Here are the key features (bold are changes to TD):

•  Your choice of a daily or weekly digest of up to 200 tweets:
  • Custom title, tags, and excerpt for the digest post
  • Specify the digest category (e.g. Digest)
  • Post tweets in chronological or reverse order
  • Select post author from all authorized users
  • Specify the time (and day of week for weekly posts) to publish the digest
  • Start right away – publish a weekly digest today of the past week’s tweets (no waiting for a database to cache a week)
• Simple, lightweight, reliable implementation:
  • Just a daily or weekly digest
  • No tweet sidebar, no tweeting from your blog
  • No automatic tweets when you post a blog entry
  • Support for just one Twitter account
  • Does not maintain a database of your tweets

You can see the output of the plug-in on my weekly Digest posts since 12/26/2009. I’ll post and tweet when the plug-in is generally available. If you have other ideas for features that do not increase the complexity of the plug-in please leave a comment here or at whalespine.org.

Happy New Year!

The bad news is that Alex King’s Twitter Tools stopped working for my weekly digest. This has been a problem for me and a number of other users. When it worked it was awesome – it worked without a hitch until it just plain stopped. First my weekly digest stopped working, then the login to Twitter stopped working so even the sidebar widget fails. Alex will only address bugs if you pay him to investigate. Ugly.

I’ve replaced the Twitter Tools sidebar widget with Twitter Widget Pro – I love its simplicity, and it just plain works. I still need to find a reliable Twitter digest solution. For now I’m doing them manually. I’m looking into whalespine’s Twitter Digest, but don’t trust it since it’s based upon an early version of Alex King’s code. I did try using Twitterdoodle for a digest but it never actually generated one. Even if it did, Twitterdoodle doesn’t let me schedule which day to post the digest. I could live with that if it had output… if anyone out there has a solution that works please let me know.

You can add your own favorite blogs to the list on GoogleDocs.

Choosing to drive everything from Ping.fm has many advantages and few disadvantages.  Ping has a wide selection of integrations and covers all the social networks I use, so I can use my tweets as status updates.  Ping lets me create “groups” so I can do both personal and professional tweets from a common interface, and share selectively.  I have a FaceBook page that I haven’t had time to do much with, so streaming status updates from Ping lets me reach my friends there when I’m busy.  There are social networks that I use passively like Plaxo and FriendFeed, and Ping is a great way for me to reach friends and colleagues there, too.

Ping also lets me submit via mobile technology, whether I use the browser, email, SMS, or chat client on my BlackBerry.  I like submitting through the BeeJive’s JiveTalk IM client, but have to count my keystrokes manually, which is a drag.  I’ve actually tried every method except SMS with Ping.  Email posting has truncated messages in the past so I avoid it (although that was the same day Twitter was melting down because of the Iranian elections so I’ll have to try again someday).  None of the browsers I’ve tried (including Bolt) will run the script to count my keystrokes as I type into the Ping submission form, and logging in to get to the posting pages is more of a hassle than using an IM client.

I’ve also tried originating messages on HootSuite and relaying through Ping, but I’ve had some issues (hence the Xin the schematic).  For example, I like to use [category tags] in square brackets at the lead of my tweets (more on why below), but if I post to HootSuite and relay through the Ping API the brackets and everything in between gets stripped.  I think the issue is at the Ping API since the same posts arrive intact on Twitter. 

The primary pathway for integrating status updates with the website itself is Twitter (hence the red arrow).  Twitter Tools uses the feed from @twitcontentguy to populate the sidebar on the main page, the headlines section on the Headlines page, and a Weekly Digest blog posting every Friday morning.  I decided not to automatically have Twitter Tools tweet every time my blog got updated for several reasons.  First, as Mike Axelrod and I discussed, there is a stylistic difference between a headline, a blog post title, and a tweet of either of these, so by manually tweeting the URL of the blog post I get the editorial control I need.  Second, Twitter Tools would only update Twitter, not the other social networks.  Third, there was a bit of an echo chamber effect, since the post would show up in the blog, the sidebar, and the headlines page with the same title. As it is, my blog posts have a notification stream of their own, via the RSS feed.  Blog posts show up in LinkedIn using the WordPress app, as well as on Plaxo and The Content Wrangler community site.  Of course the blog posts now include the Weekly Digests of my Twitter activity.

As for using Ping for micro-blogging, I can’t since I haven’t integrated the Ping custom URL on my blog due to technical issues.  I can do this now with my old WordPress.com blog (so I’ll do some testing there) but still need to get the custom URL working for my self-hosted blog.  Also, I haven’t found a good use case yet for micro-blogging; digesting the tweets weekly and in real-time with the Twitter Tools sidebar works great for getting the content to my blog.

2. How I Tweet. After four months I’ve settled into a better pattern of how I use and format my tweets.  There are several aspects I’ve thoughtfully considered: content, format, and frequency.

• Content. It’s pretty rare that I’ll share my personal status; when I do it’s usually because I’m participating in an event that others who follow the site care about, like a great webcast or speech.  In that event I’ll try to relay a quote or other tidbit from the event itself, not just my status and location.  More often I’m sharing content found elsewhere on the web.  This can be news or other relevant information.  Before I tweet about something, however, you can be sure I’ve actually read it and thought about it.
• Format.  Early on I adopted a format for my tweets : [category] @attribution: content link #hashtags
  • Category. I use [category tags] in square brackets at the start of most tweets, an idea that I borrowed from Scott Abel, the Content Wrangler.  These have the advantage of setting off my tweet from any prefix a site might attach to my post.  For example, LinkedIn affixes “Paul” in front of every status update, expecting us to write our status with a verb to follow our first name.  E.g. “Paul is out fishing.”  ”Paul just saw a UFO. Again.”  The square brackets buffer that, so it reads more like the character speaking in a script: “Paul [ECM] Big day of acquisitions in the ECM marketplace.“  They also make it easy for someone to scan the Weekly Digest for articles of interest. 
  • Attribution. Most of what I tweet is a found item of interest. In the attribution I’ll site the source and the individual quoted, whether it’s a blog, news channel, or a retweet.  E.g.
    [ECM] RT @dgschultz: EMC adds e-discovery with Kazeon buy http://bit.ly/6n1VV  or
    [ECM] via ReadWriteWeb: Gartner VP Toby Bell – Six ways to save money on ECM http://ping.fm/BPdx7
  • Content.  This would be the actual content portion of the tweet vs. the rest, which is meta.  Most of what makes it into my professional tweets is straight business (ECM news, events, etc.), but I do like to share the occasional funny bit or fishing success so that the tweets have some personality to them.  Stuff meant just for friends and family never hits @twitcontentguy; I have other personal twitter accounts for that, or I use Ping groups to selectively update my status.
  • Link.This is the shortened URL.  I’d guess that 90% or more of my tweets have a link.  Most often in the past I let Ping do the job of shortening the link.  Starting this week I’ll be using j.mp to shorten my URLs.  This is a new service from the great folks at Bit.ly. 
  • Hash tags.  I started tweeting shortly before hash tags took hold, so I was a bit slow to adopt.  I like putting them at the end of a post, as they fit.  Not everyone who reads my tweets is Twitterate, so the odd # in the middle of the post can be jarring.  E.g. compare these two posts for readability with mere mortals:
    [Webcast] DITA, Metadata Maturity & the Case for Taxonomy. Wed 9/2 1-2 EDT. http://ping.fm/m107W #dita #taxonomy #metadata
    [Webcast] #DITA, #Metadata Maturity & the Case for #Taxonomy. Wed 9/2 1-2 EDT. http://ping.fm/m107W
    Sure, the second one is more concise but I just plain don’t like the look of it. Update: Now letting Ping.fm filter out the hash tags from the services that don’t use them (like LinkedIn or FaceBook), so putting them in-line (judiciously).
• Frequency. If I’m doing well I tweet once or twice a day, giving me 5-10 items a week in the Digest.  I tend to tweet in spurts, because I tweet to share what I’m reading, and some days I’m in research mode and others not so much.  Using HootSuite has made reading those I follow more of a daily routine, so now RTs are more routine.  I still read the tweet streams I follow in batch mode, usually in the morning after email or over lunch.  Having HootSuite or TweetDeck open and watching it all day for me is the equivalent of reading the crawl on CNN – addicting at first, but eventually nauseating to watch.  I do keep it open but off to the side on my peripheral second monitor.

3. Getting my tweets to display inline. One goal of the Twitter integration was for an inline display of “headlines” on my blog.  I embedded the Twitter Flash Widget code directly on my Headlines page and that’s working fine.  I’m using that alongside the TextWise Gyzork feeds.  I’m also considering experimenting on the Headlines page with the HootSuite embed widget for columns of tweet streams of interest based upon my Twitter follows.

4. New TextWise feeds for the news page.  I haven’t done anything new with Gyzork yet, but I have to say the current feeds seeded with content from my first two blog postings are generating results that are very relevant.  This in turn is doing an excellent job of bringing my attention to articles of interest, which I very often tweet about.

5. Cleaning up the XSLT to better format the news feed. I worked with the XSLT for inlineRSS and got it to format the Gyzork posts in a similar way similar to my blog meta data.  I also hacked the PHP for Twitter Tools to apply some minor formatting to the sidebar and Headlines entries. 

6. Experiment with other semantic technologies to create automatic feeds of interest.  If any of you have other ideas for auto-generating news item listings for relevant content, please leave a comment or a pingback from your own blog posts.

I’d like to hear what you think about how this integration of Twitter with my site is working.  Drop me a line or better yet leave a comment below or on your own blog.  It would be great if you could share your best practices and favotire tools, tips, and tricks.

When is Twitter like a bad game of telephone?

This morning while perusing LinkedIn status updates, I noticed a retweet³ attributed to Guy Kawasaki that read “Study claims Instant Messaging improves productivity.” I clicked through to the blog post by Rick Broida titled “Instant Messaging improves productivity” that claimed

“..a recent study found that workers who trade instant messages with their bosses are more productive than those who don’t.”

Rick quoted an article about the study that stated:

The researchers analyzed the e-mail traffic, buddy lists, social networking friends, and everything in between of 2,600 [sic] anonymized IBM consultants over 12 months [sic] in order to draw their conclusions. They then compared their communication patters against their performance in billable hours. Those who maintained constant communications averaged an increase in revenue of $588 per month over the average, while those who did not produced $98 per month less than the average.

This sounded great to me, so I wanted to read the full story.

The quote above came from a post by Jacqui Cheng at arstechnica.com, titled “Study: frequent IMs with your boss make you more productive,” who went on to write:

The reason the latter group is underperforming could be because they feel pulled in too many directions with no clear leadership. “It could be that when consultants are linked to many managers, they may have conflicting demands from them on how the project should be executed,” reads the report. “The consultants would be rendered less effective without a clear direction.”

In a way, the findings come as no surprise. People who feel like they know their bosses better are generally happier with their jobs and are more willing to go the extra mile when needed. Similarly, bosses who know their employees’ quirks are better able to assign them to projects that fit their personalities and strengths, while minimizing their weaknesses.

Wah? Pulled in too many directions? IM helps solve this? OK, wait a minute, so what was the study really about?
I located the original MIT paper, which was presented at the Winter Information Systems Conference in Salt Lake City this February. The researchers were interested in measuring the quality and nature of social networks, and trying to assess the notion that all nodes are not created equal. Basic social network theories hold that some nodes in the network are more strategic than others – just as cities that have more highways and rail lines running through them do more commerce. These researchers are taking things a step further, and are interested in the quality of the connections, not just the quantity – where do those roads and railroads lead, and what shape are they in?

They were interested in determining how employees with direct access to managers fared relative to those with indirect access – or those with access to too many manager. In their words:

The strength of connections and attributes of the nodes in the network, such as human capital, power and status, can have a unique relationship with work performance.

Instant message traffic, email, calendars, and other electronic communications were analyzed as well as the organization chart and the corporate project and personal revenue database for about 1000 consultants, selected out of total pool of 400,000 IBM employees in the social network database that was created by previous researchers. The researchers use electronic communications as a proxy for access to management. Their hypothesis is that access leads to activity, and activity leads to revenue:

One important aspect of human capital is status and power endowed to a person. Strong ties to powerful individuals can be beneficial. Authorities such as partners and executives in a consulting organization often have the discretion to pick specific consultants to staff important projects that have high earning potential. Project managers prefer to choose consultants whom they trust to deliver excellent results and therefore, having a good relationship with project managers and gaining their trust is crucial to increase utilization and the likelihood to participate in high valued ventures. Consultants with strong ties to managers who are often experts are also likely to perform better as they can access useful knowledge and subject area expertise. Receiving targeted and useful information directly from the manager with minimum information distortion, consultants with strong ties to management are even more likely to complete a project. This forms a virtuous cycle where strong connections to managers increase the chance of accomplishing a project which then enhances a consultant‘s reputation and attracts even more connections to project managers. Similarly, we expect project teams with strong ties to managers outside of the team to be more successful as well.

So who did they study and what did they find? The researchers studied 1029 consultants (not 2600 as reported in arstechnica) and 2952 projects from June, 2007 to July, 2008 (13 months, not 12). The projects involve 39 countries with the majority of the projects in the US. Of the 1029 consultants, 864 are male, 66 are project managers. Low to mid level consultants represent 69.4% of the population while the rest are senior consultants or executives.

To understand a broader view of how social network is associated with performance, we construct two types of social networks, at person level and project level. In the employee or person level, each node in the network represents an employee and each link between two nodes represents the total number of electronic communications between the two people. To construct project level networks, each node in the networks is a project instead of an individual and links between projects is the sum of all communications between members of the two projects, ignoring all communications happening within the same project team. We hypothesize that the network characteristics that are most conducive for project networks may differ from those at the individual level. For example, the ability of a consultant to generate revenue depends on his ability to bill hours and participate in high valued projects, while project revenue depends not only on the ability of individual team member but also on how they work together to complete the project.

We collect financial performance such as billable hours and revenue they generated on a monthly basis, as well as project characteristics such the difficulty of the tasks, the region where the project is performed, the industry of the client, line of business for the consultants and clients, and duration it takes for the project to be completed. To control for individual characteristics of consultants, we also collected demographic data, such as the technical expertise, geographical locations, managerial roles, and the division they belong within the organization. Unfortunately, we cannot obtain information on how long a consultant has worked in his current job role. This could skew our results as we may expect that employees who are around for a long time are more likely to have a larger network since they have more time and opportunities to build their social network. However, we can eliminate this bias using longitudinal networks.

The findings: First, that a network that is “cohesive” – i.e. incestuous – is less productive than a diverse network. Being connected to people with connections that look like yours lowers productivity.

Network cohesion is negatively correlated with productivity, corroborating the results of previous email network studies (Aral et. al 2006, 2007, Aral and Van Alstyne 2007) demonstrating that structurally diverse networks are positively associated with productivity. One standard deviation increase in network constraint is associated with a decrease of 276% in monthly revenue.

Second, that an individual that has more closer ties or more direct paths to others (i.e. more “betweenness centrality”) is more productive:

Similarly, betweenness centrality is also positively correlated with performance, where one standard deviation in betweenness centrality is associated 513% increase in monthly revenue. Based on interviews with consultants at various stage of their career, we find that accurate and timely access to novel information through a structural diverse network is crucial to project completion by assisting consultants to solve complex problems and discover new opportunities. When an information worker is positioned at the center of the network where she can access other actors quickly, she is in the most effective position to access novel information quickly (Freeman 1979, Brass & Burkhardt 1992, Burt 1992, Hansen 2001), and act on newly discovered opportunities. This is particularly important in consulting business, as lining up projects to avoid bench time is crucial for performance.

So let’s talk a moment about cause and effect. Does “instant messaging increase productivity?” No. It’s not whether or how much you ping or tweet, it’s with whom you’re connected; employees that have networks composed of peers are less productive. Do “frequent IMs with your boss make you more productive?” Nope. Employees that IM with their bosses earn more because they are assigned to more projects. Are employees assigned to more projects because they IM to their bosses more? No, they are assigned to more projects because they have better access, because they have better skills and experience. IM traffic is the result, not the cause.

If you’re a schlumpy third-stringer with weak skills and a butt full of splinters from warming the bench, you can’t IM your way to success, and you can’t network your way there either. Sorry. Go gain some skills, build a track record, and in the process you’ll make some powerful connections along the way. The old-school way. And maybe you’ll even connect with them on LinkedIn get some of their IM handles to boot.

And one more thing – think about going back and thoughtfully reading and understanding the original work before you retweet a retweet of a blog of a blog of a news article on an academic paper.

Oh, and never confuse cause with effect. Go re-read Freakonomics…

Several things were important to me about how to do this:

1. I wanted to use this feature to notify about interesting content without a lot of authoring on my part.  Ideally posting an item to the digest would be automated with a semantic search bot pulling in the content.  Worst case I would have to drag and drop headlines and links in a Twitter-like fashion.
2. I didn’t want to add commentary – I wanted a simple re-blog capability.
3. I wanted attribution of the author to be very clear – this was not my content, just items of interest to share.

Inline RSS for a WordPress page

I concluded that what I really needed was a way to display RSS feeds in-line on a WordPress page to create my headlines or digest.  WordPress has loads of plug-ins that are great for integrating RSS feeds into sidebar widgets, but I found one plug-in – DGE inlineRSS – that provided all of the features I needed to put the RSS into the body of a WordPress posting or page. 

inlineRSS is pretty simple to use.  After install, there are three easy steps to getting a feed embedded into a page.  First, you need to configure inlineRSS to point to your feeds.  This is a simple matter of entering the RSS feed URL, and associating an XSLT file that will transform the feed into the HTML that displays on your site (inlineRSS provides a simple XSLT file that you can alter to meet your needs).  Next, you need to be sure that the configuration sets the path to the XSLT file on your site, and make any changes to the XSLT for your unique formatting.  Lastly, you need to enter the embed code for the inline RSS itself – this is simply:

!inlineRSS:myrssfeed

where myrssfeed is any of the feeds you configured in the inlineRSS options screen.  inlineRSS implements a WordPress filter to replace this code with the XSLT-formatted RSS feed.

Creating the Digest RSS Feed

The next step to getting a digest page up and running was to create the source of the RSS feed itself.  I considered three options:

• reFeed – a server for creating custom RSS feeds from items of interest
• Twitter or Ping.fm – generate a “tweetstream” of headlines and links (re-blogging vs. micro-blogging)
• TextWise – using a semantic search bot (specifically TextWise’s Gyzork demonstration app) to auto-generate a custom RSS feed that contains blog posts and news items that match specific semantic signatures

reFeed.  Last month, Mike Axelrod set up a reFeed server that he and I experimented with briefly.  This may hold some promise for the future for hand-selecting items of interest to reblog via an RSS feed.  However, Mike noted some technical issues, particularly with the quality of the RSS, so we tabled that project for the time being (he and I promise to blog more about reFeed in the near future).

Twitter and Ping.fm.  As Mike discusses in a related post, we’ve both been exploring Twitter and Ping.fm to stream reblog-type items to our websites.  Mike has the Ping.fm custom URL plug-in for WordPress working and has his “pingstream” going to headline items in his sidebar.  I’m doing the same, using Ping to drive Twitter, then putting the Twitter feed into my sidebar with the  Twitter Tools plug-in (look under Headlines in the sidebar to your right).  I’m still working on getting my Ping feed to display in-line with RSS or other techiques.

TextWise Gyzork.  You may be familiar with TextWise if only from my use of their technology here for finding related products, Wikipedia articles, and blogs for my blog posts.  TextWise uses semantic analysis to search the web for similar documents.  Each document (web page, blog post, etc.) gets a semantic signature that identifies the concepts in the document and their weight (i.e. relevance).  Gyzork lets me apply a semantic signature to any document, then create a saved semantic search that returns either blog posts or news items that match.  Gyzork also lets me create an RSS feed for that search.  If you check out my Headlines tab above, you’ll see a set of headlines (embedded using inlineRSS) that were generated by a Gyzork search seeded by one of my posts.  This search has been pretty good over the last six months at surfacing items I’m interested in.

Next Steps

I plan to continue to experiment with the automatic news digest.  Things I plan to try out:

• Propagating the news feed items to my status updates in LinkedIn and Twitter
• Getting my Ping.fm stream to display inline as a set of headlines
• Micro-blogging using Ping as the front end
• Working with TextWise technology to create more Gyzork feeds for the news page
• Cleaning up the XSLT to better format the news feed
• Experiment with other semantic technologies to create automatic feeds of interest

If you have any further ideas on this, please comment.

The biggest challenge I faced was trying to figure out my objectives for using Twitter.  I had basic integration of my tweets into the sidebar on my WordPress blog (using Twitter for WordPress).  After I looked at how others used Twitter and thought some more about what I wanted to accomplish – and what was right for TheContentGuy.net – I came up with two primary goals.

First, I wanted to generate a tweet every time I posted to the blog, mainly to notify my network.  LinkedIn does this automatically with the WordPress app, but I wanted to extend my reach beyond LinkedIn.

Second, I’ve wanted for some time to have a simple way to reblog articles of interest to my network, without feeling like I need to take the time to comment and create a full-blown blog post.  Mike Axelrod and I had experimented with reFeed last month to generate a custom RSS feed out of hand-picked articles we wanted to reblog.  reFeed was a bit of a handful and wasn’t quite ready for primetime (Mike and I promise to blog on that experience at a later date).

What I realized over the last several days was that a lot of people simply tweet URLs to  items of interest on the web.  I decided to use Twitter to create my RSS feed, and to integrate that on a “headlines” digest page on the blog.  It’s simpler, and I can do it from anywhere, even though most of the time I’ll be at my desktop.

Mike pointed me to this great article by Glen Stansberry on 10 Awesome Ways to Integrate Twitter with your Website.  It was a good place to start shopping for the ideas and code I needed to begin.  Right there I found some great answers.

For the first goal – tweeting my blog posts – I first tried Twitterfeed.  It seemed perfect for the job: you simply provide an authentication to your Twitter account and the URL to the RSS feed you want to tweet.  Unfortunately, today the site was down due to a hardware migration, so I’ll have to evaluate it another time. 

Continuing on, I found Twitter Tools by Alex King.  This actually does everything I needed. I can generate tweets every time I blog, can generate a digest of my tweets (daily, weekly, or both), and can blog my tweets (although I’m not planning on this anytime soon – the sidebar widget serves this purpose just fine).  I’ll be adding Twitter Tools to the site later today.

Mike and I had a great conversation this morning about how he uses Twitter, and it really solidified my thinking.  I’m still experimenting with following other people’s tweets; so far there are only a few that I am really interested in – mostly for professional purposes.  I’m still sorting out the mindshare issues that yet-another-input-channel presents me as a media consumer, and until I get my head around that I’m not so sure I’m ready for a tweetreader app.

On the other hand Mike had his usual great insights about tweeting and the difference between tweeting a blog headline and blogging the headline.  He made this great analogy – a tweet of the headline is like the teaser for a newspaper story you see in a box on page one.  It isn’t the headline, rather it’s something that compels you to turn to the story.  I’ll keep that in mind as I tweet to notify others about my own blog posts.

Over the next several weeks I’ll be experimenting with using tweets to create a digest of news articles of interest to the content community.  If anyone has ideas about best practices or any suggestions for how I can do this better, drop me a comment.