Christchurch was hit by a devastating earthquake on February 22, 2011, that was much more destructive than the September 4 quake. The quake happened during the lunch hour and again surprised everybody. I had not heard about the earthquake until two hours later as I had been working in my hotel room and not watched TV or been online. Seeing the pictures later and listening to the reports on TV was horrific and I am grateful for everybody who is doing OK.

The state of emergency was declared very soon, the crisis centers started its work and volunteers got together to help in any way they could. One of these volunteer groups use eq.org.nz as their web site to gather information about the state of things à la “Where are you and what do you see?” It must be noted that this is not an official crisis center page, but crowd-gathered information. The volunteers are in touch with officials to check on certain messages before they get posted to the site.

Colleagues of mine who are in Wellington set up a volunteer training center in our training room at Catalyst to be able to provide the service continuously and have enough people at hand who can help sort the incoming messages. People can email or send a free TXT to contribute information. It then gets categorized and mapped for easy retrieval. As many people in Christchurch only have cell phone access, there is also a mobile interface and apps for both iPhone and Android phones available.

Although I still hope that such data gathering will not be necessary in the future, I am realistic to know that earthquakes or any other catastrophe can happen any minute. The web site that was set up using Ushahidi can be used for other disaster relief purposes in the future as the infrastructure has been set up. The technology used is open source.

After a wonderful lunch and small talk at the lunch buffet, we had two more sessions at the EYC unConference today. You can read part 1 and part 2 before continuing if you haven’t already done so.

Low budget user testing

Courtney Johnston offered to facilitate a session on user testing and how to do that on a shoe-string budget.

A lot of user testing can be done by using paper and web site mockups. You also do not need hundreds of users, but can often already get an idea when you ask about 6 people to participate in a card-sorting activity or give them a task to complete on a web site. Some professional usability testers may bury their head in the sand when they read these lines, but here were are talking about testing web site for communities that operate on a very low till non-existent budget who cannot afford to have sessions in a usability lab and use awesome, but expensive software and setups to conduct their testing.

Often, even only with a few number of people, you can get an idea of whether a certain navigation works, whether menu items are named logically etc. However, when you only have access to a small number of people, you should be acutely aware of their ICT background to interpret their answers correctly and not make false assumptions and objectifying these.

Courtney Johnston provides tips of how to do low-budget user testing; CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Feeding back to software developers

Tim McNamara offered the last session that I went to for this day of learning more about community involvement online. It was on how to give useful feedback to software developers. That was a dear topic to me as I get frustrated sometimes when people write forum entries or send me emails from which I cannot really make out the problem and try to solve it. It always takes a lot of effort to figure out what the issue might be and how to solve it.

The Google Project Hosting issue tracker is a good example of how to guide users in providing constructive and useful bug reports. When you open a new issue, you don’t just get an empty text box, but depending on your bug report, you can choose a template which then gives a few suggestions of what to include in your bug report. The template for a “user defect report” has the following items:

What steps will reproduce the problem?
Step 1.
Step 2.
Step 3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

What browser (or hg/svn client) are you using? On what operating system?

As these questions are written directly in the text box, people can’t overlook them.

I will have to check if we could also add such pre-populated text in Launchpad for people filing Mahara bugs. That would be very useful.

Now what?

Currently, I am still in the processing phase because there was a lot of information today, a number of web sites to check out, things to try out for myself and wrapping my head around. It was great to meet people who create web sites for non-profits and a lot of times use open source. Joomla was talked about quite a bit as a person ran two sessions on it whereas other CMS were hardly mentioned (we should remedy that next time). However, as was pointed out when the Wordle was shown: Drupal sits on top of Joomla and has “brain” right next to it.

EYC unConference in a Wordle; created by Wellington ICT

A big Thank You to the organizers and volunteers as well as the participants of the unConference who made that day a great learning experience.

As written in the previous post on the EYC unConference, everybody could propose a topic for a session and gather people to discuss it. After my initiated session on how to actually get people to use a community web site in which the attendees greatly participated and did not need a lot of facilitating, I went to a similar session. There the focus was on the use of social media, in particular Twitter and Facebook.

Online communities and social media

People saw the purpose of Twitter and Facebook differently and it always came down to finding where the people you want to reach hang out and picking them up from there.

Another important point that was raised was that not everybody is using social media and should not be forced to do so in order to join a community, but they should have alternative means for engagement. though that does not mean that the lowest common denominator should be chosen. It is worthwhile to educate community members about the possibilities of social media and offer them training so that they can become literate in its use.

Despite that, especially established community members should not be forced to go out of their way to continue engaging. Somebody came up with an analogy to a restaurant that was picked up by Joanna McCleod. When regular patrons come to a restaurant, they should not be made to go out again to find a flyer that is being distributed on Lambton Quay in order to be able to dine at that restaurant. They should still be able to just go inside without any detours.

The session attendees agreed that it is about the way of communicating and not necessarily the tool. Twitter and Facebook can change rather quickly in this day and age. So you may have to switch to another service. However, the idea of the social networking will persist. And you should not be afraid to pull the plug and discontinue using a tool when you realize that your community does not take to it. Your efforts can be used elsewhere more productively.

Never mind the nice weather outside. Community's social media use is as good. CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Web accessibility

Robyn Hunt talked about what everybody could do to improve their web sites to embrace accessibility. That does not only mean that people with disabilities can get more out of a web site, but it also means that the web site is improved for everybody as accessible web sites often also include looking at usability issues that might frustrate “regular” users as well.

I know that I have to improve the accessibility of my blog here, e.g. give meaningful alternative text and not just my picture caption and probably improve a whole bunch of other things that are normally hidden to the eye, but help people greatly who use screen readers.

Learning more about accessibility is a project on my ToDo list for which I will have to set aside a time and either participate in a workshop or read relevant texts.

One thing that particularly stuck in my head was that Facebook is not a good page in terms of accessibility because it is quite busy among things. However, when viewed on a smartphone, people with disabilities can participate as the content presented in the smartphone apps is basically clutterfree making it easier to use. Thus, though the service was not changed, a change of device suddenly enables a number of users to finally participate. And the internet offers independence and freedom to a great many people with disabilities as they can now get information that they had previously no access to and they can also engage in online conversations.

I cover the rest of the day in part 3 on the EYC Conference.

Today the Engage Your Community unConference, initiated by Wellington ICT, took place at the Rutherford House at Victoria University in Wellington. It was “a day long learning event for community webmasters and others using IT for Wellington’s communities”. On top of that, it was free thanks to its sponsors.

Around 90 people fought the urge to stay outside in the wonderful sunshine and rather warm temperatures to engage with like-minded people in discussions around using the web with communities. Some people had already thought about a topic to present beforehand while others decided on the spot.

I belonged to the latter category. After listening to a number of people shouting out their topics in the opening session, I thought I did not want to bring yet another tool-centered session to the table. Therefore, I decided to offer a session on online community engagement after all the tools had been set up and talk about what happens then, how to get people to participate, and how to keep them interested in the conversation.

Engaging communities online

As I do not have eternal wisdom in that area, but wanted to share my experience as well as tips I had learned at WordCampNZ just a couple of weeks ago, in particular from Suzanne Kendrick on Day 1 and Matt Miller on Day 2 (using his example of story telling to not talk about your business but just something interesting), I started the session also hoping that others would want to share their thoughts.

The group of about 18 participants took to the topic and brought in their own perspectives and community management tips that worked for them. Tim McNamara volunteered to jot down notes. It became clear that people in one community do not all communicate in one space, but that community organizers who want to reach their community, should be present in a number of spaces online and offline to cater to the community. Discussions on Facebook may differ greatly from those in a discussion forum on the community site itself. Sometimes just having a “like” button next to a post already helps to engage those (the majority) who would otherwise not comment.

A great book to read on the topic of online community stewardship is Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith.

Whiteboard notes thanx to Tim; CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Are you interested in learning more how the day progressed? Continue with part 2 and then part 3.

My summary of WordCampNZ 2010 in Auckland, August 7-8, 2010, continues. If you have not read the beginning, you can read Part 1.

Bill Bennett – Writing for blogs

Bill Bennett has decades of experience as journalist and shared his wisdom with us in regard to what journalism can teach bloggers. He already summarized his presentation nicely. A few words that I want to highlight:

• a lot of things that applied to newspapers of old are true again today in blogging, e.g. to write concisely (I have not yet mastered that art)
• keep it simple: your audience often is often second-language speakers
• keep sentences short and simple -> 15-20 words
• don’t fill the entire screen with your words, but have short lines as reading on screen is already in general 20% slower
• he called headings “page furniture”
• remember to cover “who, what, why, when, where” close to the top to give the reader direction
• make your points in descending order so that a reader could stop at any point and still get the entire story (and only get additional info when reading on)

Take-home message: Writing for blogs has a lot of same features as “good ol’” newspaper journalism that many journalists don’t know how to write anymore. Revive the old art.

Bill Bennett; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Jo Couchman – A plugin for every occasion

Jo wanted to share with us her favorite and most useful plugins. Unfortunately, the Wifi didn’t cooperate and she spent most of her speaking time trying to get connected to the internet. However, you can view her presentation online and check out the plugins she suggested for yourself.

Take-home message: There’s a plugin for virtually everything. Check it out via Google and read comments about it before installing it (cf. Quintin Russ’ presentation).

Jo Couchman; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Pippa Coom and Suzanne Kendrick – Community Management

Pippa introduced us to the Grey Lynn 2030 Transition Community. This is a community exploring sustainability and acting upon it. They also have a virtual home that she presented. The site connects local people around the idea of improving their community. They have established a community garden, started a Farmer’s Market and so on. The community members are also very active online.

Pippa Coom; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Suzanne talked about community management in general and gave useful tips, among them the following:

• An online community manager must personify the soul of the company -> be “on brand” -> intrinsically personify the product, e.g. because you use it yourself, fit the target group etc.
• Be personal, be authentic and use your real name and voice.
• Be a bridge between the company and customers.
• Companies should have only one Twitter account and not several because that gets confusing for people who want to follow the company and are put before the task of subscribing to a multitude of Twitter channels.
• Remember: 1 creator, 10 commentators, 1000 lurkers -> Even if you think nobody listens / reads, there are lots who do. You just don’t know about them.

Suzanne Kendrick; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Take-home message: Community management becomes more important and should not be neglected. It should be viewed as essential and engaged in appropriately.

Sacha Dylan – Who are your audience

Sacha shared facts about disabled people in New Zealand and how they are disadvantaged when accessing the internet. A lot of sites are not made with people with disabilities in mind. He pleads his case that everybody should at least be able to access the content of a page in one version or the other.  Often that already involves developers running their page through a color check. His presentation slides.

Take-home message: Accessibility to web content for people with disabilities is still not guaranteed widely and needs to be improved.

Justin Scott and Sam Dalton – Vital Gifts app

Justin Scott; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

WordCamp is not only about WordPress, but great ideas in general and issues that can be presented using WordPress. Justin and Sam talked about their app VitalLink that they will launch in September.

the idea behind is VitalLink is the following: It is a storefront for Fairtrade where you can choose a real gift for a friend, have it delivered by the closest supplier and post a status update on your favorite social network (in the first version only Facebook) letting everybody know that you supported Fairtrade. In a latter version it will be possible to delay the delivery of a status message until after the friend has received the surprise gift.

The app wants to promote Fairtrade and better wages for producers in Third World Countries and at the same time give people an easy way to purchase Fairtrade products.

I think this is a cool idea with great potential for people to use it because you cannot get Fairtrade everywhere in a store.

Take-home message: If you have a cause in mind, do something and don’t just think about it.

Sam Dalton; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

That concludes the first day WordCampNZ 2010. Day 2 will be covered in the Part 3. If you missed the earlier presentations I followed, you can read Part 1.

(with apologies to Bill Bennett for writing 5 times his suggested word limit)

The second WordCampNZ took place over the weekend (7-8 August 2010) in Auckland. I had never been to a WordCamp, basically an (un-) conference for WordPress users and developers, before. Shortly after learning that I would be moving to New Zealand, I checked whether there would one. Luckily there was going to be one already organized in August. Once I knew whether I would have the time to go from Wellington to Auckland, I booked my ticket.

Jason Kemp, one of the organizers besides Anthony Cole and Dan Milward, kept everybody perfectly informed about new speakers, the venue, and also how many days were left till the beginning so that nobody could miss to book a flight and accommodation if needed.

Jason Kemp; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

I had already gone to Auckland on Friday to explore the city. The day was brilliant and I had a great view of Auckland from Sky Tower and went to the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

Saturday was the first day of WordCampNZ 2010 held at Unitec on Mt. Albert. We had two conference strands: One with a great mix of topics and the other one more developer-oriented. I spent most of my time in the main conference room.

There was a livestream for some time, but as the Wifi could not manage it, it had to be cut off more than it was up and running. However, Vicky Teinaki kept us and the rest of the world completely informed about what was going on in the sessions that she attended. She is amazing at live microblogging and earned her specialty coffee and reusable coffee mug well.

Here’s a quick run through the sessions that I attended. It was not until a couple of sessions in that I started to take photos. Due to critical editing not all made it to Flickr and I apologize to all speakers whom I did not capture in pixels and only mention here in the text.

Robert Popovic – BuddyPress live & other advanced topics

Rob gave a thorough introduction to BuddyPress and its features. Although I had of course already heard about BuddyPress, mainly from Jim Groom who uses it at the University of Mary Washington along his WordPress MU, but I had never had the chance to put my hands on it myself.

Take-home message: BuddyPress is a powerful tool that I need to check out.

Rachel Cunliffe – Blog designer and community site designer – Custom themes

Rachel deals with custom themes on a daily and often nightly basis as many of her clients are overseas. In her opinion, the biggest challenge is not the theme design itself, but dealing with people’s content and making it easy for them to add further content. “Nice” and “easy” are the two terms that pop up most often when she talks to clients who come to her for a better web site.

Although WordPress can be used as CMS, she advises to use Drupal or any other CMS as they bring in the desired functionality natively and not via plugins (potential security vulnerabilities, compatibility issues).

Take-home message: Small things can actually define the entire design process of a theme and often require that a theme is written from scratch to make it easy to handle in the end.

Courtney Lambert – Social Media and Blogging for Corporates

I had first started out in the technical strand and thus missed Courtney’s beginning (thanx to her uploading her slides, I can view them anyway). However, I was happy that I switched sessions and could listen to Courtney’s presentation. One of the many things that stuck: New Zealanders are increasingly using social media to interact with brands and to support their purchase decision making. The key term here is “interact”. Social media should never be used as a one-way street by a company, but always regarded as a conversation. Participate and don’t broadcast. That new thinking is often still difficult for companies as they are not used to it and have not planned for resources to fulfill that role.

Courtney did not only give her presentation, but also interacted actively with us, the audience, when she played “Oprah’s awesomest fruit” game with us. We were divided into 3 groups and had 4 minutes time to come up with a pitch for our fruit (apple, orange, lemon) to Oprah aka Courtney to make it to her show and become famous instantly. The game showed us the following:

• think outside of the box and don’t cling to what’s in front of you and what you are used to
• think big because you need to get attention and have to compete with others
• you need to engage the person you are pitching to into a conversation to gain their attention
• the person you are pitching to usually doesn’t have any time, only half-listens and you are pitching at the same time as many others -> you need to stand out
• make yourself available on as many channels as possible and be contactable

Courtney Lambert (right) and the leaders of the teams in the "Oprah's awesomest fruit" game; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Take-home message: If you engage in social media in a company, you need to provide for a community manager and make resources available as this job takes time and dedication.

Michael Brandon – SEO 101 – Search phrase selection especially for WordPress

Michael knows all about search engine optimization and shared his knowledge with us. SEO is often also increasing usability of a site by putting content at the top of the page and not hiding it at the bottom.

He said it’s not so much about individual words than it is about search phrases because most people don’t search individual words, but entire phrases. Furthermore, if you get your SEO right for Google, you are pretty much covered.

A common mistake people make is to not put the search phrase on their web page. Apparently, that’s a SEO no-go and should be corrected as quickly as possible if you want to increase your listing spot.

Nowadays when your site is listed as #2 on Google, you are basically #1 because hardly ever can anybody beat Wikipedia that dominates the throne.

Take-home message: SEO is also improvement of usability of a web site and not just pushing a site up on the result list in a search engine.

Michael Brandon; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Richard Hollingum – TEDxAuckland – Making a difference

Richard Hollingum from the Deapartment of Doing (what a cool company name) shared with us his experience of organizing TEDxAuckland, being at TED himself several years ago and having taken up again the organization of TEDxAuckland that’s coming up on September 26, 2010.

TED and TEDx events are all about “ideas worth spreading”. Richard, however, wants to take it a step further after having seen that people wanted to continue the conversation last year beyond the event. He wants to include “ideas worth doing” and therefore charges an entrance fee for this year’s TEDxAuckland to get the seed money for supporting a cause.

Take-home message: Inspiration is good (and can be bought for $15 from the Department of Doing) and necessary, but it should not end there. Keep the dialogue and engagement going.

Richard Hollingum; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Quintin Russ – WordPress and you – Security tips for 2010

Quintin’s presentation was the best scariest presentation I have ever heard. He talked about how to make a WordPress installation (or for that matter any installation) more secure. It was scary because it showed that you live in constant danger of falling pray to security vulnerabilities and other exploits.

Quintin’s talk was very technical, but I could follow except for the occasional abbreviation or something like “hash with a salt” (What? Make hashbrowns with salt? Well that’s a given ). His target audience was site hosts and server admins who need to make sure that the installations run smoothly.

But what can a normal WordPress user already do without spending her / his entire day monitoring web sites that publish updates about security vulnerabilities and without needing a diploma in techspeak?

• update, update, update
• don’t use “admin” as any user and use strong passwords -> use KeePassX, for example, to manage your passwords
• write your blog posts with the least privileges because you don’t need admin rights to write
• read OWASP
• Google every plugin you intend to install to find out what others are saying about it and whether there are security issues related to it; you can check the Exploit Database for that as well
• intrusion detection software / plugins are not free of vulnerabilities as they are just plugins themselves -> don’t trust them blindly

Quintin had many more useful tips, but if a normal user follows the ones above, s/he is already well ahead of the majority.

Take-home message: Everybody who has a WordPress installation, should know basics of web site security and do her / his share to ensure a site’s security.

Quintin Russ; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Part 2 and Part 3 to come.

I love conference recordings especially of conferences which I could not attend. Thus, I am very grateful to the conference organizers who decide to record their (keynote) events and make the recordings available to the general public. Such a recent event was eLearning 2010 (#ITC10), the conference of the Instructional Technology Council in Fort Worth, 20-23 February 2010.

The speaker line-up was excellent: Nancy White, Jim Groom, and Jared Stein among others. I particularly liked the following:

• Nancy White with “Online Facilitation 14 Years On: Where are we headed?”
• Jim Groom with “A Sermon: ‘For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things?’”
• John Krutsch Sr. and Jared Stein with “Late Night Learning LIVE!”
• Carol Spalding and Paul Harrat debating “Colleges Must Monitor Student Social Networking”

Nancy White and Jim Groom did not only have well-thought out arguments, but also presented them in a very engaging and funny way. Where have you ever won chocolate, books or a bottle of wine at a keynote (Nancy White)? Or has a sermon about social media tools been more compelling than Jim Groom’s rendition? Just these two examples show that keynotes do not have to follow the standard set-up, but could and should depart from them. Of course, it helps when the speaker has a great sense of humor and can respond on their toes.

Jared Stein’s and Marc Hugentobler‘s “Late Night Learning LIVE!” touched upon current learning issues with a sarcastic, ironic, humorous tone, interspersed with ads that drove home their points very well.

Carol Spalding and Paul Harrat argued about monitoring student social networking in a friendly though thoroughly researched debate in which the moderator, Michael Catchpole, who has a knack for making people laugh, watched over their allotted times because they could have debated for much longer.

If I had to choose the keynote that I liked best from the recorded events that I watched, I’d definitely go with Nancy White’s presentation. She presented the history of online facilitation, what has changed over the years, and what needs to be done in the future along with a very personal style of presenting that kept me attentive the entire time, and she also tested a couple of new presenter tools incorporating her own learning in real-time.

Update: Nancy’s reflection on her presentation and the Twitter experiment.

Recently, Twitter launched its list feature which allows users to create lists of people one follows so that they are grouped and their updates can be viewed without the noise of others one follows. Some client applications have already done the same thing. Now the game changer is that lists are officially supported by Twitter. I guess, many hope that these lists can then be used in the clients as well.

Many people have already written about Twitter lists and how they are not quite sure how they will be used (Steve Wheeler), or how they think lists will change the social economy (Dave Troy), or where the dangers lie within public lists (Mark Trapp).

I know that categorizations help me. Heck, I do it every day by tagging resources in Diigo to be able to hopefully find them again when I need them, though the search is most often done in Delicious as I prefer their bookmark panel. Putting things in categories is neat and I know where something belongs. I don’t have a problem with it when I call it tagging because I can give the resources any number of tags / keywords.

Lists and groups, however, seem to have a different connotation. They are stronger categorizations and identifiers that can have lots of impact as Mark Trapp’s and Dave Troy’s blog posts indicate. I have not heard complaints about tagging resources with the “wrong” tag or a defamatory tag (maybe I haven’t looked close enough?). It always happens that people disagree on categorizations and be it only because they come from different backgrounds and contexts in which they encounter a thing or a person. Of course, it is not nice to be publicly be labeled “douchebag” list, but except for blocking this person on Twitter I couldn’t really do anything else.

Would the Twitter lists be as discussed if the lists were called tags? Is the list feature so hotly discussed because it categorizes people and not their blogs / websites / articles / videos etc.? Are the lists thus more personal?

I had set up groups when I checked out Mixero and ran into the problems of not being able to classify people in just one group. However, to avoid seeing tweets twice (the whole point of creating groups for me was to reduce the noise), I did put everybody in just one group which was hard. As these groups are entirely private, it did not matter and I couldn’t hurt anybody’s feelings publicly. Currently, I am still debating whether I should replicate these groups in Twitter itself or whether to find a different classification system and which groups I want to make public and which ones to keep private. I will keep an eye on the Twitter lists and see if I can get comfortable with them.

My groups in Mixero

Last week I started my little Twitter-Facebook experiment in which I linked both accounts so that updates from Twitter would show up in Facebook and vice versa. I wanted to see what the changes are for me and for my followers / friends on both networks. Initially, I thought to let the experiment run for a few weeks. However, I will abort it partially today. But let’s start at the beginning.

Getting ready

Once I had decided to link my two accounts, I went in search of the right applications for Facebook to do so. Having Twitter updates displayed as Facebook status messages is pretty simple with Twitter’s own Facebook app. Doing the reverse took a while longer to set up. It finally worked with the SocialToo app for Facebook.

Being excited

After everything was set up, I was pretty excited because the actual experiment could start. I sent a few tweets, I posted a couple of Facebook status updates and they showed up in Twitter and Facebook. As I had predicted, I was more active on Twitter than on Facebook. Thus, the biggest impact should have been in my Facebook network.

Waiting for responses

Coming to the stage of reviewing what was happening in my Facebook account, I can’t really say if anything happened at all. True, I have not polled my friends, but just observed. And there was nothing to observe. OK, a couple of people liked a Twitter message or commented on it, but otherwise nothing. This can mean a few things:

• they didn’t realize that something has changed
• they didn’t care that my status messages increased
• they didn’t care about some of the strange-looking status messages starting with RT
• they wondered about the strange-looking status messages, but didn’t care to inquire with me what happened
• they put me on the ignore-this-person’s-updates list due to the strange-looking messages

Getting the hives

Though nobody seemed to notice anything (or at least mention something to me), I got frustrated rather quickly which also led me to abort the experiment quickly.

Incidentally, danah boyd posted her insight into the difference between Twitter and Facebook status updates on the same day I started my experiment (I had not seen the post then). Many of her thoughts and also the comments on the post resonate with me. Conversations are easier to have on Facebook than on Twitter because the comment feature of Facebook places them right below the status update. Furthermore, the status updates and the comments can be longer than Twitter’s 140 characters.

I had already noted the difference in the audiences in my first post. As I use Twitter mainly for ed tech related stuff and Facebook for more personal things, I wondered how that would work out. My tweets are generally pretty straight-forward and include links or references to other Twitter users whereas my Facebook updates can be more cryptic and personal.

However, the single issue that led me to disconnect Twitter from Facebook is the fact that my tweets have context attached to them that my Facebook friends aren’t aware of and that may be strange to them as the majority are not on Twitter. For example: What do you make of a RT? What does a re-tweet has to do in Facebook? As I often refer to other Twitter users with the @ in a message, people don’t know about whom I talk. Of course, they could look up that person on Twitter, but that is too much work. There is no link back to my original tweet, but just a link to the Twitter app in Facebook. Gee thanks. That helps.

Fortunately, @ replies are left out of Facebook when the @ is the first character in a tweet.

Re-tweeting makes sense for me on Twitter as these tweets are either messages from my network or people close to it. I can easily click on the Twitter name of the persons who are re-tweeted and learn more about them or I can follow a link to their the status update and don’t have to search for it. On Facebook all that is taken away. The context is almost completely obscured.

The visual side of me also does not like how RTs look as status updates. It’s just wrong. I can’t really explain it. Maybe my brain has gotten used to the way my Facebook updates look and seeing a RT and @names there is just not visually pleasing. It is perfectly alright in Twitter, be it on the web or in any of the many desktop clients as that’s the natural habitat of my tweets.

Pulling the plug

"Pull the Plug" by SKellner CC-licensed, 2 September 2009

The decision is made: I don’t want to have Twitter updates in Facebook anymore. I will deactivate the application and go back to Facebook-normal. I will keep SocialToo to be able to post from Facebook to Twitter. The good thing about this app is that you can decide an update-at-a-time whether it shall be posted to Twitter or not. If Twitter had such an option, I guess I would leave it connected to Facebook.

Brian Lamb gave a keynote today at the 21st WCET Annual Conference in Denver, CO entitled “The Urgency of Openness” – very fitting for Open Access Week.

Thanks to Chris Lott‘s Twitter messages about the keynote and the Ustream, I was able to view the presentation.

In his keynote, Brian Lamb gives his reasons for being open as in open education, open learning, open scholar. Two of his quote stuck immediately:

“Don’t worry about how you are going to share, but start sharing” and “reciprocal economy – it’s not just about the resources you share, it’s how much you give of yourself”.

Don’t worry about how you are going to share, but start sharing. Scott Leslie wrote a great post on just this topic in November 2008: “Planning to Share vs. Just Sharing”. The message in both the presentation and the blog post is clear: If you want to share, just do it and do not wait until all the details are dealt with, until everybody agrees. If you do that, you will never (or only after a long wait) be able to share and the action will be over.

If you can share openly, as Chris Lott and Jared Stein did with the Ustream of the keynote, everybody around the world can benefit from your efforts and not just a small number of people. What’s in it for you? Well, you put yourself out there and connect to people who may have interesting things for you. But you may never have known about them had you not been involved online and shown what interests you.

Sharing is not a one-way street. It is about reciprocity: giving and taking. However, “it is not just about the resources you share, it’s how much you give of yourself” as Brian Lamb quoted Martin Weller who uses the term “reciprocal economy” for that. The things and the way you share your knowledge, information etc. must be of value to others.

Martin Weller uses Twitter as an example which is quite suitable to show that there needs to be more than just resources to share in order to form connections that are valuable to both sides. The social aspect should not be neglected in the online world. I can find prime examples among people I follow on Twitter.

On the one hand, take Twitter user A who only sends tweets about published articles, book chapters etc. I have often followed up on his reading suggestions. However, I do not know anything about this person except that he reads a lot. I have yet to see a reply to people he follows or a retweet. I guess I could send him reading suggestions to his Twitter account and see if he lists them. But I am not inclined to do so because I can’t “see” who he is.

On the other hand, there is the group of Twitter users B who do not only provide links to interesting, funny, thoughtful information, videos, cartoons, blog posts, but who also share bits and pieces about their daily lives. I see the persons in every tweet because they are all different. They do not follow a standard way of writing, but they are individual and convey the personality of these people. The range of things they share is also wide. As they reply to tweets and also retweet, I get to know with whom they connect, where their interests lie, what they may laugh about. It is to those people that I address tweets and let them know about things that they may like instead of just sending out a tweet that gets lost in the constant stream of 140-character messages.

I have probably met only a handful of the people I follow more closely on Twitter, but I know more about them than of a large number of students and colleagues on campus and also friends whom I rarely see. Though these short messages can’t be a substitute for face-to-face conversations or longer online exchanges, they give a glimpse into our lives and make it possible to form relationships online.

Up until now I have kept Twitter and Facebook updates separate though my tweets are aggregated in Facebook so that the people in my network there can see everything. I have pondered about this decision for some time especially since Facebook became more Twitter-like. Is the distinction still necessary? I now also post more links in my Facebook updates than some time ago and they do not show up in Twitter unless I repost them there. Some Facebook updates are of a more personal nature or simply ones that I had not thought about posting to Twitter because the audiences are different. I know most of the people in my Facebook personally though that does not say anything about the degree of “knowing” as these personal acquaintances range from old-time friends, new friends, and colleagues to students whom I saw in a workshop or two. Twitter is more of a professional network with lots of people from whom I just know the tweets, but nothing else.

Now I am curious. I will embark on an experiment (don’t know yet how to monitor it and how easily I can gather the data from the past in Facebook) linking my Facebook updates to Twitter and vice versa so that they show up equally on both systems. What will the changes be for me (self-perception)? Will there be noticeable changes in Facebook and / or on Twitter, e.g. increased amount of comments, more replies? I assume that the biggest changes (if any at all) will be on Facebook as I generally do not change my status update daily. Although I am not a heavy Twitter user, I think I post there more often than on Facebook.

Off to install a Twitter app in Facebook…