tools for the #theatre twitter community?
Last night I spent a few hours chatting on twitter with @jesshutchinson and @chriswalts (among others) about ways in which the theatre/twitter community might better share news and information.
I use various techniques to filter and search twitter – starting with tweetdeck and twitter’s own API - but I only have one pair of eyes. If I’m lucky, an interesting story or commentary will get re-tweeted somewhere across my network of followeds (neologism alert) and I’ll pick up that ripple. But I can only spend so much time each day combing twitter. Part of me thinks I should stop trying to drink the waterfall through a straw, but the maven thinks that there could – should – be a better solution.
So: how to use the distributed theatre/twitter community to flag things I (and other people) might like to read?
The very (very) rough concept that I arrived at was a WP installation that combed the #theatre hashtag for tweets with links, then published them on an hourly basis. Readers could then rate each link up (or down) and the most popular / most discussed recent links appear in the side-bar.
It was a trial concept, rather than a finished product; a starting place for a discussion rather than a destination for a diverse community.
So – what are the advantages to this kind of approach? What are the obvious problems? How might this approach integrate with twitter groups?
- EDIT: Am also playing with the tweetsuite plug-in, which sadly only works on newly published posts. Any good?
I hear you’re paying our fair city on the lake a visit! Very excited.
I think I get this concept now! Two things that would make it more like yummy candy:
1) Threading related or retweeted or @comments instead of or in addition to blog-based commenting?
2) More API links for twitterers: Retweet this, Reply to Tweet, Favorite?
I don’t know the twitter API, so I’m not sure, but is ranking by favorite votes possible?
Yes, planning to make my second Grand Visit during the second half of June. :)
Great sugestions. So far, I’ve been working with “out of the box” plug-ins for wordpress that other people have written. Pulling info from twitter search API is the easy part; integrating more elements of twitter (beyond retweeting) is the challenge. Will do some homework when I next have a free evening.