On Blogging and Social Media

I don’t think anyone can question that Twitter has become an Internet phenomenon. With an estimated 500 Millions active users each month. What remains at question is how effective is it as a tool both for sharing and retrieving information?


To get the best out of Twitter you really need to understand the anatomy of a Tweet.

Here’s a simple Tweet:

This is a break down of the anatomy:

The message

• The message part is quite short and this is the basic information you want to share “another fabulous web2.0 tool http://www.interestinglink.com/”

For me twitter is pretty limiting in terms of sharing any real depth of information, but it’s a great way to share sources of deeper information such as links to site, blog or articles.

The Hash tags: #elt #tefl #efl #Esl #edtech

• These are pretty vital. Although many people ‘follow’ hundreds or even tens of thousands of people, they very seldom follow the main stream of information from their followers because it just moves too quickly and nobody has that much time, so what tends to happen is people follow particular tags. By clicking on one of these tags in a tweet you can find what the twitter community as a whole has to say about this specific topic. Believe me that’s much simpler and more useful than trying to scan a constant stream of information as it feeds into your page.

Likewise, if you want to share information and you actually want people to see it including an accurate hash tag will dramatically increase your chances of it being picked out from the massive crowd of information.

With longer term Twitter users ‘following’ hundreds if not thousands of people, I would estimate that most Tweets that simply consist of 140 characters of ‘message’ are actually seen by very few, if any, people, so following the right people and getting your hash tags on is really a vital part of exploiting the network.

The sources

• The other key part of the tweet’s anatomy these “RT@zzTechstuff: RT @NikPeachey:”
  They show the sources of the information. This one shows that the original source of information was @NikPeachey and it was then shared again by @zzTechstuff
  

This is really useful information as clicking on these source names takes you to their profile pages and you can find out what other information they share and then you can decide if you want to follow them.

Getting the best out of Twitter really depends on knowing how best to you use it to get what you want.

How about you?

• What are your tips for getting the best out of your Twitter network?

A few months back I wrote an article about creating your broadcast network to feed information to your PLN. In the article I included a section on a tool called Slinkset which I used to create my Technogogy news portal, which I use to share information and links to informative articles about education, technology and ELT.


Recently, I have discovered a new feature of Slinkset that automatically creates a widget that other blog or website managers can add to their site to aggregate and share the content of your portal.


I think this is a great feature and one that can really extend the reach of the information you are sharing beyond your immediate network.

The widget is very easy to install. You just need to direct web managers or bloggers to the relevant link on your portal. Here's the link to mine: http://technogogy.slinkset.com/widgets

On the widget page they will see what the widget looks like and and a simple piece of code that they can copy and paste into the side bar of their blog or the html of their site.

The links in the widget go directly to the source, in my case the articles I’m recommending, so you aren’t ‘stealing’ anyone’s traffic and the links are updated whenever you up date the links in your portal.

By all means take the code to my widget and try it out if you have a network that is interested in education, technology and ELT, or create your own Slinkset portal. It’s very simple to do and once you have it set up it takes about 2 mins to add a link to each article as you find it.

How about you?

• What tools do you use to share knowledge?
• Do you keep and share bookmarks?

Do please post a comment or question.

Stumble Upon has been for some time one of my long term favorite browser plug in tools. It’s one of the best sources of interesting and sometimes offbeat new websites and can also be a great way to point people towards your own blog or website.

Just download the plug in to your browser tool bar, register for free and the discovering can begin.

So what’s so great about Stumble Upon?

• Stumble Upon shows you new things
  The first thing that I really enjoy about it is the first button at the beginning of the toolbar. Whenever I have a spare moment or I’m feeling bored, I just click on the button and Stumble Upon will take me to a random website I’ve probably never seen before.
  
• These websites aren’t completely picked at random though, the choice is based on the preferences / interests that each person puts in when they register, and based upon other sites you bookmark that you like.
  
  
• Stumble Upon learns what you like
  Each time you come to or Stumble Upon send you to a website you like you click on the ‘thumbs up’ button and it stored in your favourites for later viewing, if you don’t like the site click the thumbs down icon and Stumble Upon will know that you don’t like those types of sites.
• So the site learns about your preferences the longer you use it and gets better at finding things that you are likely to enjoy.
  
  
• Focus your stumbling
  You can also focus your stumbling so that if you are particularly in the mood to find something to do with a particular interest like photography or music, you just stumble through those categories, or you can search through all you interests at random. Just use the drop down menu to choose.
  
• Stumble Upon integrates with other aps
  If you are a regular user of other social networking and bookmarking applications. Stumble Upon can work with them to share what you find directly into Facebook or Twitter or help you email new find to a friend.
• 
• Stumble Upon is also a community
  When you find sites you like, you can also find out who added the site and who else likes the site and check out what other sites they have been adding. You can also start subscribing to their feed and becoming friends.
• When you click on site that you like, Stumble upon also checks it’s database to see that site is a new one and if it is a new entry you can add a short review to the site. This will raise your profile with the Stumble Upon community as you’ll be credited as the discoverer of the site and will also help other people to find the sites, so getting your own sites or blogs into the system can be very helpful in bringing traffic to your site.

I hope this quick introduction to Stumble Upon gives you some idea of what a great tool this is and how you can use it. By all means check out the sites that I have found and added at: http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/nikpeachey/ and if you like the things I’m bookmarking and think you have similar interests then let's become friends.

How about you?

• How do you find new sites?
• Do you rely on your community or are you looking for sites outside your profession?
• What other social bookmarking tools do you use?

This posting is to follow up an online presentation I gave on Friday 6th November 09 for AVEALMEC at the Social Networking - Thriving as a Community of Practice online conference.

The title of my presentation was 'from Information to Knowledge' and during the presentation I tried to look at a range of online tools and show how they could be used to help teachers tap into the vast amount of information being generated online, find useful sources, capture resources from those sources and use them to develop their teaching knowledge and their personal learning network (PLN)

To support the presentation I also created a 23 page booklet, with some 'How to' type instructions for setting up and using the tools, as well as some recommendations for useful communities for teachers to join and people to follow on twitter. You can read or download the booklet here.

From Information to Knowledge

I hope you find this useful and do feel free to share it.

How about you?

• How do you build your personal learning network?
• What tools to you use to capture information from the Internet?
• How do you cope with the vast flow of information being created?
• How do you keep up with the rate of change in the educational profession?

Please leave a comment.

Here's a problem that I have each day. If this sounds like your problem too, then reading the rest of this article might help you solve the problem and avoid having a whole load of garbage links in your bookmarks.

I spend a lot of time multi-tasking at the computer, browsing articles and webs sites and scanning content whilst doing or between doing other tasks. Often I see things that are potentially interesting but which I just don't have time to read in detail. I don't want to share them or Tweet them as many of these 'potentially' interesting sites often turn out to be not so interesting, I also don't want to end up with 10 or 20 tabs open on my browser, so the answer for me is a temporary reading list which a create using Instapaper.

How to use Instapaper

• Go to: http://www.instapaper.com/ and click on 'Register'.

• Create your own username. This can be your email address or anything that you find easy to remember. Then click on ‘Register’.



• Your account is now created. To make it easy to bookmark pages, click on the ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet and drag it onto the bookmarks toolbar on your web browser. Also drag the URL of the Instapaper site to your bookmark tool bar.



• Now whenever you see an interesting article or web site that you would like to come back to later, you just click on the ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet.



• You see a box asking you if you want to save the link, just click ‘Save’ and then you’ll be able to go back later and read the article when you have more time.



• When you have time to read, access your list of links by clicking on the ‘Instapaper’ bookmark and it will take you to your list. You can then click the title to be taken to the web page or click the ‘T’ to read the article as plain text without the advertising, images and other distractions.



• Once you have looked at the site in more detail, you can delete the entry (if you are no longer interested in the page) or keep it (it will be automatically added to your archive).

• If you click on ‘Edit’ you’ll be able to annotate the link and add comments and then save them.

You can use this tool to:

• Capture links to web pages and save them temporarily until you have time to read them in more detail.
• Build up a bibliography for use as reference for articles , dissertations, research studies etc. Just capture links to articles as you browse, go back and read and edit the comments to record author date you accessed it etc.
• To share links to potentially interesting articles and website (You do this by sharing the RSS feed to your account). Here’s a link to the RSS for my own list of sites: Instapaper RSS Remember though that these are ’potentially’ interesting sites and I haven’t had time to look at them in any detail yet.

Instapaper will also run on your i-Phone and i-Touch, so you will be able to access your list and catch up on your reading wherever you are.

Of course, the thing that Instapaper doesn’t do is to read the articles and evaluate content for you, so you’ll still have to do that.

How about you?

• What bookmarking tools do you use?
• How do you streamline your work flow and make sure that you don't loose links to useful sites and articles?

Please leave your comments or links to realted materials