics View

Today’s first page story was “5 Decadent iPhone Apps for Chocolate Lovers”, which sounds perfect for me, so I decided to follow “Apps” and “Chocolate” which were tagged for the article. I followed “social media” which was one of the five most popular topics, then went to the People page to see what my friends were following. Alex’s topics were pretty generic, but Vadim was following “Social software” so I followed that. Blake was following Android so I clicked that too.

Now Mashable can recommend new topics for me to follow based on what I clicked, and populate the My Stories tab:

You can see my top stories, which are related to Social Media, Android and a random post related to Mashable Follow itself. When a new story appears in my feed I get a little red notification on the stories tab. On the righthand you can see “Recommended Follows” like on Twitter. These are the KOLs of Mashable Follow or friends.

Below the ad (yuck!) you can see a stream similar to Facebook of recent activity. (Blake’s been busy.) You also get red notifications at the top tab with your friends activity. Activity notices could get out of hand. I only was following 6 people, but after not checking it for about 48 hours, I had 34 activity notices. Unlike Facebook notices which directly pertain to your friends activity with you, these notices are for everything your friends do–every badge, every one they follow. Serious overload.

When I signed up for topics on Mashable I got a new Badge, the “Laughing Baby” badge. I wanted to go spy on Alex and see what badges he had, so I put his name into the Bing search bar. We have a problem. Alex is very popular and comes up as a “story” but when I click on his name I end up in the Mashable Twitter Directory, not on his Mashable Follow page. I have to go back up to the People tab, People You Follow, and scroll down to find Alex. Annoying.

Ok, let’s check out Alex’s badges:

Yay we’re even! For logging in and using Beta we both got a “LOL Catz” (I hate cats), and a “OG” badge. Alex has an “Oolong” badge because he’s super connected his Mashable profile to five other networks in place of my “Laughing Baby” badge. (Love you Alex.)

This post is an introduction to Mashable Follow. See comparison with Gawker coming soon.

The technology (or what are my powers?)

You can sign into Montage by authenticating using a LiveID,  Twitter or Facebook. To get started, you can create a montage from scratch or from a trending topic.

When you input a word or phrase you’re interested in, Montage will automatically display results on a Web page with a layout that consists of a number of panels arranged in columns and rows. You can control both the panel content and the column numbers and layout.

You’re given the option to change the layout and content display immediately. You can browse through suggested layouts/content displays to  select one you like, but don’t focus on the content at this point because you can always change that. Focus on the look and feel of your layout.

Once you select a suggested layout and content display, you can decide you’re happy with it or modify it. For example, you change the content and layout of individual panels. Hovering over an individual panel causes these options to be displayed.

Your panel content choices are shown below. (I’ve recolored them for better visibility.)

Some pointers about content options
You can select specific news items and images by pinning them or allow the Montage to draw from random content posted on the web. You can display news items and images in a list or slideshow format.

I suggest making use of the text option, since adding text  is a powerful way to add context to a montage you’re creating. You have some basic text formatting options and you do have the ability to add hyperlinks.

text formatting options

Fine tuning your layout
As you add content to your panels, play with column size and add additional columns if it’s helpful.

You can also drag and drop panels to change their relative positions.

A video summary and some comments
For a video overview of Montage creation, see this page.

What I wish Montage would allow me to do:

• Eliminate retweets from a Twitter stream
• Obtain Web content from sources other than Bing News
• Embed code in the text box

Instructional strategies

As an instructor, Montage is a nice tool to help you curate content for your learners from feeds or from static content that you’ve pre-selected. Your Montage should ideally tell a story and you can control the “narration” of the story by adding text and by arranging the different types of content that are in your various panels and their sequence. You can include videos you’ve found or those you’ve created (e.g., to illustrate concepts, demonstrate procedures,  provide guidelines, or even launch a problem-based learning challenge). You can also use text boxes to  add questions and challenges,  link to polls, quizzes, and other media, to add additional interactivity.   Because learners can scan your page, they can pull specific content that ‘s interesting to them.

Some tips and tricks for instructors
As I was exploring Montage, I learned that it’s probably better to pin images rather than to rely on feeds, which can pull up some pretty random stuff.  I created news panels that will pull random content as well as those that include static content I want viewers to consider.  Additionally, using a variety of different search terms related to a topic in different panels creates a more dynamic Montage. Similarly, if your search topic in twitter doesn’t garner a huge amount of tweets you might want to combine terms (for example, I searched for “health literacy OR epatients”).

Montage for learners
Asking learners to create their own montage requires them to reflect on how disparate types of web content are connected. You can also suggest that learners use text boxes to add their own reflections and/or to challenge their fellow learners.

My Montage

My Montage on health literacy is here.

The technology (or what are my powers?)

Chirpstory allows you to assemble Tweets from your Twitter timeline, favorites, users, lists, and specific Twitter URLs to create a story. Just log into Chirpstory using your Twitter account and select “Create Story”  to gain access to your story dashboard.

Next assemble Tweets that relate to your story.

In addition to using Tweets to generate your story, you can also include media from YouTube and from Twitter photosharing sites (e.g., Twitpic, yfrog, Flixi, img.ly, Twitgoo, and mobypicture). You can also use the Add Media interface to add text and links (e.g., if you want to add resources that are not from Twitter).  The Add Media interface allows you some ability to format your text to create different heading levels and add bullets. Unfortunately, you can’t add images from non-Twitter photosharing sites like Flickr.

When you’re ready to publish,  select the  “Create Story” button at the bottom right of your story dashboard.

Here’s where you add a title for your story, a description, and tags. You also choose your privacy settings at this point. (You can always edit this later). You can choose to Tweet the story immediately, though you might want to see what your story looks like before you do.

The Options icon provides you with  access to some editing options including a Delete option (which proved useful in my case since I accidentally published a story 11 times when I got an error message).

Once you’ve published your story you gain access to additional sharing options since you can connect to Digg, delicious (for awhile, anyway), Stumbleupon, and Reddit. You can also add your story to the Chirpstory Storyboard, to share your story with the Chirpstory community (in my hands, this option was a bit buggy).

The video below summarizes the basic “how-tos” of using Chirpstory.

You can also find more detailed  information at the Help Page.

Instructional strategies

Chirpstory has been touted as a curation tool, and you can use it to assemble bundles of information, but I think curation isn’t all that useful unless you use the storytelling capabilities of the tool.  To do this, think about the story you want to tell before using Chirpstory. Use the title and story description to engage learners and make them care about your story. Use the drag and drop feature of Chirpstory to rearrange Tweets and media so that your story has a logical flow.  Use the Add media option to add context. If you want to add interactivity, you can use the Add media interface to link to websites with polls, flash interactivity, quizzes, etc. You can also use the Add Media option to add questions before or after the Tweets you’ve assembled.

A Chirpstory I created on Health Literacy is here.

Learners can use Chirpstory as a tool to make sense of information and create their own stories, since creating a story requires them to read posted links and consider how different Twitter conversations fit together. They can use the Add media interface to add their own reflections on Tweets and the media they’ve posted. Learners also can comment on other stories using the comment field provided, like a story on Facebook, and share stories with others.

Similar tools you might consider include:

• Storify
• Keepstream

Both tools allow you to add a wider selection of content and media, while Chirpstory is more Twitter-centric, but arguably gives you more filtering tools based on Twitter preferences. All three tools are easy to use, so which tool you choose will probably depend on how much you like using the dashboards of the respective tools. I particularly like the ability to format some of the content I added and the ease of dragging and dropping in Chirpstory, but it’s a close decision for me and it’s likely that all three sites will be adding features. Really, the bottom line is that the story’s more important than the tool.

Yes this looks just like the sort of fodder I peddle over on that t’other blog, but I wanted to have a tinker with some new tech.

To see my story (as pictured above) in all it’s ‘glory’ you’ll have to hop over to Storify – as the embed functionality isn’t available to self-hosted simpletons like me just yet. Currently Storify is in beta and is billed as a platform to ‘create stories’ from social media. This could be tweets, Facebook posts, Flickr images, YouTube to name a few.

It already seems an easy to use and attractive to look at service for collating posts to document events – take a look at this example using content from the All About Audiences industry seminar ‘Sense & Accessibility’ held today.