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When Twitter's "FailWhale" surfaces while you're covering live events, it's Friendfeed to the rescue! |
Today I'm in Chicago for a meeting of Knight News Challenge grantees. It's a pre-event for the big Unity 2008 conference for journalists of color.
As has become my custom, I'll use Twitter to turn my notetaking process into live coverage for interested people. Here are a few tips I've picked up for making this work despite Twitter's limitations and frequent outages:
- Use a separate Twitter account to post live coverage. (Mine is amylive.) This will keep rapid-fire posts from overwhelming your regular followers. Configure this account to see "@ replies" sent to you from any twitter user. You don't necessarily need to follow anyone on this account.
- Use Friendfeed for backup. Twitter is prone to go down, so it helps to have a backup so you can keep posting regardless. Set up a corresponding live-coverage account on Friendfeed -- mine is amylive. Then configure that Friendfeed account to republish everything from your live-coverage Twitter account. This creates a coherent record of all your coverage, regardless of Twitter's ups and downs.
- Tell your Twitter followers about Friendfeed. Change the link associated with the profile for your live-coverage Twitter account to point to your Friendfeed live-coverage account. Then post a tweet or two pointing to your Friendfeed page. Explain that if Twitter craps out, they can switch to Friendfeed and not miss anything. They also could choose to follow you on Friendfeed and get all the action there, since your Friendfeed account will republish anything you post to Twitter.
- Alert your regular Twitter posse. Just before you begin live coverage, post a tweet to the Twitter account you use on a daily basis (mine is agahran) that says, "I'm about to begin live coverage of [event title]. Follow me at @amylive or http://friendfeed.com/amylive to see what's happening."
Of course, Twitter and Friendfeed aren't just about you. Chances are, other people are using those services for live coverage and commentary of the same event. That's where hashtags can be handy. A hashtag is a short character string preceded with a "#" sign that serves as a tag denoting that your tweet is related to that event. When several people at an event include the same hashtag in their tweets, searching for that hashtag becomes an easy way to see all of their coverage simultaneously.
In order for the hashtag function to work, you must first follow hashtags in your Twitter account. After that, Hashtags.org will aggregate your tweets that contain hashtags.
Today, here's how that's going to work for my coverage. Technically, today's event is part of the Unity conference. So the hashtag for this event is: #kfunity08. So I'll start every tweet that's part of my live coverage with #kfunity08. Yes, that does consume a few of my precious 140 characters per tweet, but it's worth it to make it easier for interested people to find my coverage.
To make it easier and more reliable to insert that hashtag without typos, I've set it up as a "text snippet" that I can paste into any application with a short keystroke combination. The Mac utility TextExpander (not free, but well worth its reasonable price) makes that easy. I've just configured TextExpander so that when I type the string kfu in any application, the full #kfunity08 hashtag appears. Saves me time and typos.
Use a Twitter client that can handle multiple accounts. Even though you'll mainly be posting to your live-coverage account during the event, you'll probably want to still monitor your regular account. My favorite Twitter client, Twhirl, allow you to keep windows open for separate accounts at the same time. I generally keep two Twhirl windows open during live event coverage.
Use your browser toolbar as a dashboard. Add these items to your toolbar for quick access during the event:
- Summize search for the event hashtag. Summize is the best Twitter search engine around. Search there for the full event hashtag -- like #kfunity08. When the search results page pops up, bookmark or favorite in your browser, and put that link in your browser toolbar. Then, at any time during the event, you can click on that to see what everyone using the hashtag is saying. This trick is useful because Hashtags.org sometimes gets flaky and doesn't update its display of tweets for a given hastag quickly or at all. Also, some Twitter users neglect to follow hashtags on Twitter, so even if they post using a hashtag, Hashtags.org wouldn't aggregate it. But Summize sees all of that, and updates very quickly, so I find it the best place to get an overview of the Twitter "backchannel" for an event.
- Share on Friendfeed bookmarklet for your live-coverage Friendfeed account. If Twitter goes down, this makes it possible to post to Friendfeed even if you're not currently viewing the Friendfeed site. When posting, just delete whatever appears in the "you shared" link field, and type your comment in the comment field.
There are plenty more tips for live event coverage via Twitter, but I find that this basic setup is a very good start. If you want to see how it works in action, follow me today at amylive on Twitter, and also bookmark amylive on Friendfeed as a backup if the infamous FailWhale surfaces on Twitter. And also bookmark or favorite this Summize search for #kfunity08 to see what everyone posts. (You can even subscribe to an RSS feed from that in your feed reader.)
