Results tagged “twitter” from Chad

So I was listening to the on-demand archive of Twiter CEO and Founder Evan Williams' (@ev) conversation with Susan Mernit (@susanmernit) at the Online News Association conference and was stunned to hear a question I submitted posed to the founder.

My question "Do they plan to change the status box from 'what are you doing' to something else?" was answered at about the 23:10 mark of the video embedded below:

It was cool to make an appearance in such a session, but the question I submitted that I REALLY wanted answered was "Why is the search query for search.twitter.com limited to just 140 characters?"

Are you a twitterer in Quincy? Do you use the Internet? Do you have questions about ways to better take advantage of all of the tools that are out there? Do you like beer? Do you like the beach?

If so, come join @pinkshoe, @chadrem, @eesullivan and other twitterers at The Beachcomber Irish Bar, Thursday, June 11 beginning at 6:30 p.m.

This is known as a "tweetup" though we understand if you don't want to call it that.

Twitter is a growing online communications tool that's quickly making its way into the mainstream. Just today news spread that China is now blocking the service, so you know it must be making a dent.

There are several Quincy residents with sizable followings, and you can read more about them here. We're hoping to spread the word and (hopefully) help foster a greater sense of community among the "netizens" in Quincy.

But mostly, we just thought it would be fun to have a beer by the beach with other twitterers.

Hope you can make it!

No one has ever asked me to be a professor of whatever they call "journalism" online. But plenty of people have been asking me questions about various trends and technologies, and some of them are also teaching. I also had the great pleasure to work with some outstanding interns from Northeastern University over the past couple of years.

And of course, I've spent many years in and around journalism and think tanks and training institutes and non-profits that are attempting to educate.

So I got to thinking. If I were to teach a course on something resembling "online journalism" what would it look like? What would it cover? What are the essentials that people should enter the world with an understanding of so that great journalism can be done with the wonderful tools that I am fortunate enough to play with nearly every day?

This isn't everything I'd want to include, but they are some things I think are important. I encourage you to add yours as well.

And who knows? Maybe someone will read them, and think about them, and start teaching them. Dare to dream...

Wrangling RSS - Using Yahoo! Pipes to divine meaning from feeds

Geo Metro - Understanding how longitude, latitude and mapping technology can have an impact on readers

Twend reporting - Using tools like search.twitter.com to glean insight into the minds of the audience

Crowdsourcing investigations - Use the leverage of the audience to demand, and vet, answers

XBRL - Where online journalism means business

Flash - No. Not unless you REALLY need to. (One day session)

A Web of Ties - It's not just about your content on your web site, but about extending it online

Online video - Dos, don'ts and how and where to publish to have the biggest impact

I just read Robert Scoble's "The worst thing for Twitter" about how if Twitter got bought by IBM or Adobe or some such outfit that would be even worse for it than being bought by Google.

A wave of emotion rushed over me. And it had nothing to do with any of those potential suitors. It has to do with newspapers.

I haven't written much about the death of newspapers, as I think there is about as much of a saturated market on that angle as there are "Social Media Experts" on Twitter. I started working in newspapers, worked five years at The American Press Institute, ran the web site for every We Media conference, and went to the same school / worked at the same school newspaper as Jayson Blair. I know pretty intimately, the reasons for the death of newspapers.

I thought about an alternate universe where as an ultimate act of swinging for the fences, every newspaper got together and made a bold, expensive gamble similar to the $1.1 trillion Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Lula Ignacio de Silva, Manmohan Singh, Hu Jintao and the rest of the G20 pledged to the International Monetary Fund yesterday.

The action I pictured for newspapers: Buying Twitter. In a consortium brokered by either the World Association of Newspapers  or the Newspaper Association of America. In early 2008. Or at least after Facebook was rebuffed.

I have for years lamented decisions, big and small, that were made by newspapers that adversely affected their bottom lines. From straightforward steps like creating easier interfaces for purchase images both breaking local events, as well as from a paper's archives, or learning the lessons of Craigslist and Monster.com  and applying those to their often awful relationships with funeral home directors to protect their lucrative obituaries section from outside threats. [Disclosure: during a stint as Sr. Editor, Obits and Fun at Eons, I helped build the precursor to Tributes.com and may or may not have shares in that spinoff.]

Some of these things wouldn't have cost a dime.

@chadrem

Hi #pmv people! I tweaked the monitter code and embedded a real-time twitter widget for #pmv into this post. This is running in concert with the Webinar that I'm in RIGHT NOW here

Also, if you want to see some of my posts on Twitter itself, click here.

Cheers,

Chad

Hi #SXSW people! I tweaked the monitter code and embedded a real-time twitter widget for #sxsw into this post. I'm curious how it works with another widget on the same page, so I'm about to see.

Also, if you want to see some of my posts on Twitter itself, click here.

Cheers,

Chad

Hi Terp Fans. I made a one-stop shop spot (say that 10 times fast) for you guys to follow today's Tweets. It pulls in #terps #duke and #acc. If you want to follow on a mobile device, I made a short redirect to search.twitter.com at thisguychad.com/terps

Also, if you want to see some of my posts on Twitter itself, click here and on Maryland Basketball, click here. Cheers, and Go Terps.

"Twitter Search is perfect."

I read this in the comments of Michael Arrington's Tech Crunch piece on how people should start thinking of Twitter as a search engine. In a previous post, I wrote about some ways I was already doing this, on a more geeky way than perhaps most users would.

But this comment struck me as just a little bit off.

The more I play with Twitter, the more I see its potential. And like a coach of a promising athlete who hasn't yet fulfilled his potential, I want to see it do even better than it think it can.

A couple examples of how I think search.twitter.com (formerly Summize) could improve, or perhaps even derive some business.

REMOVE THE THROTTLING BY IP ADDRESS - Last week, for WeMedia, I tweaked the monitter.com widget to pull in specific tweets that related to We Media, and embedded them on our home page. The problem, however, is that too many bangs on search.twitter.com from the same IP address too quickly results in the unfortunate response "You have been rate limited. Enhance your calm."

This message didn't make it into the widget (Thank God, I think...). I'd love the ability to either pay to override this throttle, or agree to some advertising to come through as a means of balancing the load that my IP address was putting on the server.

EXTEND THE QUERY STRING TO MORE THAN 140 CHARACTERS - It truly is amazing what you can do with some of the query strings in search.twitter.com. But as I found out yesterday, in preparing for the upcoming Traveling Geeks web site, you can only have a search query that is 140 characters or less. Big deal, you say? Well, try limiting a search to just a dozen Twitterers. I have a workaround using Yahoo! Pipes, but I loose the immediacy of Twitter search that I'm almost addicted to.

I know these are small gripes from the sideline, and the world won't end if they're not solved, but again, I point to the coach analogy. And I did go to Maryland.

For whatever reason during my life online, I've had the good fortune to be something of an early adopter. I also like to build stuff online. These traits came in pretty handy over the past year or so as Twitter came on the scene.

I had occasion to have no fewer than 10 conversations with a wide range of people about what I've done with Twitter and what its potential is to reach others. I thought, after the fifth conversation, that perhaps I should get some of this down in a post. So here goes. Without further ado, are 10 ways I've used Twitter, and without even directly touching the Twitter API.

Pub Crawls

In October 2007, I learned about Twitter, and I didn't really know what to do with it, like many people who are arriving to the scene right now. I did, however, talk a bunch of trash about how I was going to build a "kickass" web site for a pub crawl that my brother-in-law and some friends had been running for more than a decade.

Thus, my first twitter account @qpc. I added my cell phone number to the device, and pre-entered each tweet as a saved draft. When we moved from bar to bar, I only had to hit send. This came in handy later on in the day, as the potential for typos rose with each subsequent bar ;-)

inaug09.com and dctrip09.com

A couple weeks before the inauguration, I heard that NPR had established the hash tags #inaug09 for people to tweet on inauguraiton day and #dctrip09 for people making the trip to DC. I also noticed the .com addresses for these tags were still available. So I bought 'em. Then I had to figure out what to do with them.

What I ended up doing was a pretty lame hack, but it was very educational.

First, I went to search.twitter.com and did a search for inaug09.

I then took the RSS feed http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09 and added it to a new pipe in Yahoo! Pipes. Because there were so many tweets coming through at once, I wanted the Pipe to pull in multiple pages of tweets, so I added http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09&page=2 http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=inaug09&page=3 and so on.

What a morning! I came to the first session of O'Reilly's Tools of Change Conference with two goals: Learn stuff and get a job. Not necessarily in that order.

So I go to the tutorial by "Twitter-famous" author Chris Brogan (aka @chrisbrogan) and I do what I do at conferences and other events - I tweet.

So I see he's got a screen up behind him but he's not at the computer. So I type a tweet, but I wait.

Then, at exactly the right moment it turned out. I struck. I posted this tweet:

Wonder if @chrisbrogan will be psyched or annoyed at me for plugging "Hire thisguychad.com " ... seriously, I'm available ;-) #toc

Then he went to his computer and updated the #toc stream, and there I was, on the big screen, fourth down, for like a half an hour.

But that didn't feel like enough. So I whipped out my flip-cam and went closer up in the room so I could capture the moment on video.

Done. But now what?

YouTube!!

So I log in to my TubeMogul.com account, uploaded the video, tagged it, and "launched" it into my YouTube account.

So I then want to tell the world what I did, cause that's what you can do with YouTube and Twitter, so I used the Firefox is.gd URL shortener to fit the link into a tweet.

Then, to my amazement, I hear Chris mention how great a Flip video camera is and what you can do with it.

So, as someone who has attended my share of conferences and enjoyed enhancing the conversation with tips from my unique perspective, I chimed in with my YouTube link.

One problem though, the link was bad. D'OH!

So Chris tries to show off this very meta moment, and it goes to the wrong page. Then, my wireless goes down RIGHT THEN so I can't update.

Nightmare.

I take some well-deserved ribbing for "side-swiping" him during the workshop, but we eventually get back on track.

Meantime, @suzaxtell tries to re-tweet my tweet, but there were two problems, one she wrote @Chad Capellman which doesn't link to my twitter account, and she re-tweeted the broken link.

I think I'll be looking back at this exchange a lot. It highlighted a lot of elements of the immediacy of social media tools, what can be done with them, and how easily things can run off the side of the road without meaning to or even sometimes being aware that it happened until it's too late.

Click here for notes from this session. Like I said, what a morning!!

My friend Brian posted on his blog about the age gap of those who are addicted two Twitter and those who have never heard of it. Below is my comment:

When I think of what has made the Internet a successful, widespread medium, the first thing that comes to mind is its ability to remove barriers to publishing for the masses. This, of course hasn't happened all at once. There were login issues, HTML issues, security issues, bandwidth issues, privacy issues etc. But what Twitter represents is the closest thing I've seen yet to tapping into our collective online id.

For those who don't "get it" (and I've been sought out by more than a couple dozen people at this point to help explain Twitter to them) I always tell them to make sure to check out search.twitter.com. That's an amazing resource. I have used it to connect with people who think certain things suck, certain other things are awesome, to find potential freelance clients, and I even pulled the RSS feeds from two terms #inaug09 and #dctrip09 on there, sent them through Yahoo! Pipes to make my own Inauguration keepsakes in the form of inaug09.com and dctrip09.com.

Also, it's worth noting that many people on this planet use a mobile phone as their whose primary Internet connection, and for them, a service like Twitter (and the hundreds of tools built off the API) are opening up entire new worlds to them.

It's probably too early tell what direction this will go in, but for those who give it a chance, I have yet to see someone stop using it. Time will tell.

I have had it, and I know many of you have too. There are so many things that need to be built, sites that need to happen, and fewer and fewer resources to deal with them. And I'm not just talking about money. I'm talking about time, and people. How many companies have let go staff and are struggling to just now do the "bare bones" work that "needs" to be done?

Anyway, my point here is this:

In this current economic climate, there is just no time, resources or REASONS for people to have to babysit an outdated browser that has been the bane of many of our existence for way, way too long. I'm talking, of course, about Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6. As a friend of mine likes to say "Dat shit's gots to go."

And it is, but slowly. Way too slowly. IE 8 is on the way. Hell, I'm even drinking out of an IE 8 promotional coffee mug as I write this. (Thanks Web 2.0 Expo Microsoft Party!!)

Some people have been slow on the uptake to upgrade, and this is where we can help them.

I'm hoping more people take the lead on this, like my heroes over at 37 Signals, who boldly announced that they no longer support IE 6.

They originally announced the cutoff would be August 15, 2008, but pushed it back to October 15, 2008 to give people more time to adjust.

I originally thought of pushing for this to coincide with the presidential inauguration but now I think I know a better time: April 5, 2009. Why April 5? Congress is still mucking around with when to push back the digital TV transition and a lot of the problem seems to stem from people's confusion about the date.

April 5, however, has something else going for it: Baseball.

Major League Baseball's opening night is April 5. This day, for many, is a pivotal point in the calendar year. It's the time when summer feels much, much closer than it did even just one week before. It's a time of renewal, and a time of clean starts and possibilities.

I can think of no better day to make a break with an outdated browser that has caused more stress to developers, and prevented audiences from experiencing what the web can truly do, than the beginning of baseball season.

There are some things that still need to be done with this "movement":

• We need a logo
• We need a twitter # tag: my vote is #nix6on4509
• We need people to commit to it by spreading the word and alerting their web audiences why and when.

Then, come baseball season, already overloaded developers can relax that there's one less thing to stress about.

Play ball!
 

UPDATE: My audio narration of this and part two of this post got picked up by Frontline's Digital Nation series. The clip they're featuring is below:

This is something I wrote, and was talked down from posting. A recent exchange (part two of this post), however, got me fired up to post this, as well as the followup to the very ignorant things that were recently posted on my Facebook wall this morning.

I'm probably going to offend a former classmate of mine from high school with this, but then again, I didn't start it, and I'm too fascinated by it to not share it with others. Especially after another friend I read this to couldn't help but burst out laughing.

A couple weeks ago, I was reunited, via Facebook, with a high school classmate I hadn't spoken to in at least 10 - 15 years.

Right off the bat, after having read some of my status updates, she posts on my wall:

"Go Republicans! Don't tell me you want O'butthead??? Come on Chad! How have you been? Married? Kids?"

Since this was sitting out there on my wall, I didn't really want to let it go unadressed. So I wrote back:

"I want a lot of things. I want the Constitution to not be pissed on any more, I want the word 'elitist' to be used appropriately, I want tolerance to become so a part of the fabric of our country that we don't even talk about it because it's such a given, I want a president who wouldn't dare call his wife the C word in front of the media, who has enough respect for his fellow Americans to actually look them in the eye when debating them, who doesn't try to 'save the country' only after the poll numbers look bleak, and who doesn't attempt to pick fights with the same media outlet it quotes 60-plus times during the campaign (New York Times), I want a president who might actually help my parents pay for their medical bills and who isn't afraid of being intellectually curious. Oh yea, and I also want Obama to win by a landslide. I'm married with no kids at the moment. Things are generally good and looking to be much better come January ;-)"

We also got into a pretty intense Facebook IM chat, that I unfortunately didn't save and can't seem to find an archive of. (Facebook folks, please make make chat archives available like Gmail does. Thanks!)