This week I would like to talk about microblogging, a modern form of communication that is popularized by Twitter. Microblogs are short messages, usually a sentence long. For Twitter, this is limited to only 140 characters. Most people are already accustomed to writing and reading short text messages, such as those sent through short message service (SMS) or instant messaging (IM). Microblogging is similar to these technologies, except that instead of one-to-one or one-to-many for chat, microblogs can potentially be read by anyone in the world. This makes microblogging a very powerful platform for communication.
Traditional blogs, like this one, consist of a larger body of text. Blogs are also not published too frequently; for me, this is once a week. Microblogs, on the other hand are usually published several times a day, sort of filling in the gap between blog postings. These microblogs, also known as “tweets” in Twitter lingo, are short messages about personal opinions, what a person is doing, upcoming events,… basically anything you like that fits within a line of text.
Many Universities around the world use microblogging, to supplement RSS, to notify students/staff and general public of events or news. It allows us to publish information without being intrusive like email spam. If you prefer email, you can still send and get tweet updates through email or mobile phone.
For CityU, we are gradually building up a community of twitter users. For example, the Communications and Public Relations Office (CPRO) has a “CityUHongKong” twitter feed for CityU announcements. Our Library has a “cityulib_eres” twitter feed as well. I, of course, have the “CityUCIO” twitter feed. In addition, many individual CityU staff and students have their personal twitter feeds that might also talk about CityU events.
I envision that more and more departments/units will be using microblogging in the future. To make it easier for our students and the general public to find our microblogs, I am proposing that we following a very simple convention - just include “#cityu #hk” within the line. This method of using hashs and tags together is called hashtagging. The individual tags are called hashtags. By following this simple convention, we can now search Twitter for “#cityu #hk” or simply “cityu hk” to get all updates related to CityU. You can extend the hashtags to, say “#cityu #hk #seminar” for seminar announcements. This way if someone searches for “hk seminars” they will also see our announcements. Hashtags will, of course, consume part of the 140 characters limitation. So they should be used sparingly.
If your tweet contains a link, a common practice is to compress a long URL into a short one to save on the number of characters. There are many tools that do this for free; I use bit.ly.
Besides Twitter, other Web 2.0 software also provide similar microblogging feature. For example, facebook and Google Talk both have a status line. Most Web 2.0 applications have connectors and interfaces that allows you to share information and synchronize updates. For example, every time I post something in this blog, Twitter gets an update. Every time I post something on facebook, my Twitter gets updated as well. This is done automatically through my blog and facebook.
I’m constantly fascinated by all the neat and advanced technologies our students are using day-to-day to stay in touch with their friends and classmates. Our channels of communication and teaching can greatly be improved if we use the same tools as they do. I hope to see more use of Web 2.0 throughout the University. If any department of administrative unit needs help in getting started, I will be more than happy to participate.
What’s New This Week:
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MS Windows 7 - All departments/units get copies of MS Windows 7 for testing. All lecture theatres and classrooms will be upgraded during break!
Permalink November 17, 2009, 1:46pm Comments
