Curating, filtering, and increasing traffic

This week, my computer mediated communication class will be looking at filtering and curating, and the impact these have on traffic to sites. So with that in mind, I decided to write a brief primer on these topics.

Defining curating and filtering


My understanding of curating is the identification and categorization of resources. In the context of computer mediated communication, curating can be done by individuals for their own purposes, creating their own categories that work for their own personal uses and learning. I use curating in a number of ways: resources for classes, resources for my research interests, resources to share with family and friends on common interests, conversation starters.

Online, I use a number of tools and processes. My main tool over the past 5 years has been delicious.com. This program allowed me to access online resources from one of the three computers or 4 or 5 locations in which I work. In class, I am able to access websites for my class by going to sites tagged for the class (i.e. ACOM 203). I then can choose the resource that is relevant for the class and the lesson I want to teach for that day. I have instant access to the resource (as long as my internet connection works), which was not possible without the computer.

Filtering, on the other hand is keeping out information that may not be relevant or meet my needs. Like curating, it is focused on identifying resources. However, filtering is a way to avoid information overload. The key to filtering is finding the correct way to search for resources (i.e. the ideal key word, the correct network to access) and choosing those resources that meet my needs. This requires an ability to skim resources, identify their authors/purpose, and evaluate content.

Increasing traffic

The purpose for most who are active on the internet is to increase traffic. For example, organizations want customers to read their blogs, bloggers want increased traffic to their blogs, individuals want their youtube videos to "go viral", those on twitter want to build their followers. The more traffic to a site, the greater legitimacy it is given in cyberspace.

In the past, "experts" decided on what was relevant and who should have access to resources. With CMC, popular content becomes "expert" resources. If someone is able to access the computer, they are able to produce a resource that may be perceived as "expert."

Tools for increasing traffic

So it is important for anyone involved in computer mediated communication to know, understand, and use tools that will increase traffic. Some of these tools include:

labels, tags, and key words: people who look for resources using search engines input key words.  Blogs, facebook, photos, videos, and even webpages usually have the ability to identify their pages on the internet by using labels or tags.  It is important to use tags or labels that your audience will use for their searches.

Hashtags: twitter and a growing number of social networking programs use hashtages (a # followed by a keyword identifying a group or category, i.e. #ualbany, #running, #curating).  Related to this is the @ sign which identifies an author, as on twitter.  @comprof1 would identify anyone who wrote about me using my twitter name.

Links: using links to other sites that might increase traffic (i.e. from "experts" in the field or reporting agencies) can sometimes increase traffic.  Some of these sites have employees that track the links and either ask for the link to be removed (if they feel it is ruining their image) or may use a back channel (backlink) to the post/resource.

Using multiple channels: Whenever I blog, these days, I post to twitter the topic and the fact that I have posted something.  Some also use this when they upload a new video on YouTube or link the video onto their facebook page.  The more channels used to publicize a resource, the greater exposure to new potential traffic sources.  Related to this is that the greater the traffic in a concentrated time slot, the better the chance that the resource will be picked up in search engines or "highlights" in the social network programs like linkedin or blogger. Related to this is having various channels available for spreading the resources, e.g. facebook or twitter buttons on a blog, automatic updates on linkedin when you tweet something, or "most popular" posts or videos listed on a blog.

Commenting on others blogs, youtube videos, and/or facebook. The more visible a user is the greater the chance the user will be "checked" out by others.

Filtering and curating tools

In addition to hashtags, tags, and labels, filtering and curating tools may include:

Favorite: By identifying something as a favorite, others may access the resources or a resource may be retrieved for future use

Page counts Programs such as google analytics or stat counter allow your page's statistics to be shown on your internet page (i.e. blog, webpage). This not only allows you to identify your audience, but also allows your audience to identify how "popular" your page is and where your audience is located.

Ratings: By allowing others to rate your content, you are allowing for a review process from the public. Beware, however, that this might result in negative as well as positive traffic. Likewise, the ability to remove negative comments will aid in decreasing negative feedback that could be detrimental to building up traffic, but may also make curating and filtering less valuable.

Notes and descriptions: Putting the resources into context helps to contextualize lists. Programs such as sticky notes, one note, google docs, and delicious not only help to identify resources, but also allow for evaluation of resources and explanations/links within categories.

Nuts and Bolts of twitter

So I now have been using twitter for almost 4 weeks now. And there are some nuts and bolts that I would have liked to have known before I started. This post is meant for those that don't use twitter (or use it regularly). Anyone who is more experienced than I am, please feel free to add on insight or tips in the comments area.

Retweet, mentions, and favorites

It took a while for me to figure out these options. I could intuitively figure out WHAT retweet was. However, unlike the "reply" option, retweet just rebroadcasts without comments. However, I wasn't sure WHY you would use this. After using twitter for a while, I figured out how most people use this.

Each person has their own social network which is slightly different than anothers. Retweets allows you to pass information (or questions) on to those that may not have access to all of those within your social network. In other words, it helps to broadcast your comments/questions to a wider audience. I saw this happen when I posted a question to those who were studying for a Phd who had children, how they found time for thinking. This was then picked up by a group studying for their phd (#phdchat) and soon I had a lot of answers.

An alternative to just clicking on the Retweet button is to mark a tweet with RT (retweet). This allows you to comment on the retweet and not just pass on the information. For example, if you had a particularly good link in a tweet that you think a group would be interested in you cut and paste the tweet, starting with RT, then put a comment or hash tag to identify why this is important.

This brings me to the third way you can bring attention to someone else's tweet: the hashtag. The hashtag begins with a # and identifies a group or topic which others might be interested in. For example, many who are tweeting at conferences will use an agreed upon hashtag to identify all tweets having to do with that conference. You can then search for all tweets using that hashtag. This is how the Phdchat group identifies its members.

Another option tweeters have is to engage in a dialog about a topic. You do this through the reply button (if you move the cursor over the comment it will come up on the menu below). The reply will then be saved as an exchange. You can have a long chat just by using the reply. It took me a while to figure how to access the dialog and sometimes I lost the thread of interaction or missed others contribution to the dialog until I found the feature that allows you to see contributions to a thread through the reply button. In the upper right hand corner of the tweet is an open comment icon (the type you see in the comic strips). If you click on that or the little arrow that pops up, you'll get the dialog that includes all people that contributed the discussion.

Finally, you might find something that you feel is very important and want to save for the future. This is when the "favorite" button comes into play. I was marking things as favorite, but then wondered how to retrieve it. So I tweeted to my followers and got the answer back immediately (this is one of the things that useful in twitter: immediate answers from your network). Go to profile (menu up at the very top, next to "home") and click on favorites. Those tweets you marked as favorites will be listed. This comes in handy when you want to "bookmark" favorite resources.

Communicating Using Twitter

Twitter was originally designed for mobile technology. As such, a tweet is limited to 140 characters. For those, like myself, who are used to writing rather long sentences/comments, this can be challenging. Over the last 4 weeks, I have found that I need to think differently when writing for twitter. In fact, I think one reason that twitter is popular among businesses, but not academics is because of the writing style.

So here are some hints for writing for twitter:

1) Use truncated words when possible (i.e. U, R, 4, b/c, w/, etc...). Learn the tx spch such as RT commonly used in twitter. I find that most people use their own forms of abbreviation. Research has found that English speakers can decipher words as long as there is the initial and final sounds spelt out.

2) Simplify your words. Use "hard" rather than "challenging". I feel that I have gone back to my business writing roots when using twitter. Most academics are used to using large words and complex sentence structures. Twitter requires that you use direct sentence structures and words.

3)Learn to write without punctuation (unless lack of punctuation will make it difficult to understand your tweet) and spaces. Most of us learned that you have two spaces after a period. This is at least one less character you will have for your tweet.

4) Twitter has a new ability to shorten your links' url. It used to be that you would need to use an outside ap (tinyurl was the most popular). Twitter now automatically shortens the link so you have more characters to explain what the link is to.

As I mentioned above, these are only some of the suggestions I have from 4 weeks of being a twitter user. Please add any suggestions you have in the comments section.

Twitter update: Are you a follower or do you follow

As mentioned last week, I am playing around with twitter for a computer mediated communication course I will be teaching next semester. Thanks to one of my blog readers, Anne Marie, I got a good jump on how to be a follower on twitter. She recommended:

If you want some people to follow have a look at this list of people who I have labled as 'learning' http://twitter.com/#/list/amcunningham/learning
I'm not sure what you mean by 'follow twitter sites'. You follow accounts not sites.
It's not necessary to get any notifications my email. But I still allow notifications to my usual email address of DMs (direct messages).
How to access twitter? I think the best way is to download a desktop application such as tweetdeck. It's easiest to see everything that is happening then. But the main webpage is still manageable.

I got so caught up in looking through her list, I forgot to "follow" her! I found, though, that others had followers that were interesting. So I looked at who some of my favorite bloggers were following. One problem with this is that sometimes you loose the context of who they are, so I made sure that I also looked at their biography.

So lesson #1: make sure that you have a "vision" for twitter (just as you would for blogging) and that is evident in your biography.

Lesson #2: check out your favorite bloggers and their followers/people they follow. This helps you to create a network that will be helpful to you.

One thing that I noticed was that I had 3 readers immediately. What was odd to me was that none of them had followers and they had no tweets. This got me to wondering why they would follow someone and not tweet. One possibility is that they use twitter as a resource to find out about certain resources. At least one of my followers appears to be this as she is a marketing blogger. She may follow any one who has "communication" in their description to capture trends and resources.

Another possibility is that they too are new to Twitter and I am a follower of someone that they know, but being new to twitter don't have anything at this point to tweet (or rather are too nervous).

The third possibility is much more nefarious. Like with Linkedin or Facebook, they may want to get a large following so when they finally tweet, it will have a greater impact, putting them on the "favorites" page immediately.

Getting a following

I'm not sure how I got the initial following. However, I did get a few more followers through becoming a follower myself. This is like friending on facebook in which a person has the ability to reciprocate the "follower". I may not want to know about the person following me, so I don't feel obliged to reciprocate (nor do any of those I follow need to feel obliged).

In getting others to follow me, I need to let them know how to find me on twitter. Just like when I began blogging, I have to decide how public I want to make this. As I will be using this with my class, and I am still new to it, I decided to go with a pseudonym.

I also need to figure out how to tie my twitter account to my blog. Of course, as I write this, I realize that I should have named my twitter account something like @connecting2. Oh well, this is something I will need to work out in the future.

I would appreciate any suggestions from my readers on how to expand my following. You can also follow me (I'll post new blog post titles on twitter) at Comprof1 (that is the number 1 at the end) unless I decide to change name in the next week or so (let me know if you think I should keep what I have or change the name or create a new twitter account that is dedicated to the blog and items related to the blog).

Entering the world of "Twitter"

As many of my loyal readers know, I don't do "twitter". This, however, is about to change as I prepare to teach a course in computer mediated communication next semester. In fact, I don't think I can teach CMC without looking at the type of communication used in twitter and facebook. So for the next few weeks, I will be setting up a twitter account and blog about my journey in trying to figure out 1) how to use twitter; 2) communication strategies for twitter; and 3) how to incorporate it into my class.

What I've learned so far

In preparation for using twitter, I went to the website. I was impressed at the amount of information and support in setting up twitter there was. This may be a reason why it has taken off in the last couple of years.

I know that when I set up my twitter account, I should not only be interested in getting people to follow my account, but also I should begin by following other people based on my interest.

I also know that twitter consists of short messages which I assume means little context in the tweets. This is why so many who use twitter connect to a webpage or blog. The webpages and blogs can give context that short messages cannot. I relate this to the difference between telegrams and letters in the 19th and early 20th century. Telegrams gave basic information that without context made very little sense. A follow up letter would give the details that would give a telegram context or there needed to be personal/shared experience that would give a telegram meaning.

Twitter works well with mobile technology. However, twitter users tend to be older or professionals (corporations). I also read a report that said that twitter was used more by African Americans than facebook. Little is known why there is that preference except that twitter works well with cell phones.

What I don't know

In the next few weeks, I will need to identify some people to follow.
The twitter site gives some ideas on how to do this. However, I'm interested in knowing how others set up their twitter followers.

The site also gives advise on how to follow twitter sites. I am going to need to figure out how to do this without overfilling my email. Do others use a separate email account? What about something similar to RSS feeds? Are there RSS feeds or readers for twitter like with blogs?

How are tweets different than other forms of online communication? Can they be stored and accessed later? Nancy White recently had a post in which tweets were pieced together to create a story/dialog. Can this be done in a central location (i.e. facebook's wall to wall which shows discussions between two people)?

I'd appreciate any help you can give me and I will continue to post my progress.

Twitter vs. Blogging

As I have mentioned before, I am in the middle of writing my dissertation, so I don't have much time to write blog posts. However, this is a topic that has been peculating in my mind since Karyn Romeis announced the end of her Karyn's Erratic Learning Journey blog.

This caught many readers off guard. However, I have noticed that many of the blogs I have been following have given up blogging over the last year. I have addressed this in previous blogs, so I won't do so now. But I wanted to address the rising popularity of twitter.

Honestly, for my personal web based habits, I don't see the importance of Twitter. One thing that has been needling me over the last couple of months was a blog report I read that said the African Americans are more apt to use twitter, while the majority of Americans use facebook. Finally, I received the answer from one of my student groups in a presentation they gave on group technology use.

In the presentation they mentioned that twitter was especially effective on mobile technology. Just looking at the access to the internet that my students use, I would say that the majority of my African American students access the internet through their phones, while the other students access it through their labtops. As they say in Costa Rica, the coin dropped (I made the connection). Those linked to the internet (and whose main form of communication) via smart phones, cell phones, or pda's would prefer twitter. Those linked to the internet via labtops, macs, and other pc's have the luxury of seeing and posting a longer reflection.

So as technology gets increasingly more mobile, I predict there will be less blogging.

But wait!

What about the ebook devices, ipad, and netbooks? Perhaps blogging isn't passe, but rather for more "academic" purposes. What do you think?

Web 3.0 or Neo-Web 1.0?

Lately, I have felt that the discussions have ended and I am no longer a part of a community online. With the advent of tools like twitter and even the changes to facebook, I feel that we have reverted back to "I'm going to give you sound bites and it is up to you to listen or not. I'm not really interested in your opinion."

I felt that when the new web tools first were established (blogs, myspace, etc...) that there was a renewed engagement between people in cyberspace. Suddenly those that never had a voice were given a voice to craft their message and engage in dialogue. Time was not as much of a factor. A deeper level of understanding between writers and readers was established.

However, I currently have three facebook accounts. One is actually my daughter's, the other is just for family and friends, and the last is for students and colleagues. I post, but there is always a resounding silence after. I am sure for many of my students, I my comments are hidden. With so many comments coming in, many of them just have very superficial conversations.

Now don't get me wrong. I see a valuable service in facebook and twitter, especially when you want to communicate information to a large group of people quickly. But there is no two way communication the way a blog or a ning or even the original design of facebook allowed. And what two way communication there is usually private, so there is not the same level of community. I also feel that the people that originally embraced the Web 2.0 to give themselves a voice they never had have been pushed aside for commercial and mainstream opinion leader's use. It is a bit like starting a conversation with someone in the popular group when you were in high school and having the rest of the popular group join in and push you out to the side because you aren't part of their group.

I hope we go back to the idea of community on the web and the feeling of belonging in an online community. But I'm not sure that can happen in today's battlefield over users (how many friends can YOU collect?). What do you think? (I have a feeling without tweeting this, there will just be a big resounding "silence." Oh, well).

Why I don't twitter

I have read and heard more and more about twitter these days. I don't twitter for the following reasons:

1. I can't write short sentences and not expand on them.
2. I can't imagine that anyone would be so interested in my every thought and movement. And if they were, that's a bit creepy (as my kids would say).
3. I think twitter is great for celebrities, the media, or school officials where there is a need to get information out to a large volume of people. Perhaps I'll think about twittering for my classes in the future to remind students of assignments, etc... However, I think that students should take the responsibility for their own learning and course work. I have other tools that address this need in my class (Ning) where there is more dialogue rather than one way communication.
4. Twitter seems too directive (do this or look at that). I'm more of a dialogue type of person.
5. Most of my students don't use twitter as they have their preferred tools for interaction.
6. I think it would boom me out to only have 5 or 6 followers on twitter!

Truthfully, I don't see the need to follow anyone nor do I see the need for anyone to follow me other than by blog or even IM. I have trouble keeping up the "what I am doing" on LinkedIn. Why start using another tool?