is it just me

With the recent announcement from Twitter to allow arbitrary metadata attached to each tweet (so-called annotations), the Twitter platform is getting even more interesting for tool developers. ReadWriteWeb writes:

With annotations, third-party Twitter developers can add any additional metadata to a Twitter post. [...] And a tweet can have more than one annotation attached to it. This extra data will initially start off small – Twitter developer Marcel Molina said it will “probably” be around 512 bytes. But over time, it will gradually grow larger as Twitter rolls out the feature and scales up in order to support it. The company hopes to have it end up “around 2K,” says Molina. How developers use that extra space is entirely up to them – there can be one giant piece of extra data attached to a tweet or a thousand tiny ones.

In a blog post Raffi Krikorian posted a useful map of the topography of a tweet. The picture could serve as cheat sheet for any developer dealing with Twitter… See also Raffi’s first ideas on what to do with annotations:

map-of-a-tweet

Popularity: 9% [?]

Since today Twitter is offering a simple service to embed tweets into blog posts (and other HTML pages). Simply go to http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/ and enter a Tweet URL (okay, this could be done easier in the future, e.g. through integration in the web interface or third party clients) and click generate Bake it.

While it works on the page and for others, the integration in my (simple wordpress) blog fails. Does it work for you?

Popularity: 46% [?]

I can’t remember who pointed me to this group, but I already made use of the “Twitter research”  google group. Here you can discuss your current Twitter research, get feedback on ideas, pedagogic use cases and practical applications of the most used microblogging service. Furthermore it links to an open and free-to-edit Twitter Research Bibliography managed by danah boyd.

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-research

Popularity: 3% [?]

Together with Steve Wheeler and Martin Ebner I could place another paper on Twitter at the WCC 2010 conference. Its title “All I need to know about Twitter in Education I learnedin Kindergarten” as well as the basic rules derive from Robert Fulghum’s 1988 book “All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten“. During my diploma studies I wrote an article about the basic principles of pair programming that was adapted from the Fulghum book and thought: “one day you’ll borough these rules as well…” I’m pretty excited about the result:

Abstract:

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.

Latest draft version:
All I need to know about Twitter in Education I Learned in Kindergarten

Popularity: 8% [?]

After the WCC 2010 decided to cancel all workshops we could place our publication in another track of the WCC 2010 conference (Key Competencies in the Knowledge Society). The title of the paper is: “Getting Granular on Twitter: Tweets from a Conference and their Limited Usefulness for Non-Participants”.

Abstract:

The use of microblogging applications (especially Twitter) is becoming increasingly commonplace in a variety of settings. Today, active conference participants can post messages on microblogging platforms to exchange information quickly and in real-time. Recent research work was based on quantitative analyses in terms of the number of tweets or active Twitter users within a specific time period. In this paper, we examine the content of the contributions and aim to analyze how useful posts are for the “listening” Internet auditorium. It can be shown that only a few microblogs are of interest for non-participants of the specific event and that meaningful usage of a microblogging application requires greater care than previously anticipated.

Final draft:

You can find the final draft of our paper on Scribd.
Getting Granular on Twitter: Tweets from a Conference and their Limited Usefulness for Non-Participants

Popularity: 5% [?]

It is my pleasure to announce the call for paper for the first workshop on Using Microblogging to enhance communication within Communities of Practice (MicroECoP) which will take place at the WCC 2010 conference in Brisbane, Australia. I organize this workshop together with my colleagues Steve Wheeler, Graham Attwell and Johannes Magenheim. You’ll find all the necessary information at the workshop website.

Microblogging has become a very popular social networking activity in the recent years. The limitation of 140 characters constrains the user to send concise messages. Twitter and other popular microblogging tools have acted as catalysts for a flurry of new and fast exchange of thoughts and artefacts, and from these activities a new area of research has emerged. There are case studies for the application of microblogging in scientific conferences, educational courses, distributed software engineering teams and corporate project groups.

A number of questions are emerging from the early use of micro-blogs as social networking tools that connect communities of practice and interest. These include: How can microblogs support the development of professional communities of practice? How can microblogs be effectively incorporated into formalised professional learning? How can we measure the optimum levels of engagement necessary for microblogs to be successful social networking tools within professional communities of practice? How are communities of practice enhanced or enriched as a result of the application of microblogs? What about issues of security, privacy and intellectual property – how can these be protected? Do the filtering features on microblogs constitute semantic tools?

The workshop focuses on current research trends in the application of microblogging in various domains. The workshop seeks to attract quality research papers that propose solutions to the issues identified above. The workshop also seeks papers that comment how the application of micro-blogging can impact on real life experiences in diverse communities. It aims to bring together scientists and engineers who work on designing and/or developing the above mentioned solutions, as well as practitioners who use and evaluate them in diverse authentic environments.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Design and development of microblogging tools
• Application of micro-blogging in teaching scenarios
• Application of micro-blogging in software engineering scenarios
• Communication and interaction issues using microblogging
• Understanding the dynamics of microblogging communities
• Harnessing the semantic filtering capabilities of microblogging
• Visualization issues of microblogging
• Evaluation issues and case studies
• Smart devices for microblogging in education
• Using microblogging for enhancing creativity in education
• Digital identities and microblogging
• Ethical and safety issue
• Harshtagging and tweckling
• Developing pedagogies around the use of microblogging
• Live microblogging and micro-narratives
• Language Learning with microblogging
• Engagement analysis and microblogging

Papers up to 12 but no less than 8 pages are solicited. All submissions should be original and not published or under consideration elsewhere. Papers must correspond to the WCC 2010 conference format requirements, as they are described at the conference web site (http://www.wcc2010.com/call-for-papers/submission-instructions). All accepted papers must be presented at the conference by at least one of the authors. One of the authors of accepted paper needs to register for the workshop.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Yesterday at the JTEL WinterSchool in Innsbruck, Erik Duval asked me

If you only could follow one person on Twitter, who would that be?

I gave my answer (which I cannot tell you here…) and thought it would be a cool thing to explore with a wider public. That’s why I put up a really simple questionnaire over at Google Spreadsheets and would be really happy if you could distribute it to your fellow Tweeple.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The guys at Freshnetworks share their experiences with Google Wave as back-channel at conferences. I like the idea of that approach as the emerging document is a very good summary and social annotation of a given talk. As the usability of Google Wave is rather … not that good at the moment I’d stay with Twitter at the moment, but give it a read:

Google Wave vs. Twitter at conferences

Popularity: 25% [?]

There is much going on these days at Twitter. After they introduced the new lists feature last week and a spanish version of Twitter, today they roll out a limited access to the new re-tweet feature. I can’t wait to see it in action and implemented in Artefact-Actor-Networks – re-tweets will be the next step of mooring Twitter in the Semantic Web. Hopefully they will allow the geolocation for single tweets soon, which would be another great step in a better connected and semantically annotated web world.

The lists feature obtained mixed feedback. Some people like it that they can put their followers in lists according to their location, community, language or any other criterium, others are saying it was a snapshot of the Twitter team. If you look at the profile of Tim Berners-Lee you’ll see he is listed nearly 1200 times. A lot of these lists are  related to technology, the WWW and semantic web. Unfortunately (or luckily) there is not the One technology lists where anyone you get started (mainly because such a list is pure imagination). On the other hand, if you look at the lists that Stephen Downes is on, you’ll get 90 lists, all dealing with education and learning in the web 2.0. Like so often each coin has to sides and we will need to sit and wait what Twitter lists will be useful for. For me I like it that now I can sync my lists with several tools and the Twitter website – a great gain in mobility and consistency.

If you are developing applications built on the Twitter API maybe the experimental Twitter Streaming API is interesting for you.

Popularity: 8% [?]

The two workshop I was involved are already over and I really took a lot out of them. In the morning I was able to attend the Science 2.0 workshop where I presented our paper on Twitter in conferences and the belonging tool. Erik Duval and Peter Scott did a great job with the workshop and selected a wide range of papers that represent the problems and chances of Science 2.0. There was a talk about Mendeley and two talks that analysed co-authorship and co-citation in TEL conferences and Erik, Xaver et al. showed some great visualizations (e.g. this one).

I missed the morning session of the TEL-CoPs workshop but the afternoon session was very interesting and Manolis Tzagarakis gave a really interesting talk about “Practical Lessons Learned while Developing Web 2.0 Collaboration Services for Communities of Practice“. One of the major findings was that you have to develop the UI at first and test this with your users and afterwards focus on the architecture. As we are computer scientists, we tend to do it the other way around. The other thing he pointed out is that the later you introduce features to a tool, the more unlikely it is to be used. There I presented my second paper about how to support CoPs with Twitter. I received mostly positive feedback back there was a heavy discussion about the way we visualize things. I take this critics and will improve future visualizations using visual analytics methods.

You’ll find my slides at slideshare and our tweets here and here.

Popularity: 15% [?]