Lesson 6 Microblogging part 5: Teleportation machine and collaborative notebook

Twitter walls are very common on conferences and other events. It adds to the social experience of the event to see and share comments on the Twitter wall. But Twitter feed can have more ambitious functions:

• The participants can make a silent or spoken agreement to share their notes on Twitter using a session or topic specific hash-tag
• The participants can view the stream from parallel sessions in real time and have grounds for a decision of session switch
• You can view the notes of the parallel sessions afterwards
• You can follow the conference events in real-time even if you are thousands of kilometres away

MindTrek Conference 2013 Twitter wall.
Photo copied from Tweet by @lecklin (Tuomas Lecklin)

I have tested use of Twitter at conferences with my students at some occasions. Some students love it. Some students hate it. Some students enjoy following the stream, but find it very hard to follow the conference producing simultaneously notes for Twitter.

If you want to have a look on how hash-tags worked at last European Youth Award (EYA) festival check this.

And here's one example how to utilize Twitter feed: I have on many occasion composed blog posts using the Twitter feed of my students. Here is an example from EYA 2012.

Engage the experts

Apple founder Steve Wozniak interacting on-line with
MindTrek 2013 participants.

Many professonals are active Twitter users, and some of them like to interact and share. You loose nothing by giving a try asking the experts. The example here Woz replying to @Lecklin is from an arranged situation, where Stewe Wozniak had promised to answer questions, but I've seen other situations where my students have asked and the expert replied on Twitter.

TAMK Media student Tuomas Lecklin was very happy Steve Wozniak answered the question he made on Twitter on-line. You can see the six minute interaction on YouTube.

To collect data for our second research project
Our second research project studies the use of social media by #eurovision song contest fan communities, contestants, record labels and television broadcasters around Europe. Twitter is one of the main sources of research materials for the study.

The brief of the research project will be on this blog tomorrow.

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The lesson about Twitter, parts 1-5:
1. A general news channel (lists) published on April 7
2. A specific news channel (basic searches, using #)
3. A better search engine than Google?
4. A massive database
5. Teleportation machine and collaborative notebook (This story)

Lesson 6 Microblogging part 4: A massive database

One of the very first social media services I used was del.icio.us (now delicious.com), the social bookmarking service, priceless in large research projects.
Twitter is similar but applied to tweets. By looking for the most popular hash-tags of the topics you are interested in you possess a data library without limits. And you can initiate valuable banks of information by creating and sharing your own hash-tags.

A very basic but illustrative example of Twitter data usage is Tweetping:

Screenshot (partial) of Tweetping. The application shows you world
tweets in real-time with lots of data. 

F-bomb is another simple example of how you can visualise Twitter data: it just shows in real-time all tweets on earth containing the F-word.

Here you can follow where and when "Happy New Year" was tweeted.

Twitter-data and your Eurovision research project
The examples above are amusing. But the Twitter feed can be used for very ambitious projects.
The links below give you an idea how Twitter data has been used to analyse Eurovision and it’s audiences. Twitter analysts knew in advance that Laureen would be the winner in 2012.

Measuring the popularity of the contestants in the Eurovision Song Contest using Twitter  (2012)
Forecasting of Events by Tweet Data Mining (2013)
Twitter as a Technology for Audiencing and Fandom: The #Eurovision Phenomenon 
Eurovision Song Contest 2011 – tweets visualized
Eurovision and Twitter - #Eurovision the ultimate in social TV? (2009)

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The lesson about Twitter, parts 1-5:
1. A general news channel (lists) published on April 7
2. A specific news channel (basic searches, using #)
3. A better search engine than Google?
4. A massive database (This story)
5. Teleportation machine and collaborative notebook (upcoming)

Lesson 6 Microblogging part 3: Twitter better search engine than Google?

Would it be a good idea to use Twitter as your main search engine?
Not really. But if you want to follow the current discussion about some topic you find the Google search engine pretty useless. Twitter again brings you the most recent arguments and news on the floor.
You can see the difference on the screenshots below. Google is powerful if you want to know about Motion Graphics in general. But if you want to know what is happening right now around Motion Graphics, Twitter is the service to use.

Google (above) gives you 50M links - too many to find fresh discussions. Twitter (below) shows the jobs available, takes you to the conferences running right now and lists the most recent industry news.

So services like Google and Twitter are both better search tools the same way bikes and trains are both more useful in satisfying specific transportation needs. You just have to identify the right tool for the job.
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Also please note that the Twitter search offers two handy options not introduced in Part 2 of this lesson:
All people/People you follow The latter is very handy if you remember one of the persons you follow (or yourself) has tweeted something important on the topic but you don't remember who and/or when. (Maybe you have not faced this problem yet, but don't worry; you will start forgetting things sooner or later.)
Everywhere/Near you gives you the option of searching globally or in your neighbourhood.

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The lesson about Twitter, parts 1-5:
1. A general news channel (lists) published on April 7
2. A specific news channel (basic searches, using #)
3. A better search engine than Google? (this story)
4. A massive database (upcoming)
5. Teleportation machine and collaborative notebook (upcoming)

Lesson 6 Microblogging part 2: A specific news channel

To be honest, for many years I did not understand the value of Twitter. But in August 2010 I was in big trouble -  then Twitter came and helped me out showing what a useful service it can be.

I was in the deep woods of eastern Finland. Can you believe there are areas in Finland with no Internet? Not even with a mobile data modem? Yes, there are such areas, even entire villages without the Internet.

Normally I can survive some time without the Net, but now Hull City had a very important game, and I just had to be able to follow the match in real time. But no chance to listen to Radio BBC Humberside match commentary over the Net in Möhkö, Ilomantsi.

Möhkö is the most eastern spot of continental EU.
(Funny that Finland, the most eastern part of EU
is said to belong to Western Europe)

In my desperation I had to try any means, so I tested Twitter over SMS. The hashtag to follow Hull City news is #hcafc. I followed the Twitter stream created by a number of Hull City friends at the stadium and I could imagine I was there with them watching the game.

Amazing. Fantastic! Spectacular!! 
Now I understood the genius of a service like Twitter: from the magnitude of streams on the Net, from the babel of billion voices I could filter only the most valuable for me at the moment.

I could create my own news channel which focused on the one and only important news stream for the moment.

Searches with or without #, saving and choosing what to see

Above you can see results of a search I made with hash tag and the search term; #eurovision. The result is a list of entries where the user has printed the # before the search term thus highlighting the importance of Eurovision in her/his tweet.

Note that you can choose between seeing all tweets or only the most important ones, and that Twitter offers you the option of saving the search.

The search above is made without the #. You can see that the result shows all tweets containing the word "eurovision", with or without the hash tag. What do you think: can it be useful to know and utilize the difference?

Other search options

Below you can find the result of another topical search this morning:

On the left side of the picture please find advanced search options:

• Everything is the basic search showing all tweets.
• People restricts the search to entries made by users having "ebola" in their name or user name.
• Photos show only a list of photos attached/linked to "ebola" tweets.
• Videos show only a list of videos attached/linked to search term tweets.
• News shows tweets about the topic by news services.
• Advanced search enables more search options like countries, languages, time etc.

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The lesson about Twitter, parts 1-5:
1. A general news channel (lists) published on April 7
2. A specific news channel (basic searches, using #) (this story)
3. A better search engine than Google? (upcoming)
4. A massive database (upcoming)
5. Teleportation machine and collaborative notebook (upcoming)

Lesson 6 Microblogging part 1: General news channel

On this course we use micro-blogging to collect and share data, then process the data hoping to again learn something. The service we use is Twitter, which allows the user to share posts of length up to 140 characters.

Twitter is the Swiss army knife of Social Media and the net — you could use it to replace your email and all the social media services you use. You would not get all the special functions -  only the basic features. But then again Twitter is more.

Just to give some ideas about the ways to use Twitter I give five examples in this lesson which will be posted in five parts this week.

1. A general news channel
To be an active Twitter user you don't have to tweet at all. But you can use Twitter or similar services to keep yourself updated about whatever you are interested in. To have a general news service of what is happening you just choose some news media to follow.

For most of my life newspapers and television were my main source of news. For some years I learned most of the breaking news through Facebook. Now Twitter seems to have become my main source of news, followed by radio (the real radio!). Whatever media you follow, be sure to include many sources in your news feed, because there are no objective media, they all have an agenda to serve.

But is not a news story consisting of maximum 140 character too brief and shallow?* Yes, if the story is in that message. But news tweets are most often headlines followed by a link to a story, often with links to more in-depth background articles on the topic.

Twitter lets you create lists for different purposes.
This is my News-list which gives me an excellent
view of the news around the world.

On the picture you see a stream of news you can create on Twitter. (Go to Me/Lists/Create new list)
Here are some lists of mine you can view to get the idea:
News
Football
TAMK international media programme students

The best things about lists:
If you follow on Twitter all users you might be interested in you will find yourself in trouble; the feed is so intense you would not have time for anything else than reading your Twitter feed.

Designing lists solves this problem, here's an example: @ftransfers (footballtransfers) and @premierleague (English Premier League) are most relevant Twitter accounts for a football enthusiast like me, but they are so active they occupied a too dominant role in my Twitter feed.

My solution: I stopped being a follower of them but kept them on my Football list; and on Saturday afternoons when nothing else than football matters, I follow only my Twitter Football channel.


* And short stories are not necessarily shallow. It is told Ernest Hemingway considered this six word story one of his best works: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”

The lesson about Twitter, parts 1-5:
1. A general news channel (lists)
2. A specific news channel (hash tags)
3. A better search engine than Google?
4. A massive database
5. Teleportation machine and collaborative notebook