Tag Twitter

Entries 28 Total

I Tweet, Therefore I Am…Seriously?

The New York Times published “I Tweet, Therefore I Am” today. It is too bad because I though we were past the days of mainstream media feeling to need to publish something, anything about Twitter.

The fun of Twitter and, I suspect, its draw for millions of people, is its infinite potential for connection, as well as its opportunity for self-expression. I enjoy those things myself. But when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy?

If Twitter causes you to externalize every thought and post every feeling you should step back and take a deep breath. For your followers’ sake, put down the tweet button.

On a separate note, we need to stop absolving responsibility by forming broad claims as questions. If you are going to bring those questions up attempt to answer them. Otherwise you are preying on readers who do not know any better.

Posted on July 31, ’10

Medieval Multitasking and Focus

A few weeks ago Religion Dispatches published an article about medieval manuscripts and multitasking. The point is that for centuries our minds have referenced texts on multiple levels; the internet did not inherently create this distraction. There is also this gem from a David Brooks column:

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities.

Posted on July 30, ’10

Link wrap-up for #J361

A collection of links and pointers to what I talked about with Suzi Steffen’s Reporting One class last Thursday.

WordPress

I mentioned a couple of things that may come in handy, including all the support pages for WordPress.com. Those are a great place to find out how specific features work and can help you get going again if you’re stuck on something.

There’s also a handy series of How-To videos at WordPress.tv. These cover everything from the basics to more advanced editing options. There are also a series of videos on the WordPress.tv homepage if you’re interested in watching talks given at WordCamps around the world.

After the Deadline

Great spell, style, and grammar checker that is baked into all WordPress.com blogs. You can also find extensions for Firefox, Google Chrome, and OpenOffice on ATD’s download page.

Podcast recommendations

I mentioned a couple of podcasts and wanted to add some specific recommendations for those interested.

5by5 is a studio run by Dan Benjamin that produces a great series of technology and web-focused podcasts. Many of the guests are not your typical developers as well. Some are in the editing, design, or usability fields as well. The Pipeline is particularly good and the show with Liz Danzico may be interesting to those wanting to improve their writing or find out a bit how professional editors work.

I also highly recommend anything from Merlin Mann. I mentioned his Time & Attention talk in class and that’s really worth watching if you’re wondering the forces that come into play when envisioning how to get people consuming your content.

Danah Boyd is also someone worth following if you’re interested in how information flows around the web. She gave a talk at the Web 2.0 Conference that is about 20 minutes long and well worth listening to.

There was a lot more mentioned too so if you have any questions just shoot me an email. It’s andrewspittle at automattic.com.

Posted on July 5, ’10

Twitter and its plan to run advertising

I wanted to jot down two quick thoughts about Twitter’s announcement earlier today.

First, the money for Twitter is not going to be in running ads against search terms. I just do not think most people use Twitter as a way to consistently search for information. Google can get away with this because a search engine is not traditionally a personal thing. Google leverages the power of the many, Twitter relies upon relationships between users.

Twitter’s true value in advertising, is going to lie in leveraging what it knows about users you follow. If Hunch is able to build something that predicts tastes based upon following habits Twitter ought to able to develop something similar to deliver targeted recommendations.

This last part is what has me actually excited about advertising on Twitter. This could be huge. It could take the type of recommendation-engine that is true of advertising on The Deck and Fusion Ads and extrapolate it to a service with millions of users.

Posted on April 13, ’10

Archiving Twitter With WordPress

Yesterday I had a spare couple hours and decided to follow Doug Bowman’s example and set up a self-hosted archive of my Twitter stream with WordPress. You can see the finished product of that here.

There was some interest expressed on Twitter of others wanting to do something similar so I thought I’d help out by making what I did available for download. You can grab a copy of the theme and required plugins which will provide pretty close to a turn key solution for getting this running.

I highly suggest following Bowman’s tutorial for downloading and importing the initial archive of previous tweets. Once you have that done and the plugins and theme are installed there’s a couple things you’ll want to do:

  • Replace the profile_image.jpg file in the theme folder with your own profile image.
  • Head to your profile page within your WordPress installation. You’ll see two new fields, one for the url of your Twitter profile and the other for your Twitter username. These power the text in the header so just fill them both out and the header text will be linked to your profile.
  • The tagline below the username in the header is pulled from your blog’s tagline so fill that out in General tab underneath Settings.
  • Setup Twitter Tools to create a new blog post every time you tweet. You can find more information about doing that at the WordPress plugin directory.
  • Run two queries using the Search Regex plugin (for more info on these queries read the original source). This will link up all the @usernames and #hashtags from your tweets.
    • For @usernames enter /(^|\s)@(\w+)/ into the Search Pattern field and then enter \1@<a href="http://twitter.com/\2">\2</a> into the Replace pattern field. Check the Regex box.
    • For #hashtags enter /(^|\s)#(\w+)/ into the Search pattern field and then enter \1#<a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23\2">\2</a> into the Replace pattern field. Check the Regex box.
    • In both cases I suggest running a Replace before running Replace & Save. This will allow you to look everything over before making changes that will affect your database.

That’s it. After doing those steps you should have a searchable, self-hosted archive of everything you’ve posted on Twitter. If you run into questions or problems feel free to fire away in the comments.

Update 3/23: Emily Ingram pointed me to a plugin that will achieve the same auto-linking of @replies and #hashtags that the regex calls do. It’s a super simple solution and can be downloaded from the WordPress directory. Sounds like it works quite well.

Posted on March 21, ’10