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March 29, 2007
Using Twitter to Fight Cyberbullies
Those of you who have been following my blog for the last month know that I've been experimenting a lot with the group messaging service Twitter. It's been a great way to keep in touch with colleagues, though it borders on the addictive. Lots of folks have been playing around with ways to enhance the value of Twitter, coming up with various tools that interface with it. I've started using one of these tools, TwitterFeed, to create a Twitter account that sends out messages for news and resources related to Stop Cyberbullying Day, which begins in less than two hours. (Actually, if you're in Europe or further east, it already is Stop Cyberbullying Day, so I might as well start contributing now, right?)
TwitterFeed is a fairly simple idea - it lets you take any RSS feed and send its contents out over a Twitter account. So let's say you have an RSS feed for your blog. If you wanted to, you could send out bits of each blog post to your Twitter friends, who in turn would receive it via text messaging, instant messaging or over the Web, depending on their preference. So I decided to set up a Stop Cyberbullying Twitter account for the express purpose of sending out all the content bloggers and other Internet users are tagging as related to activities surrounding the campaign. First, I took a bunch of RSS feeds from sites like Technorati, del.icio.us, Google News and YouTube, all tailored to include content about cyberbullying. I then mixed them together into a single feed using the tool FeedDigest, then took that feed and supplied it to TwitterFeed.
In theory, TwitterFeed will post all new content from those feeds about once an hour, but it doesn't seem to be working that way so far, possibly because FeedDigest takes a while to update as well. Still, the process is beginning to work, with a number of cyberbullying resources going out through the Twitter account I created. If I could only get FeedDigest and TwitterFeed to update more than once an hour each, this could be an interesting way for anyone to get specially tailored information collected through RSS feeds out to a large audience, whether they prefer to receive the information via the Web, text messaging or instant messaging. Pretty cool, huh? -andy
Tags: cyberbullying | instant messaging | RSS | SMS | stopcyberbullying | text messaging | Twitter
Posted by acarvin at March 29, 2007 10:21 PM
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