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The Confluence of Content Streams (Our Twitter River)
- 13 June 2008
One of the benefits of our redesign process (including the modernization of the technological underpinnings of the site), is that we look forward to being able to reuse content in new ways across our site. This is not a radically new concept on the web in general, but for Lewis & Clark it is a change that offers exciting opportunities for an improved user experience.
In the old days, interesting stories that were told one place, say the newsroom, had to be manually added anywhere else we thought might be worthwhile, like an academic department’s news page, and vice versa. If you wanted to read those stories you were pretty much limited to using one device, the web browser and accessing it one place, the static web page. With the rise of some pretty heavy acronym-laden technologies, RSS chief among them, the PubCom team is using the redesign to play with some new ways to deliver the fascinating as well as the day-to-day goings-on of the members of the Lewis & Clark community, both on and off Palatine Hill. Recently we have hopped onto bandwagon that is Twitter (Twitter Explained in Plain English) and are experimenting with directing some of our varied content streams, of Watzek Library news, of Law School podcasts, of our Newsroom, as well as items that come to us from the outside world, like google news alerts, into a united content river. At this point you can access it on our twitter page from your web browser, mobile phone, or via our new service, telepathic broadcast, (still in beta). Advantages: we set the stage for serendipity, practice brevity, and offer a less formal venue to let people know what L&C is doing as an institution. Our approach will invariably change as we learn more, and if you find yourself asking your computer monitor “Why?” out loud as you read this, drop us a line in the comments. We like to talk about this stuff.
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I follow the lewisandclark twitter, and sometimes it is a bit hard to figure out how the updates are populated and who they are directed at. Not until right now I understood why some of them start with “eande” (E & E!) and other topic lines like “newsroom” and “oncampus”, and others simply start.
Hey Tanya, thanks for the good question. Updates are populated from six or seven disparate RSS feeds around the L&C web-o-sphere along with additions from me, either interesting things I find or interesting things that find me. The target audience for the twitter stream so far consists of those people who follow it. It is in a more experimental phase and so is decidedly not a strategically mature instrument, but I don’t think that is a bad thing. What your comment prompts me to wonder though is how I might gather some feedback from those following about what they think. Personally, I don’t always go to the various websites whose content makes up the twitter stream, so it has proven to be quite a nice way to find out about stuff that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Interesting approach. A couple of questions/suggestions:
1) Why Twitter? Is there a benefit to doing this “out of house” as opposed to providing an aggregated feed on the L&C site? I’m all for being able to get the same data from multiple places, but the Twitter page loses most of the L&C branding and feels ‘flimsy’.
2) Aggregation is great - it lets me find information about all three components of L&C. But, truth be told, as a CAS graduate I’m mostly interested in CAS news. The aggregated feed needs to be easy to dis-aggregate just by scanning it. “eande” as a source just doesn’t cut it.
As an example, there’s an entry with this lead:
eande Mike Sexton, dean of admissions, elected college delegate for PNACAC: Mike Sexton, dean
Which school does this story apply to?
Anyway, its great to see the experiment.
Hey Alan,
Thanks for the feedback and good questions.
Twitter was chosen because it was honestly the quickest way to try this idea out and we are starting to see more of the students, undergraduate at least, and some staff and alumni, using this particular service. Kind of a “Go to where they live” theory. Along those lines, and in response to the “flimsy” feeling, I don’t expect that most of our followers will consume the stream from the lewisandclark page, but rather items from us will pop up amidst their normal everyday flow on their own home page. Or they import it into facebook, or friendfeed. So a tweet from your friend waxing poetic about their lunch pops up and then up pops an item about a fantastic, interesting or mundane L&C happening. It isn’t all the time and you don’t have to seek it out, but the hard work that is being put into creating web content, telling our stories, or promoting events is distributed a bit more broadly.
I definitely hear what you (and others) are saying about the “eande” feed title, it has already been changed.
As far as headers in general, because this is automated to a great extent, we will get the odd inscrutable post since it is being translated from one medium, like the blog, to another.
Thanks for the school segmentation feedback too, because we do have the power to separate, and decided not to initially. I appreciate your position though, and expect it would be true for others. With a higher volume of postings I can see a situation where the option existed to narrow down the scope of info.
Hey Noah,
I was unsure about this twitter idea at first, but now I think I see where you’re coming from, with this idea that it becomes a part of somebody’s already established online life. I think the idea of making L&C a daily presence is an important idea overall for the College, and in relation to the alumni population in particular. If this stream solidifies into something permanent, is there a plan to publicize it somehow to the community? Or has that already been done?
Best,
Tanya
Tanya,
Definitely. I’d imagine a number of iterations of publicity, feedback gathering, and refinement. And for the other 95% of our audience that doesn’t use twitter, this could become the foundation of an information sharing service that meets them wherever they are, customized from our end for different sites or platforms.