ThiemeMeulenhoff organiseert maandelijks een iLunch. Een iLunch is een inspirerende bijeenkomst voor TM medewerkers. Meestal wordt een externe spreker uitgenodigd om de iLunch in te vullen. In december was ik uitgenodigd om te spreken over het succesvol inzetten van Twitter, privé en zakelijk. Mijn slides heb ik gedeeld op Slideshare en bij deze ook hier. Feedback, vragen en commentaar zijn welkom.
Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts
Less Filter Bubbles with Twitter and RSS?
But is the internet all good. There have been many that question if the internet is such a positive force. Shouldn't we question some (or all) of the changes the internet is doing to the world and to. Andrew Keen wrote about the negative aspects of the internet on culture. Nicolas Carr published about book about what the internet is doing to our brain. And more can be mentioned here.
Recently I bumped into a review of The Filter Bubble in my Dutch newspaper, went over to watch the related TED Talk with the same title and the post about information gatekeepers popped up in my feeds. Talk about the wonders of internet and serendipity...
In short the TED talk is about how services like Google and Facebook are automatically filtering out information for us, without us knowing, based on our profiles, search behavior, friends, etc. And the question is asked if this is good thing.
I'm happy these kind of questions are being asked. It helps me question myself if I'm too positive about the (role of) the internet in my life. One of the things I like about the internet is the fact that so much information is accessible at my finger tips. And the fact that I can follow close and far-away friends, thinkers and experts with such ease. I try to keep my filters fresh and open to new views. And as I agree and understand that Google and Facebook are trying to help me find what's relevant, I also see that I need other ways to get unfiltered content. Isn't this where Twitter and a good feedreader come in? Oh, yes, even there I don't follow the whole world on Twitter and I can read all the blogs in the world. But it's hard to block out all kinds of information I think I don't want to see. I can't stop someone I'm following to not send a tweet or write a blogpost about a certain topic. Of course I don't have to read the blogpost, but to do that I have to read the title of the post. And with that I'm at least confronted with his/her view on a topic.
Does this make sense? I'm really curious how you stay out of the filter bubble. Please share your thoughts!
Which Social Media do Millenials use?
I kicked off my lecture with some open questions. I'd like to share the answers to one question with you. I was curious what social tools they use themselves to get things done in their lives. With all the talk about millennials being digital natives (or aren't they), easily moving in the social space, organizing their life and work with these tools, etc I thought I'd see if this if the case in practice.
I shared what I got from the students on Google+. In sum, this is what they told me.
Of the 60 students:
- 40 use Twitter
- Almost all use Facebook
- Just over half use Hyves (Dutch social network)
- 1 uses a bookmarking tool
- 2 blog
- 0 have a wiki (although all have experience using wiki's)
- 6 use Google+
- 2 use Foursquare
- 16 are on LinkedIn
Of course these results are not statistically valid. It's just 60 students from one college in a city in Holland telling me what they use. But I'll will poll them two more times this year. (Great idea from Chee Chin Liew!) Let's see what we learn from the trends in this class.
I didn't have time for a real discussion about the data. Of course you wonder why only 2 blog, for instance. LinkedIn is not much used either. Does this point to the fact that LinkedIn is a business network for people looking for a job or that have a job? This poll also shows Foursquare, Google+ and bookmarking are hardly used. The students using Google+ said they signed up to see what Google+ is and find out if it has added-value compared to their current toolset. Facebook is very popular and the Dutch network Hyves is clearly becoming an echo chamber for them. Several said they stopped using Hyves or just use it to be reminded of their friend's birthday.
Interesting data, don't you think? If you have any question I should ask them, please let me know!
Helping You Filter Streams - Darwin Awareness Engine
How do you keep up with the news, tweets, updates and feeds? We live in the wonderful world of information abundance. But many feel overwhelmed by the amount and speed of information. Some even talk about information overload.
I described how I keep up with what's going on in the world and in my area's of interest. But can't it be better?
Yes, it can. This is where all kinds of new(er) solutions pop up. Like Techmeme and Postrank. There's even talk of Web Squared, Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web, which should help us filter through loads of information coming at us. Not just by highlighting 'the best tweets and feeds', but my semantically analyzing and summarizing the information.
The Darwin Awareness Engine fits in this movement. And I think they're doing a good job. I can see why they won several prizes. It works and it's useful.
Bill Ives explains what Darwin Engine is about and what it does here.
Rather than using semantic technology to attempt to enable understanding by a computer, our approach to awareness based on Chaos Theory provides a visualization of results that better enables a person to make more informed decisions about where to look next. Then there are tools that allow for efficient drilling down into relevant details. It builds on a person’s expertise rather than trying to replace it.You can try it here or built on Twitter here. You'll see it presents the information in tagcloud-like visualizations. It also shows a ticker-tape. By adding and removing terms (attractors) the results can be manipulated.
I used Darwin Engine for some time. I don't use it very often anymore. My experiences are:
- Darwin Engine or Twortex was an extra space for me to watch (besides the streams that I already pay attention to). It was too much for me to also keep going there. I also wonder if this has to do with usability. Are the visualizations visual enough and is the interface self-explanatory enough for users to keep coming back? The biggest challenge for a new service is to get users to integrate it in their workflow.
- I liked the application of the Engine to Twitter, called Twortex. It would be great to flip the standard Twitter timeline with a more visual one like Twortex. Not only on terms but also on my or one of my follower's timeline. I do find Twortex kind of slow. Sometimes is keeps on processing without showing results.
- Related to the previous bullet: I think it would be helpful to have a more visual navigation of my feeds in Google Reader. I'd like to see the traditional feedlist and easily flip to the visual mode. Flipboard and Zite show there a market for more visual navigation.
- As mentioned on the website, Darwin Engine is great for business and competitive intelligence work. And for information management departments. It would be neat to use the Engine on internal company information as well.
Have you used Darwin Engine? What are your experiences? Please share your comments or blogposts here.
The State of the Blogsphere 2010
I've been blogging what I learned from the SotB for a couple of years now. Technorati's report on how the blogosphere is doing is lengthy and rich. To my knowledge it's the largest piece of research on the blogging community. They started back in 2004. Besides collecting general data about blogging, this year's focus is on the female bloggers.
Blogs are in transition, they say. The line between blogs, microblogs and social networks is blurring. Mobile blogging is the key trend this year. Based on the results of the survey and interviews they see great optimism about blogging. More and more blogs are generating revenue, more frequent blogging and more blogs are planned and more and more people say the go-to resource for news will be blogs. The trust in mainstream media is dropping.
Hobbyists remain the backbone of the blogging community (65%). And again the blogging community is shown to be a "highly educated and affluent" group. The report also shows bloggers consume lots of information, mostly through reading.
About 60% of the bloggers spend up to 3 hours per week on blogging. 40% puts more time into their blog.
Compared to 2009 the hobbyists are updating their blog less. In general updating is done much less on a daily and more on a weekly basis. This is mostly (63%) due to family and work commitments (did bloggers get better and more busy jobs?!). 30% said it was due to shift some communication to microblogging and social networks.
Bloggers that blog about their work/company say they have greater visibility in their industry, also leading to prospects and sales.
Just about 80% is using Twitter (not all! - 34% of the non-users don't understand the service, they say, others use Facebook instead) to promote their blog, share links and keep up with news and events.
Facebook and Twitter are seen as the most effective platforms to market blogs.
A small increase can be seen in mobile blogposting (24% in 2010, 20% in 2009). I'm really curious if this number will go up faster with the iPad market penetration.
Really interesting is the fact that social media sites are outpacing search engine optimalization as widely-used marketing tools. Only "38% of bloggers use SEO".
Interesting quote by Barbara Jones: "I see Twitter and Facebook as two very different applications. Facebook is like a backyard barbecue, mostly friends and family. I see Twitter as a cocktail party where you have the ability to pop in and out of conversations and make relationships."
One thing I miss in this report (and I've mentioned this before) is some hard numbers about the number of (active) blogs and the number of new (active) blogs.
Let's see what 2011 has in store for blogging! For now, my question to you is, do these trends relate to your blogging practice? Are you blogging more or less? And what tools do you use to promote your blog?
Following Tweets
When this post was in draft I was planning to write about Tweetdeck: why I use it, how I use it and why I love it. However I practically stopped using Tweetdeck. Why? Well, I tweeted about it here and here: I'm loosing too many tweets. More specifically: I simply don't want to miss tweets from some people. That's one of the reasons I started to read tweets from Google Reader (which doesn't really work for me). (I also use Google Reader to backup my tweets. This does work great.) I didn't uninstall Tweetdeck yet, though. I found myself using Tweetdeck again to live tweet a conference...
What I liked about Tweetdeck is what everybody likes about it: It makes tweeting much easier. Retweeting is easy, defining Groups is easy, adding hashtags (automatically) is easy, etc.
Then I bumped into Brizzly! Brizzly is a webclient, a layer over Twitter. It is still in beta. It is far better than the Twitter website. At the time I started using it Twitter Lists and Retweet was not available yet. Brizzly had these features and implements them well. Brizzly called Lists Groups, but changes their Groups to Lists when Twitter launched Lists. There's a bi-directional sync of Lists (making List in Brizzly shows up on the Twitter site and vice versa). Adding people to Lists in much easier in Brizzly (incremental search).
Retweet has been implemented in Brizzly like it is in Tweetdeck. Even though Twitter now also has Retweet functionality, I still like the old way better (and so I agree with Stowe Boyd).
The best part of Brizzly is when you scroll through your tweets, the page is updated automatically. You can scroll down and down through an endless list of tweets.
So, although the Twitter website is moving in this direction, I have enough reasons to stay with Brizzly!
Do you use Brizzly too? Tell me about your experiences. And what tools do you use to follow tweets?
UPDATE Nov. 21, 2009: I forgot to mention some other features I like about Brizzly. Brizzly clearly shows the tweets you haven't read yet. So, you know where you left off last time you were reading tweets. I also like the fact that Brizzly expands url's automatically for you, so you can see the url and make a better decision to click on it or not.
Retweet Button
Just a post to test if the 'retweet'-button I added works.
How did I do it? Just followed Blogspot blog's post. Thanks 'Blogspot blog'!
How did I do it? Just followed Blogspot blog's post. Thanks 'Blogspot blog'!
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