[Air-L] creating a unique hashtag to track a specific event

Kathie Gossett gossettphd at gmail.com
Thu Apr 15 22:09:12 PDT 2010


Stephanie,

I searched your hashtag on hashtag.org and it shows that 4 tweets were  
made on or around April 10 with that hashtag. My first suggestion  
would be to try a third party application like TweetDeck or Tweetie to  
gather the hastag's tweets into one place. The Twitter interface is  
not all that friendly for trying to follow a hashtag conversation.

The only way to keep a tweet stream within a specific group (at least  
that I know of) is for the user twitter accounts to all be private and  
then all the users have to follow each other. This can be difficult to  
set up, especially at a conference. Your hashtag seems to be going in  
the right direction; according to hashtag.org it doesn't appear to be  
being used by others (i.e.,  only 4 tweets) and it's nice and short. I  
would recommend against the longer 'bringthesocial' since that will  
use up valuable Tweet real estate (the hashtag counts as part of the  
140 characters).

If you'd like to see how a public tweet stream plays out, you're  
welcome to look at some of the ones my colleague, Liza Potts, and I  
use with our classes and lab RAs. The hashtags for those are: #ceme,  
#nmtp, #ia10. We've occasionally had problems with strangers  
straggling into the conversation and have sometimes had the happy  
circumstance of having scholars show up for the discussion when we're  
talking about their work.

Also, some of your problems may have to do with your recent switch  
from private to public as Liz pointed out, but it could also be a  
problem with Twitter. Twitter has a fairly persistent problem where  
some accounts get "stuck" on private mode. This has happened to myself  
and several students in my classes. It takes a lot of perseverance and  
usually the stocking of several Twitter programers/employees for  
several months to have an account cleared. Many of us have had to end  
up creating a new account while we wait, while others have had some  
luck getting it unstuck by changing account passwords.

One other thing I'd suggest, if you want to keep the tweets generated  
at your conference, you should go to twapperkeeper.com and set up an  
archive. This tool will capture and archive all tweets with the  
hashtag you register there so that you can go back later and re-read  
them (Twitter stores posts for either 7 or 14 days, I can't remember  
which). Creating an archive at Twapperkeeper allows you to store them  
indefinitely.

Hope this helps,
Kathie

_______________________________
Kathie Gossett, PhD
Asst. Professor of Writing, Rhetoric & New Media
Co-Director, CeME Lab
Department of English
Old Dominion University

(757) 683-5818
kgossett at odu.edu
www.kathiegossett.com
ceme.digitalodu.com



On Apr 15, 2010, at 8:56 PM, Stephanie Jo Kent wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have been a quasi-lurker for @6 years. I have interacted with a  
> few of you (thanks!). Some day I imagine I'll have something  
> substantive to contribute; to date my attempts have been diverted  
> into other directions.
>
> Next week, a colleague and I will conduct an action research project  
> at a conference, "The Science of Team Science." We will invite  
> conference participants to tweet thoughts, observations, commentary,  
> jokes, etc during the conference, in order to build a supplementary  
> database for the authorized task of our poster session.
>
> Any suggestions on how to set this up so that the stream remains  
> relatively 'clean'? There is probably a technical term, but what I  
> mean is boundaried - as much as possible - to the participants of  
> the conference. I created the hashtag #socialSTS as a test. At the  
> moment, it does not come up in search, not even advanced  
> search....and it is close to 'socialist' which might be a  
> problem(?).  I am supposing that if/when the number of relevant  
> tweets increases then the twitter search engine will find them, am I  
> correct? Or, is the scale so small (<200 people, with who knows what  
> percentage actually participating) that I need to set up some actual  
> architecture? (I'll be thrilled if even a few percent contribute,  
> since this is so experimental.)
>
> Maybe bringthesocial is a better hashtag, and closer to the name of  
> our poster/project.
>
> I've kept my own tweets private until today (I've hardly been a user  
> at all). I thought I ought to make them public for this project? If  
> the idea catches on, for instance, there may be people who wished  
> they could attend the conference but couldn't.... and who might want  
> to participate vicariously...?  (Yes, call me a dreamer, grin.)
>
> I'm sure there is a range of implications I've yet to consider. If  
> anyone knows of similar projects, or has ideas about implementing  
> this one, I'll be grateful for the opportunity to hash this through.  
> (Pun intended - which is not usually my style!)
>
> thanks very much,
> steph
>
>
>
> -- 
> Stephanie Jo Kent
>
> Weblog: http://www.reflexivity.us
> email: stephanie.kent at fulbrightmail.org
> mobile: 1 (413) 824-9663
>
> Fulbright Fellow to the European Institutions, 2008-2009
> Doctoral Candidate, Communication, University of Massachusetts  
> Amherst USA
> Master of Education, Social Justice Education
> Certified American Sign Language/English Interpreter
>
>
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