A truckload of Twitter tools and some peachy keen visualizations....

My netvibes page is rapidly falling into disuse thanks to Twitter. I still have much love for all the feeds in my reader but it feels more lecture-like with people talking AT me. I understand that there is a masked asymmetry involved in Twitter but it just feels like a great rolling conversation in the hallway of this awesome conference where everybody interesting just happens to be chatting it up. So before I head to IITSEC, I wanted to pass along a few of the tidbits I've picked up in the hallway. 

BigTweet: A way to post to your Twitter feed from any Web page. You can post sequenced Tweets so that you can send out 280 characters at a time. I want to play with this but as with alot of these tools/services, I find myself pausing to ask ' how loose do I want to be with my Twitter credentials'?

Block Posters: I may have mentioned this one already but you upload an image, tell it was size paper you have in your printer and how big you want the image to be and presto...you get a PDF that you print out and make a wall-size poster from. Nifty. Found it through Twitter of course.

TweetGrid: Set up your grid (up to a 3x3), enter your search terms and watch the grid magically update as TweetGrid scans the Twitterverse. This is a nice Web site but I think someone on Twitter said it best when they said "it wants to be an Air app."

Tweetsgiving: Here is a great social media success story. This site, created by Epic Change, managed to raise $10,000 in 48 hours from 336 contributors using nothing but social media. The money will go to fund a new classroom for a school in Tanzania.

People Browsr: Twitter is like this ridiculously deep trove of social interaction. People Browsr is one of those tools that begins to peel back some of the layers of that onion. You get a similar feel from Tweet Deck's multiple column view but People Browsr allows you mix in feed from all your online networks. Dizzying really.

Who to follow?: Now a great place to start that I've mentioned before, is Jane Hart's Directory of Learning Professionals on Twitter. Another collection of lists that I am currently plowing through is this growing set of niche Top Tens from Darren Rowse at ProBlogger. I am also following Mr Tweet, who seems to aimed at helping people expose folks they should follow.

edmodo: Just like Yammer is an attempt to take Twitter (aka microblogging) inside the corporate firewall, edmodo seems to be aiming at the teacher/class market. Stowe Boyd has a great post outlining his initial survey of this as a tool which allows teachers to set up private networks for their classes, and send each other files, notes, etc. This one will bear watching.

Best Online Learning Games-2008: This is from Larry Ferlazzo and while it has nothing to do with Twitter per se, that is how I found it.

The same goes for these last two items: FeedVis: Top 50 Edublogs and Show/World. Jason Priem put together this great visualiztion tool for looking deeper into the posts from the Top 50 EduBlogs. As Jason so eloquently puts it "It's an animated tagcloud that lets you compare word frequencies accross different time periods and authors, then check out the posts that used the words." The coolest thing though is that Jason put the code for feedvis up for download and all it takes to parse another OPML file, is to change one line of code.

Finally, we'll close with Show/World. Click through the available maps to see the world change in proportion to the population, the percent of broadband penetarion, the rate of infant mortality and illiteracy. Not always comfortable but always revealing.

Comments

[mark oehlert]

Jason,

Thanks for the update! I'm headed over to try it out now!

mark

[Jason Priem]

Mark, thanks for your kind words about FeedVis. Since you expressed an interest, I wanted to let you know that I just released version 2.0. Now you can upload your own feeds and make custom tagclouds. You get a url that you can bookmark and share, and your tagcloud will just hang out there, staying up-to-date by pulling in posts from your feeds. You can also browse tagclouds that other people have uploaded. The new version's still at http://jasonpriem.com/feedvis

[mark oehlert]

Larry...thanks for pulling it together!

[Larry Ferlazzo]

Thanks for sharing "The Best Online Learning Games" list with your readers....

Larry