I’ve been reading Jakob Nielsens UseIt alertboxes for many years and this weeks is about twitter. And is one of the better articles I’ve seen about how to write well crafted tweets with a specific goal in mind.

In other news, I’ve written an article which should be appearing in FUMSI soon. It’s about using IA principles in your library and I’ll link to it when it is published.

In the meantime, keep your eyes open for a complete revamp and relaunch of Enquiring Minds coming soon to screen near you.

Well, it’s been a while since we last posted.  Jennifer and I are currently thinking about where we’d like to take Enquiring Minds in 2009, but in the meantime here’s a quick link to an interesting article on twitter: What are you doing? 

In fact I’ve just discovered that the Guardian has an entire section devoted to articles on Twitter. Definitely a page to keep track of.

I haven’t yet blogged about law.librarians, the newest experiment in group blogging from an international crew of law librarians, mostly, I think, because I’ve been spending so much time there!

It’s turning out to be a great community and resouce for everyone involved. Law.librarians is being used to share resources and links, both serious and not-so-serious, as well as becoming a place to ask community opinion on a question, to try and find a resources or just to chat with like-minded people.

As much as I like and enjoy using Twitter, I’m finding the ability to comment, and the better signal-to-noise ratio of law.librarians to be very appealing. If you haven’t gone to check it out yet, do drop by and have a look!

I meant to post the three-quarters written post that’s been sitting in my drafts folder for about the last week before I left for BIALL, but I seem to have run out of time (time is something that I seem to be in seriously short supply of at the moment). I’m off to the conference in Sheffield this afternoon, and will be sans interwebs whilst I’m away, unless I should stumble upon a web cafe of some kind. (note to self: must get laptop /nods). I’ll be twittering though, so keep an eye on that if you’re interested.

And, in light of having a proper post of any real content, I give you a bunny. Cause I don’t know about you, but my morning could totally do with some bunny schnorgling action.

After some time of protesting on my behalf, it seems that the inevitable has occured – I’ve been struck by the Twitter bug. I blame Twitbin, personally, for making it so damn easy for me to post, and so compelling to watch it refresh itself over and over again. There’s a certain balance point, it seems, once you’ve starting watching enough people to make it interesting, that you can’t seem to tear yourself away – it’s just this mini-conversation, playing away in the back of your mind.

I’m still not totally sold on it’s usefulness as a tool in libraries or in organisations, but it is a fantastic social networking tool, occupying that void between IM (too personal, too intrusive) and blogging (too much like hard work).

I’m here, by the by, should anyone be struck by the misplaced desire to listen to me witter about the cup of tea I’m drinking or the email I’m writing or whatever it is that I’m patently not doing, because obviously, the only thing I could be ‘doing right now’ is writing for Twitter :)

It’s been a bit quiet around here, but we’ve not been idle. To make up for no posts for a week, have four posts in one!

After doing a bit of research, and scouting through other blogs, we’ve decided to trial Google’s Adsense. It should hopefully be unobtrusive, and mostly unnoticeable but it will be an interesting experiment. Personally, I’ve always wanted to know if the Google ads actually work, so this will be a good experiment to see if people do actually click on the ads.

In a similar vein, Google Analytics recently changed their report layout, and we’ve spent many hours playing with all the reports and statistics. It’s quite useful to know what posts get the most hits, and so what people like the most about the blog. I’ve also signed up and am now using Analytics on my personal blog, as a way to see if a) it does get any visitors at all and b) if so where are they coming from and why do they come to the page.

Meebo has just released MeeboRooms, which are just like the chatrooms of old, just a little more advanced. Basically, the Rooms mean you can share media with the people in your room, and watch YouTube videos together. Obviously, chat rooms are back in fashion. :) They have the ability to be embedded into pages, but when I attempted to add a room to a wiki I’m working on, it didn’t quite work. I’m going to need to spend a bit of time playing with it, but if I can get the room working on the wiki, I’ll be very happy. Apart from the usual social uses of such a room, I can see it helping in distance education – especially being able to have a ‘classroom’ feel, where you can watch something with your classmates and then discuss it. Also, training sessions, and possibly, maybe, video conferencing. So someone could be giving a presentation, being filmed via webcam that can then be embedded into the Meebo room. The more I think about it the more uses I can think of!

I’ve started using Twitbin at home, which does make twitter dangerously easy to use. Instead of having to click through my firefox tabs to find my twitter tab, I simply look at my sidebar. It does make me glad I don’t have firefox at work! I’m not following many feeds yet, but I can now see that changing now that it’s easier to follow them. I’ve never been able to make the RSS feeds work in bloglines, so this will be a much easier way to keep up with things.

I realise that this is another post about Twitter, but as the FT says, it’s the next big thing.

It was a front page story in todays Financial Times, and you can bet, if the FT has picked it up the other broadsheets will follow soon. The only concern about this is, if it starts getting press, and more and more users sign up, will the service stand the test? And will the surge in users then skew any adoption stats?

If, as the article says, it is

the first application that people have got excited about since Flickr came out

then will it get bought out like both Flickr and YouTube? And what consequences might that have on the service?

Then again, the article goes on to say:

I don’t think it will be the next YouTube – but I do think it will gain wide adoption (said Ross Mayfield, a Valley entrepreneur)

so maybe this will just be a flash in the pan until something new comes along.

(The article is available on the FT website here, but it’s a subscription based service)

An interesting link was sent my way today, and thought I’d pass it on.

It’s a map of twitter posts, in realtime. You can either view it as a whole, or look specifically at your location. It’s quite absorbing, and yes, voyeuristic. But interesting. It could be very useful in the case of an event or something similar, see how people are reacting to the same thing. Or you could do what I did and just sit and watch where and what people are twittering. Also, it could be useful, simply as a demographic studying tool.

You can’t escape it at the moment. Everyone’s talking about it. South by Southwest has been taken over by it. It’s the next biggest smallest thing in blogging – Twitter.

It’s the newest, trendiest kind of microblogging. Rather than having to post something of length (or interest) you can post quick snapshots of what you are doing. It comes across as a stream of consciousness babble of ‘what I’m doing right now’. And yes, I know what you’re thinking. Why? There’s no point! People will just be posting endless nonsensical streams of ‘Oh my cat just did the cutest thing!’ and ‘I’m going to bed now’. Which, to be fair, it is used for. But it can be used for so much more.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere of late talking about what libraries could be doing with Twitter, and what other applications people and organisations are using it for.

Libraryclips and Splashcast talk about applications for Twitter and the top tools for Twitter, and David Lee discusses library specific applications for it.

Here at micropersuasion, they have developed a basic Google search for Twitter, which could be useful, though I expect there’s an awful lot of content to be trudging through – you’d want quite a specific search!

It could be used for keeping track of what people are doing on a project, tracking what people are doing when working in disparate locations, keeping a personal running tally of reference questions, as a list making tool, a checklist, or just a way of communicating with your teammates.

If nothing else, it’s at the peak of the internet zeitgeist at the moment and it’s in our best interests to keep an eye on it. It might not have any lasting longevity – it might be one of those passing internet fads that have their hour in the sun, but it may not. It’s in the nature of these shiny new toys for them to gain popularity, and then gain more features, more functionality, more people writing hacks and tools and tips and tricks to integrate it into our work in ever more interesting ways. In a few years time, who knows how it might be being used? And in the meantime? It’s a pretty cool way of keeping track of what peoples cats are doing :)