What does ten years on twitter look like?

I have just reached ten years on twitter.  Some of you have been on twitter for longer, some shorter. One way to look at the ten years is by the work of @mhawksey and a twitter archive.  August 2013 was peak tweeting for me. It is easy to set up your own twitter archive. There is a video of how to do this.  The twitter archive just updates in the background, and is an easy way to look at tweets over time.

My tweeting has changed over time. At first it was only library related, and then I introduced some other areas such the environment. I also follow a wider range of people and organisations including more knitters. What has stayed the same is that I am still a conference tweeter and I still tweet some of my professional reading.

How has your tweeting changed over time?

twitter archive on github thanks to @mhawksey

I am excited about this.  It is my first use of github, and yes, I did not have to do anything fancy but follow the directions, and it worked.  I now have an updating twitter archive on githib.

You can watch the video of instructions here.

I have been a fan of Tagsexplorer beta for a while (here is an example).

A lovely case of mistaken identity

This tweet

Special thanks to @cartoonstudies visiting artist cartoonist @ellenforsyth! pic.twitter.com/yJ6F9BnoNa
— Cartoon Studies (@cartoonstudies) April 15, 2015

came through my twitter stream, as an alert. It is lovely. They look a great group of people to work with, but it was not me who was visiting.  I am really sympathetic to typos in twitter handles as every conference or so (and it used to be very conference), I would make a typo in someone's twitter handle.  Seeing this photograph, was a lovely lift to my day as it joyful, and I really like that people are being trained to create cartoons (lots more comics).

Tate Museum #museumweek discussion about museums of the future

This online discussion about museums highlights areas of interest to libraries as well, in thinking about the future.

We are the dead - a Canadian commemoration of all their war dead

I came across the twitter stream We are the dead which you can find out more about here.  It is powerful, simple but very powerful.

twitter mirror

The image on the left shows a Twitter mirror at Protiotype which took place in August.  It was part of a display of new technology and you could have your experience auto-tweeted.

I thought this would be great at various events, giving a way of providing visual feedback.  You could have a series with people excited by what they are borrowing at the library, or various programming possibilities.

The below image shows me concentrating on reading the text on the twitter mirror

Live from the Twitter Mirror... #Protiotype #SydDes #IoT pic.twitter.com/pgsugjGVZB
— Protiotype (@Protiotype1) August 20, 2014

Twitter and society - a review

Twitter and Society by Katrin Weller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It is written to explore the outcomes of different analysis of twitter use and what this can tell us. There are topics ranging from sport, and disasters to journalism and scholarly communication.

Each chapter summary is written as a tweet, complete with relevant hashtags. Most of the writing is collaborative and the majority of authors have twitter accounts which are listed as part of their details at the end of the book.

I am interested in twitter analytics for some of the work that I do and read this book to help my thinking about this. It did. Some of the chapters were very entertaining, and there are many references to follow up. There are parts I will need to reread, but I look forward to to this.

View all my reviews

The kindness of King County Library System

I came across a mention of a new app from King County Library System.  It is an app which records how much you read - as a motivation.

When I first checked it out, it was only available for people in the USA, but still the library staff were very kind in their comments to be via twitter.

The app is now available for people all around the world to use, and it is lovely.

 ---

Added 21 December 2013 To show how lovely they are - they sent this tweet

@ellenforsyth Aww, thanks! :) Happy to help others #TakeTimeToRead
— King County Library (@KCLS) December 19, 2013

HerdyShepherd on twitter

I came across the HerdyShepherd account on twitter from reading an article in The Atlantic (article here) thanks to it coming through my reading on Zite.

Since then I have been following HerdyShepherd  on twitter.   Recently one of the tweets from the account looked for some indicative numbers on who actually looks at the tweets.

Always wonder how many people see a tweet.. Just as an experiment if you read this favourite it so I can see. Thanks pic.twitter.com/f4Viryy6RX
— HerdyShepherd (@herdyshepherd1) December 6, 2013

This account has over 19 000 followers.  In all likelyhood each person will not see each tweet.  I realise this is broadly indicative data, but I still thought it was an interesting method to use.  Looking at the statistics on the photograph, almost 70 retweets and almost 2000 favourites, it looks like a decent percentage of followers see each tweet, or at least see a percentage of tweets.  I liked the way this broad indicative data was used.

Celebrating social media - at South Sydney

South Sydney, the rugby league team, celebrate their fans who follow them on social media.  They have a club twitter account @SSFCRABBITOHS which they use like other organisations.  They also have a page on their website which celebrates how their fans are showing their support for the club and the team, on twitter.  You can look at the leader board of tweeting fans - with links to their twitter accounts, just in case you want to follow them.  They also profile some of their twitter supporters (social fan of the week) and often feature a key tweet on their home page (which many libraries and other cultural institutions also do).  I like the profiling of the twitter fans as it is a way of both celebrating and building community.

Other sports teams may also feature this kind of community celebration, so please treat this as an example.  I liked the way they are bringing the social media to anyone who uses their website.  They are celebrating this kind of support for their team, as well as much more traditional means.  It is about building and connecting to their community of fans, and celebrating them - and I think there are ideas for libraries in this.  They even have a weekly wallpaper featuring different key events and players of the previous week.  It would be lovely if people were so excited about library collections that they wanted to show this by having a different library (museum, gallery or archive) wallpaper on their screen each week.

Thanks to @cfwriter for telling me about this.

It only seems polite to end this post with - #GoRabbitohs