twitter – a space for grace

I have just had a great experience testing out Screenr – a free, screen capture Twitter app that allows you to add audio and create a short tutorial.

I watched the 1 minute tutorial on their site and was able to proceed without any problems.

Here is my demo masterpiece:

You can tweet your creation immediately, or save it for later and tweet it manually. The appliation provides you the code to embed it in your blog or website, has a button so you can upload it to YouTube or allows you to download it as an mp4 file.

One thing to remember is that everything created is public and goes on to the public feed. Before I knew this I thought – wouldn’t it be a great way to add some voice to photos and share pictures with distant friends, etc.

This was my experiment – since it’s now public I might as well share it here:

I can see Screenr being an extremely useful tool in providing “how-to” answers to patrons – how to log on to a database, how to create an RSS feed. It’s so fast to make a screen capture tutorial you can create and share it almost instantly.

I think it would also be great for academic librarians providing service to distance students, or creating content to add to online courses.

Going through this week’s discovery excercise I was already quite familiar with iGoogle, delicious, and Twitter. I set up an iGoogle tab with RSS feeds of all my 559 classmates blogs and I love it! It looks great – you can see the most recent three headlines from every blog laid out in its own box and they all sit together on one page under the tab 559 Social Media. If my computer weren’t so technically challenged I’d post a screenshot for you.

To learn something new, and for purposes of comparison, I thought I’d set up a Bloglines account. Lo and behold, when I entered my email I already had one. But I couldn’t remember the password, so I started fresh with a different email. I have to say the Bloglines experience wasn’t as good for me, perhaps this is why I abandoned it in the first place – I have a list of the 559 blogs under My Feeds, but it was not nearly as intuituve to set up as iGoogle and I only see the title and number of posts, no headlines. For attractiveness and ease of use my vote goes to iGoogle. As an information professional it’s valuable to know about the benefits and constraints of these different current awareness tools because it’s something you can educate your clients about, via individual consultation or group workshops. In fact I think that is where I set up my Bloglines account – in a drop-in Web 2.0 workshop that was given by a BCIT Librarian. She has made quite a reputation for herself at BCIT as a 2.0 authority and bolstered the library’s credibility as well.

Twitter is a great tool for pushing information out to people. The information professional can let followers know what resources and services they offer. In an age when so many of our offerings are virtual they need to promoted because without a physical presence they can easily be overlooked, or lost in the abundance of virtual information. Our library has used Twitter primarily as a marketing tool (twitter.com/bcitlib) promoting our hours, workshops, new titles, websites of interest and contests, etc. However I can see there is an opportunity to track and contribute to Twitter conversations about an organization and it’s projects.