Web Worker Daily

In an effort to justify the time that I spend on Twitter, I am always looking for ways to be able to claim that I use it for more productive purposes.

I am finding that many of the more popular web services have recognized that Twitter is becoming a communication hub of sorts. This leads to some great connection functionality built right into their apps that lets users get at their data from within Twitter. If you’re spending quite a bit of time in a Twitter client anyway, having the ability to quickly access or add to your info without needing to load another app can be significant.

So here are some of my favorite, or otherwise notable, applications that let me tweak every last bit of productivity I can from my Twitter time.

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When I explain Twitter to the uninitiated, I tend to describe it as my virtual water cooler. It helps me keep a finger on what is happening outside of my office by letting me listen in on what others are saying. Aliza just wrote about ways to use it for work, and it can indeed be a part of a productivity suite. To me though, much of the chatter is the equivalent of overhearing a phone conversation from the cubicle next to me.

Despite my ever expanding list of folks I follow, I know I am only seeing a portion of what is being said. So I am rather intrigued by a new project called Connect the Tweets. Connect the Tweets collects the top trending items on Twitter and attempts to put them into perspective and context. What is this and why is it trending? These are then posted on the site or more conveniently, distributed back out via Twitter by @cttweets.

It’s a simple concept with a simple implementation that creates a Twitter ticker of sorts. By distilling the massive number of simultaneous conversations happening into useful nuggets, it helps me filter out some of the noise while still allowing me to discover and the conversations that are of interest and importance to me. While Twitter’s own search also presents the top trends, I appreciate that the way that Connect the Tweets turns this discovery process into an effortless one for me.

How do you follow Twitter trends?

I said it once, and I’ll say it again. I love Twitter. WWD has been talking about using Twitter as a professional tool for quite some now.

I use Twitter daily and often, almost always from my laptop on the Web, occasionally from Twhirl if I want to post to one of my 5 accounts other than my main one, sometimes from my mobile phone and once in a while from my iPod.

Twitter is my watercooler as I work solo from home (or a local cafe) in Alaska. It is my finger on the pulse of social media and things happening in the Lower 48. It is my way of touching base with friends, acquaintances and people who I’d like to get to know better.

Looking at my Twitter account over the last few weeks, I also saw distinct ways I used Twitter in my work proving once and for all that Twitter is not just chatter but a useful business tool.

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When it comes to truly professional “social” networks, there are far less than general interest and entertainment-oriented networks. Ryze is virtually dead. Xing is more global. The old standby is LinkedIn although it still struggles with its Web 2.0 features. Facebook is still trying to overcome it’s school focus in some professionals’ minds. Plaxo has tried to capitalize on their previous incarnation as a contact management system. And hybrid online/offline communities such as BizNik tend to be more niche or regionally focused.

Enter Konnects. Konnects wants to fill in the gap between LinkedIn and Facebook, providing social tools for a younger professional who may not quite have enough contacts to make LinkedIn really work for them but want to focus on business more than Facebook promotes. Konnects wants to be not only the place where business professionals can find one another but also the place where they can transact business on the site, exchanging all of the information and documentation needed to solidify a working relationship.

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Image via Wikipedia

I was poking around the comments on my Preparing to Live Blog an Event post and came across a conversation about live blogging events at ProBlogger that made me think more about how I’m going to handle single-handedly “live blogging” a 3-day conference. The discussion also made me think more about what exactly “live blogging” means.

The social media maven for nonprofits Beth Kanter defined Live Blogging as: “basically taking notes, photos, or recordings at lectures, conferences, and presentations of what was said and posting it to your blog.” (quote found here) I agree with Kanter’s basic definition, but for anyone who hasn’t tried live blogging before, I think this definition isn’t detailed enough.

If I had to define live blogging, I’d define it this way:

“Live (multimedia) blogging is capturing the words, sounds, and images at an event and posting them online to a variety of Web 2.0 enabled sites with the goal of sharing the experience for those who cannot attend while preserving key moments in an archive.”

Here are some more of my thoughts about live blogging.

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Presence and availability information has been one of the key enabling technologies for web workers, providing signaling mechanisms for indicating the ability and willingness of users to communicate, whether by instant message, VoIP call, caller ID or even an email auto-responder.

Together presence and status indicators weaved through our various communication channels make teleworking and telecommuting less painless and provide useful ’social signaling’ that would ordinarily take place in office environments. It’s arguable that time & distance are no longer useful measures of the value or cost of communication, but the richness of contextual signaling available in any one medium.

Personally, I’ve found the most profound innovations in presence, latterly, to be Twitter and to a lesser extent Jaiku. Both provide important mechanisms for richly describing presence location - whether it’s location, activity or even mood…the latter perhaps signaling the solicitation of communication. In Jaiku’s case, it’s not difficult to imagine the universe of Google applications setting and utilizing presence through Jaiku.

Recently, Anthony Townsend of Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future speculated on Telepresence as a Driver for Presence. Townsend writes about the correlation between new communication technologies and long-haul travel, speculating that the arrival of HD videoconferencing and the uptick in fuel prices should be a perfect storm, but improved fidelity is often applied to mundane communication with a premium still attached to in-person meetings when closing down important decisions.

Certainly, HD sports channels are no substitute for watching your favourite team live at a stadium, though such media broadens the appeal and access to physically exclusive events. So despite living at the bleeding edges of human communication, we web workers do place a premium on ‘live’…

Read more at Telepresence as a Driver for Presence and The Future of Presence…

Apple MacBook

I’ve been asked to live blog an event for a client and their members. Actually, I’ll be live blogging, podcasting, Twittering, Uttering, and live streaming an event.

I am putting together my equipment, securing accounts with all the online tools and services I need, and reviewing the schedule so I’m prepared. This will be a major undertaking that will include two 12 hour days as well as pre- and post-blogging.

Normally, live blogging a conference is done with a team, but this is a proof-of-concept so I’m on my own.

While I’ve live blogged and live tweeted conferences before, this is the first time I’ll be doing it formally for a client. The conference is not my usual fare - it is about philanthropy instead of Internet or technology. I’ve worked with many nonprofits over the last 15 years - including running a nonprofit in New York City in the mid-90s - so the issues aren’t foreign to me. Still, I’ll have to be on top of my game - with a healthy dose of caffeine - to keep up.

Here’s what I’ve put together so far for my Live Blogging Gear.

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Microblogging service Jaiku is suddenly showing signs of life again - for the first time since its acquisition by Google back in January. After a few days offline, they returned with a blog entry and a couple of announcements: Jaiku is now running in one of Google’s data centers (though apparently the long-promised port to App Engine is not yet done), and they’ve opened up invitations. Though there’s still no open signup, any Jaiku member can invite an unlimited number of new members.

But the question has to be asked: does it matter? If Jaiku had managed to reopen with fanfare a month or two back, when Twitter was having severe uptime problems, it might have stolen the microblogging spotlight. Now, though, with Twitter humming along smoothly, it seems destined to be just another also-ran. While I won’t rule out the possibility of exciting innovations (or the traffic boost that could come from things like integration with existing Google accounts), it remains true that the leading service is the one where conversations are already taking place.