social | digital nomad

Creating Twitter Archives

Post author:Leo Gaggl
Post published:December 10, 2012
Post category:documentation education
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One of the more common uses of Twitter for me is to monitor "back-channels" at events (often events I can attend, but more often these days events I am unable to attend). Unfortunately Twitter's search capabilities cease to be useful after a little while and so it is very handy to be able to create an archive for the events 'hashtag'. There used to be a number of tools in the early days, but mainly because of Twitter's changes to policies and very unfortunate morphing into a closed 'media-publishing' platform, the developers of such tools were forced to discontinue their services. Here is IMHO the best remaining tools I have found that still work: TweetArchivist This is an easy to used & fairly polished product which allows download of raw data. http://www.tweetarchivist.com/ TAGSExplorer This is a more involved, but open solution based on a Google Spreadsheet and can be modified to suit. http://mashe.hawksey.info/2011/11/twitter-how-to-archive-event-hashtags-and-visualize-conversation/ Kudos Martin Hawksey from JISC CETIS

Organisational micro-blogging for all

Post author:Leo Gaggl
Post published:July 24, 2012
Post category:education telework / digital nomads work
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Having seen more and more articles on the use of micro-blogging tools in educational and corporates settings, I am constantly surprised that one of the most useful options from my point-of-view seems to be constantly overlooked. Micro-blogging is like Twitter, but private to your organisation. It is a great way to capture those more informal internal discussions. It can help distribute useful information (such as links) throughout your organisation or help kick-start conversations. The major advantages of StatusNet as a platform over competing proprietary systems (such as Jammer) are: Ownership of information: you can host StatusNet yourself and StatusNet fully supports DataPortability.org to get your data exported from StatusNet as well. Customisation: since you can host Status.net yourself it is possible to fully customise it to suit your needs. Integration potential: since StatusNet is Open Source software you can easily integrate and build upon it. To download Status.net head to http://gitorious.org/statusnet/ or try a personal account with Identi.ca. You can also use a cloud-hosted version provided by StatusNet http://status.net/cloud. A Yammer import tool is also available for users looking for a Yammer Alternative. However being a tool that is private to your organisation does not mean your users will be isolated. There is the ability for your user to connect StatusNet with with their Twitter account should they wish to post messages outside. Note: this is a cross-posting from my work blog at http://www.brightcookie.com/blog