I have been using a basic Twitter plug-in to auto-tweet new blog posts to my twitter account.  It was always a little fussy, and recently it seemed to stop working — maybe something related to the recent WordPress update?  No matter, it seemed a good time to go looking to see what else was available.  And so far Twitter Tools is looking very promising.  It can be set to pull in Tweets that contain a specific hashtag — allowing selective tweet-posting of new entries.  And, assuming this message makes it over to Twitter, you can set your posts to go go to Twitter as well.  The big question is how it will work with posts originating from other external tools, like ScribeFire, or scheduled posts — both of which I do a lot.  We’ll see…

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I get a fair amount of useful information off of my twitter feed — in fact it is often more informative than the RSS newsfeeds I follow.  But Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the rest of the live streaming applications share a common problem.  If you want to refer back to something that floated by several days, weeks or months ago you are pretty much out of luck.   The noise factor is not an issue when monitoring the stream live.  I mean sure, there is plenty of noise, but it is easy enough to filter it out as the garbage floats by.  But try to dig through items from the past and the noise quickly overwhelms.  Anyone got an answer?  Or is do we just need to accept that we must leave the past behind — even if it is digital?

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Gobal Ignite Week is coming March 1 – 5 — and it looks like there may be events here in New Haven.  Could be fun — I’m following the twitter feed.  Could be fun.

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Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey.   So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting.  As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system.  So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there.  And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.

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Screenr offers a new service to make screen recordings and share them via twitter and other web sites.  It looks easy enough, so I decided to give it a spin with a quick WordPress MU demonstration.  When you launch the recording tool, it lets you set which area of the screen to record.  You push play and you’re off and running, up to 5 minutes in length.  When done you can preview the video and then it gets automatically deployed in web and iPhone versions.  No edits, fancy fade-ins or other effects — but in the video arena and enforced simplicity is probably best.  Do it right the first time, post it and move on (spoken as someone who has spend hours perfecting a 4 minute video!)

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Yammer use took off in our workplace late last year, but since everyone has returned from the Christmas break interest seems to have dropped off somewhat.   Maybe something like TeamBox, with its richer toolset, might be more attractive.  Teambox organizes communication around projects.  Users are members of projects, and a project has communication divided into conversations, task lists, pages and files.  The concept seems to have similarities with Google Wave, but at first glance the user interface seems a lot more familiar.  And TeamBox is open source allowing installation on your own server — so you can own the data.  And can customize the app (built with Ruby on Rails).  Now I just need a project to test it with… Read the rest of this entry »