Comments on: Episode 27 – All Atwitter

By: Cameron Blevins

Cameron Blevins — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:18:24 +0000

Not sure if you saw the page Twitter for Librarians: The Ultimate Guide, but it offers a good introduction, some interesting ideas, and lots of good links to other sources. Looking forward to your recap of THATCamp!

By: Mark Sample

Mark Sample — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:31:57 +0000

I appreciate the debate about Twitter. I started off uncommitted, like Dan, but I'm moving closer to Tom's position. Lately I've been thinking about how I could use Twitter in the fall as a transformative teaching tool in a class devoted to new media literature, e.g. having students write a collaborative "story" dispersed across a number of Twitter posts from a number of users. Something that has tipped the balance for me in favor of Twitter is the number of tools and platforms out there making use of Twitter's API. From a digital writing perspective, there's Twistori, which organizes the Twitterverse into six different emotional states (Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel, Wish), and makes for a perversely pleasurable voyeuristic reading experience. More practically, I've been experimenting with Jott, a free voice-to-text service. You call a toll-free number and leave a message, which Jott converts (quite accurately) to text and either sends to you or someone else as an email, or, optionally, sends to Twitter as a tweet. If Digital Campus listeners are interested in other tools, the Twitter Fan Wiki has a comprehensive list of Twitter tools that is worth checking out.

By: Tom Scheinfeldt

Tom Scheinfeldt — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:05:19 +0000

Thanks, Ken. That's a great idea about Brewster. We'll see what we can do. We're actually working with IA on our Zotero Commons project. Tom

By: Ken Pendergrass

Ken Pendergrass — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:25:44 +0000

FYI- I tried to call your 703-879-4796 number today from Seattle…kept getting a busy signal. I think this is a great idea, but couldn’t connect.

In light of your opening comments about Microsoft’s pullout of the digital book scanning business, I think it would be great to have Brewster Cale on the show as a guest. As the founder of the Internet Archive, Mr. Cale was recently on the TWIT podcast and spoke at length about Microsoft and Yahoo’s involvement with digital book scanning and had some great insight and vision for this incredible project.