Finding People to Follow

I’ve been preparing for another Twitter workshop this morning and spent part of the time looking for examples of people who Twitter.  As Twitter is all about your network,  if you don’t build one then you are unlikely to see the benefits and stick with it.  My last Twitter workshop was at the Plymouth E-Learning conference (pictured) and ‘selling’ Twitter to elearning folk is fairly straight-forward as there are lots of educational technology types to follow  (BTW – There are over 1000 Twitter updates related to the Plymouth conference!).

My workshop on Wednesday is for staff at the LSE who are not educational technologists so I wanted to have a list of ‘people’ to follow that might be more relevant to them.  Finding people is quite difficult when you are looking beyond your own network so below are a few starting point I’ll be highlighting on Wednesday.  If you’ve any more social science related twitterers, let me know!

For politics there’s a lot of potential, Tweetminster is a good site bringing together the feeds of MPs who Twitter, as well as @DowningStreet, @UKParliament and @guidofawkes to keep you in touch with goings-on in Westminster. According to sourcewatch there are 19 Senators and 50 Representatives in the US Congress twittering away.  Other examples i’ll be highlighting are @intuteeconomics,@IntutePsychUK, @policynetwork, @HEFCE, @GuardianEdu, as well as a handful at LSE @lsepublicevents, @lsecareers, @lsesummerschool & @charliebeckett

And I’ll be encouraging the use of searching via both Find People & Twitter Advanced Search.  I’ll also highlight sites such as wefollow.com which have lists such as academics who Twitter.  Once you have a small network it gets easier and I found browsing friends of my followers the best way to widen my network.

Slides from my Plymouth workshop:

My annotated Twitter handouts are also on slideshare.

Going Mobile

I’ve never been one for gadgets – the Franklin Rex-3 I bought back in 1997 being the only one I ever owned!  My mobile phones have always been bog standard (free)  models and I’ve never really made much use of the camera or web access:  the odd pic that rarely left the phone, the footy results when I’m out and about.

This year my habits seem to be changing and it is strongly connected to my ever increasing use of Twitter.  A few months ago I discovered that my mobile had  the Opera Mini web browser (it had never occurred to me to look!!).  Since then I’ve found myself reading & twittering more and more on the move which in turn has led to a lot more general browsing.

At the same time I’ve been enjoying an increase in the number of pictures appearing in my twitter stream from services such as twitpic.   And now I’ve joined in thanks to my discovery that I can update Twitter with photos via MMS (multimedia texts) from my phone.  I send the MMS to Mobypicture via an email address (I didn’t know this was possible!) and they automatically update Twitter.  Despite the name, Mobypicture can also be used for audio & video and there are many service integrations including facebook, youtube, flickr & wordpress.

Of course I’m still a long way from being a gadget boy as I discovered at James Clay’s great Mobile Learning workshop at the Plymouth E-learning conference last month where there was a whole suitcase of gadgets!  One of the mobile applications James showed that I really liked was audioBoo  At the moment it’s restricted to the i-Phone but I’m sure they’ll be alternatives soon.  AudioBoo allows you to make & publish an audio recording, with a photo and an automatic Google map location.  Great potential for fieldtrips.   Here’s an example audioBoo James made with me at the conference dinner.