Category Archives: Twitter

Bing, Google, Twitter, Web 2.0

Twitter search in Bing and Google

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Bing and Google have both announced that they have done a deal with Twitter that enables them to offer ‘real time’ Twitter searches. The Bing service is live now at http://www.bing.com/Twitter/. SearchEngineWatch has an overview of the service at Bing.com/Twitter: A Visual Tour. It looks impressive but as is so often the case with Bing the reality does not live up to expectations.

I have just returned from a conference on chemical information held in Sitges – hashtag #icic09. This should be an easy one for Bing Twitter to handle I thought. Silly me. Up came “We did not find any Twitter results or links for icic09″. I tried it with and without the hashtag – still nothing.  And yet both search.twitter.com and www.twazzup.com had no problem finding tweets from the conference.

Bing Twitter results on #icic09

Twazzup results on #icic09

It also appears that you cannot search on a username. I then compared the results of searches on keywords and names that I knew had been tweeted at the conference: chemspider, chemspiderman, David Walsh, semantic mediawiki, markush. Nothing! It seems that the whole conference has been boycotted by Bing Twitter. I did begin to suspect that the service is not really up and running but searching on Nick Griffin came up with plenty of results and it found a tweet from one of my Twitter network about chickpea curry that had been posted a few minutes before.

There is something seriously wrong with Bing Twitter. Until they fix it and can present credible results I recommend that you give it a miss.

So what of Google’s offering? It isn’t live yet but there is useful discussion and comments on Google Social Search Is Coming & More On Google-Twitter. The main question for us as searchers is whether or not the Twitter search will be integrated into the standard web search or made available as a separate option. Tweets are already included in the web search as I discovered when I did a search on icic09 but they are spread out amongst the results. It would make sense to have a separate search tool such as Google’s Blogsearch. Another option would be to incorporate it into the side bar under “Show options” (See Google new search and display options).

Bing have yet again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. As for Google Twitter, we shall just have to wait and see.

Facebook, Twitter

University Twitter

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Liz Azyan is well known for her excellent lists of local government and councils using social media but now she has turned her attention to the UK Universities. The List of UK University Twitter Accounts as of 28th July 2009 has  56 accounts so far and as well as the name of the university it includes the ‘bios’. A surprising number don’t have one! In addition there is a University Twitterleague according to number of followers as of 28th July 2009. If your institution is missing from the list either email Liz at research@lizazyan.com or leave your details in the comment box to the posting.

UniversityTwitter

You might also want to check out the  List of UK Universities Fan Pages on Facebook as of 28th July 2009 sorted by number of fans. The top two, and way above the rest, are The Open University (16,913) and Oxford University (14,867). Again email Liz or leave a comment if your university is missing from the list.

Presentations, Twitter, workshops

PATLIB 2009 presentations

The presentations that I gave at PATLIB 2009 in Sofia, Bulgaria lastweek are now available at http://www.rba.co.uk/patlib2009. There are two: a 25 minute  presentation that was given as part of the main conference and the longer half day pre-conference workshop. As usual, many of the slides will probably not make sense without my commentary but you are welcome to email or Twitter DM me if you want more information.

There is also a two page “Getting started with Twitter” document. Yes, I know that there is a plethora of  how-to-twitter pages on the web but almost none of them answer the questions that I am asked on my workshops. The best and most succinct that I have found so far is the two page http://portfolio.ginaminks.com/job_aides/twitter_cheat_sheet.pdf

mashups, Twitter

Twitterplan – UK local government mashup for planning applications

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I discovered Twitterplan via a posting on Liz Azyan’s excellent blog – Twitterplan: The Newest Mashup in UK Local Government via her Twitterstream @liz_azyan .

Twitterplan is a new service that has been set up by Lichfield District Council with help from the City of Lincoln Council and Planning Alerts. It sends a Twitter direct message to you whenever a planning application is submitted in your area. Go to http://www.twitterplan.co.uk/ and follow the instructions on screen.

twitterplan2

The service covers 324 local authorities at present and there is a list of participants on the Twitterplan web site. My own council – Reading Borough Council – are included, which surprised me. Reading BC do not seem to be that keen to embrace Web 2.0 technologies and their web site can be a nightmare to navigate. They may be in the list, I thought, but will they actually deliver? A few hours after I had signed up my first two DMs arrived!

twitterplandm

I am impressed: click on the link and you are taken direct to the details on the authority’s web site. It beats having to carry out an advanced Google site search on the Reading BC web site and trawling through the local newspaper planning applications.

Presentations, Twitter, Web 2.0, workshops

Hants & Isle of Wight Web 2.0 Session

A reminder to all of you who attended the CILIP Hampshire & Isle of Wight evening meeting on Web 2.0 and social networking that the PowerPoint can be downloaded from http://www.rba.co.uk/hiow/ . Anyone is free to download it if they wish but it probably won’t make much sense unless you were there and heard my commentary! It is also available on SlideShare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/cilip-hants-isle-of-wight-social-networking

CILIP Hants & Isle of Wight – Social Networking

View more presentations from Karen Blakeman. (tags: hiow cilip)

You might also like to view the twitterstream that evolved over the evening by going to http://search.twitter.com/ and searching on the hashtag #hiow . You will note the participants had their  priorities right by tweeting on the quality of the biscuits and tea/coffee 🙂

A big thank you to all of you around the world who tweeted to us at the seminar about where you were, what you were doing and how you use Twitter. It really showed how great Twitter can be.

Google, mashups, Twitter

Keeping up with #uksnow disruption

If  you are interested in monitoring how the snow is progressing across the UK Ben Marsh has compiled a Google-Twitter mashup to map tweets tagged with #uksnow. Twitter users have been using #uksnow for reports on the amount of snowfall and travel disruption that they encounter. If they also include the first part of their postcode and marks out of 10 for the amount of snowfall their tweet is automatically added to a Google map.  The site updates every minute.

#uksnow tweets 9.55 am 2nd February 2009

Facebook, Flickr, Government, Twitter, Web 2.0, Wikis

LARIA/ALGIS Presentation: Web 2.0 in the Public Sector

The presentation I gave at ‘Managing Information in the Public Sector – The Future – Relaunching ALGIS’ is now available on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/web-20-in-the-public-sector-presentation and on Authorstream at http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/karenblakeman-109455-web-2-0-public-sector-laria-algis-uk-lariaweb2-others-misc-ppt-powerpoint/ .

The slides are based on earlier Web 2.0 presentations but I have included examples from local government authorities and public libraries. Apologies to those of you I have used as examples: you may be deluged with enquiries from the seminar participants! There was a lot of interest in what is being done especially by local authorities.

The event was a joint LARIA/ALGIS seminar and held in London at Baden Powell House, London, Tuesday 18th November 2008. All the presentations will be available on the LARIA web site.