Episode 27 – All Atwitter
2 June, 20084 comments
As Dan finally buckles under and joins in the most hyped Web 2.0 site of the moment, Twitter, Tom and Mills join him to debate the merits—and demerits—of the “microblogging” craze. Do services like Twitter merely increase the distractions and noise from the web, or might they be helpful for communication and community building in academia? In the news roundup, we cover Microsoft’s exit from book digitization and the significance of the tech layoffs at the University of Washington. Picks of the week include a podcast series from Harvard, a blog post explaining the semantic web, and a wiki for digital research tools.
Links mentioned on the podcast:
Mills on Twitter
Media Berkman
Semantic Web Patterns
Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki
Running time: 47:21
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Mills Kelly
Ken Pendergrass : 5th June, 2008
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.
Tom Scheinfeldt : 5th June, 2008
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
Mark Sample : 6th June, 2008
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.
Cameron Blevins : 10th June, 2008
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!