It’s easy to forget how things are changing. Today I showed a great diagram I’d found to thousands of people! 3 years ago I might have emailed that diagram to a handful of people that I work directly with.
It all began yesterday afternoon when I came across a picture in a report:
There were a couple of retweets immediately (the re-posting of another person’s tweet to share it with your own Twitter followers). Then this morning, a retweet by @josiefraser (who has 6000+ followers) initiated several further retweets.
The final results according tweetreach were that a potential 19, 207 people had seen the tweet which compares with the potential 821 followers of my account. It’s important to stress the potentially here as many tweets pass by in the stream unseen, plus the Twittersphere is full of abandoned accounts & so on. Even so, it’s very different from an email to a closed network.
Looking at the reach of the retweets I was surprised to see how little overlap there is between the networks of those involved. Of the 19000+ who might have seen one of the 24 tweets only 3285 saw it multiple times. I’d wrongly assumed that there would be a much larger overlap between the followers of the likes of @josiefraser & @timbuckteeth
This morning I spotted a couple of tools that I thought I should try and I’m glad I did because I quite like them both, although with some reservations. The two services are Amplify & Jing. Watch this video created with Jing for a brief intro to both. (Sorry, WordPress won’t let me embed, so click the image!)
Jing is a free service from techsmith.com, the makers of the popular screen capture software Camtasia. Capturing and publishing are pretty straightforward, once you know how – I did struggle to find things initially! The free service (not suprisingly I guess) restricts your storage (2GB) and your monthly bandwidth (how much you upload, also 2GB) so there are limits. The above 2-min recording used up 7.5MB of my allowance (not quite 1%). I will definitely be using it again for videoing and will be interested to see whether storage becomes an issue. For images I imagine I’ll stick with my long time friend MWSnap
Amplify uses the WordPress blogging platform and is a spin-off from Clipmarks. On the whole it worked well for me, although it can be a bit fiddly clipping the bit you want, especially if there is a link involved – it’s easy to click the link rather than clip the link!! The blogging side of it was great (it’s wordpress!) and it’s very easy to tweet what you clog… oh dear. I used my Amplify Clip Blog today to create a collection of posts on e-Learning coverage on various HEA Subject Centres that are relevant to the LSE. I don’t think I’ll be using Amplify again as a personal tool (except to review today’s work!) but I can see it could make a great tool for a digital literacy or other teaching activity. For now, I’ll be sticking with Diigo / Delicious and my memory of what I liked on the page!
Both worth some of your time.
Turn Your Name Into a Face does what it says! Thanks to @AJCann on Twitter for this, which makes this my Tweet of (Yester)day. The site also includes a link to bomomo which I enjoyed playing with…
Mad Rattling
Matthew Lingard
Matt Lingard
Thanks to Brian Kelly on Twitter for this one. Dipity: a tool for creating timelines. You can add your own events manually or use external feeds – blog posts, your YouTube videos etc. Here’s a simple one with some of my holiday snaps from Flickr. Not very up-to-date as i’m usually at least six months behind in getting my photos online…
I couldn’t get the timeline to embed here but if you click the image you’ll get to see the real thing. For another (better) example take a look at Brian’s original Dipity post.
My example is set so that only I can edit it but you can open it up to others for some collaborative timelining!
Wordle is a great tool for creating attractive tag clouds. It allows you to start with your own text (e.g. pasted from a word file), or any page incorporating a feed such as a blog or a del.icio.us (social bookmarking) account. The top left Wordle is this blog, the bottom left my del.icio.us and the final one is my master’s dissertation. It’s never looked so good!
I found this in Ed Techie via actualal on Twitter.
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