Computing Assistance Support & Education Inc – CASE Notes

There’s a large number of Twitter related services out there. Some cater towards the “power user”, others are just a great way to keep track of statistics relating to your Twitter account. At CASE we’ve been using Twitter  in order to be involved in various conferences and events as well as communicating interesting bits and pieces to our members. The links below are some Twitter related web service we find interesting and or useful:

Twitalyzer: This website examines your Twitter account and then gives you scores in the following categories: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity and Clout. These are measured by how many people follow you, how many times you re tweet, how frequently people are choosing to follow you and so on. The site makes recommendations on how you should improve your scores and gives you a whole stack of nice graphs to visualise the whole thing. This site is a must if you think your Twitter campaign is important. Great for stats!

Qwitter: This site offers a service whereby you’re notified when someone stops following you on Twitter, and shows you what your last tweet was before they canceled. This would be a very valuable tool for someone dealing with controversial material – you can effectively see visualise people turning their back on you on the Twitterscape! Simple, yet effective.

Whatthetrend: This site shows you the emerging trends on Twitter and allows users to post detailed descriptions on what those trends are, and why they’re trending. Great for seeing what’s popular and what people think of it. This is also a good place to keep an eye out for upcoming spam and scams.

ChirpCity: This is a handy website that searches for and then collates tweets by city. This means you can keep an eye on what’s emerging in your area even before it trends.

There’s been an abundance of good references mentioned during the event and we want to take note of a few of them here.

Yesterday Susan Devine and Gail Tuft gave a talk on how they have used a wiki to maintain business knowledge. The session was packed and a lot of people were very interested in trying out a wiki themselves. Gail reccommended DocuWIKI for a simple, easy to use wiki platform.

Peter Deitz from Social Actions gave a thought provoking presentation on “Social Actions”. For his site you can see www.socialactions.com, for a list of social networking sites you can see this wikipedia entry.

Headshift, a social networking consultancy based in the UK (but looking to expand into Australia) has done some good work and their offical site can be found here: http://www.headshift.com.

More to follow…

The second day of Connecting Up 09 is now in full swing. We’ve just had a talk from Alan Noble, engineering director of Google Aus/NZ. He gave a brief overview of some of their lesser known apps, cloud computing and answered some good questions. Just how green can cloud computing be? Can we get our information back out of the cloud if we place it there? He also detailed how adwords works and where community organisations can go to apply for grants from Google.

The wireless connectivity issues that plagued the conference seem to have been resolved (at this stage) so Twitter is still filling up with tweets. Elliott Bledsoe who gave the talk on Creative Commons yesterday also has a great blog post that explains how hash tagging in Twitter works and would be a valuable read for anyone new to Twitter.

More to follow after today’s roundtable discussions have finished…

We’re coming up on lunch in the first day of Connecting Up 09 – there have been some highlights so far including a great talk by Mark Pesce where he explored ideas surrounding the gradual change of our social fabric. An incredibly comprehensive online version of his presentation (plus much much more) can be found at his blog here.

Elliott Bledsoe’s talk on creative commons and copyright was very informative and ultimately, very important. Learning more about creative commons can be done (quite easily!) through their newly revamped website at www.creativecommons.org.au. A very important tip is to make sure you generate creative commons licenses specific to your country, even though CC applies worldwide.

The official Twitter feed has been getting a healthy workout despite generally poor wireless broadband at the venue! You can follow the twitter conversation here.

More to follow…

We’re pleased to release the next episode in our occasional podcast series. This time I head out of the studio to visit ACT Senator Kate Lundy. We discuss using Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter, WordPress and Joomla, get her views on the proposed national broadband network and how she feels about funding to community organisations.

To listen to this podcast head over to the official CASE podcast page!

The first Public Sphere event has just finished It’s been an information packed, thought provoking few hours. Here’s a brief rundown of material that has resulted:

• Official Public Sphere event details on Senator Kate Lundy’s site.

• The Twitter feed from the morning.

• Craig Thomler’s liveblog from the event.

• Tom Worthington’s blog (Including links to the slides of the morning’s  presentations)

More posts to follow, just need to let the dust settle!