My first experience at a Twitter enhanced presentation

October 1, 2009 by Colby · Comments
Filed under: Nutrition 2.0, Twitter in presentations

Last Thursday, I went to see Michael Pollan at the Kohl Center in Madison. It was a great talk, and my first time seeing him speak in person. The 7,000+ in attendance gave it an energy that made it well worth attending even though it was available through an online stream. But if I couldn’t have caught it in person or online, there was another option to follow what he was saying: Twitter.

I have read plenty of accounts of Twitter tags being used at conferences to update those who cannot attend with what is being discussed, and meet and have conversations with others attending. No nutrition conferences or lectures/presentations have caught my attention, though they very may well occur (please let me know if you have good examples).

Tonight before he started, they put up a turn off your cell phones sign but feel free to tweet #gobigread. For those who are not familiar with Twitter hashtags, they allow others to add to a conversation by displaying all tweets with the tag on a page, for example: http://twitter.com/#search?q=#gobigread. You just search for the hashtag they give you to view what others are saying and add it to the end of your tweets if you want everyone to see it.

Someone under the account @GoBigRead tweeted during the talk the main points that he was saying. And others using the #gobigread tag could also add content to the stream as well. Services like Twitterfall or Tweetchat allow for live streaming of tags if you want to follow in real time, or other clients are only slightly delayed.

After the presentation, I checked what was being posted and found many additional perspectives and links to articles that further expanded my understanding on what people from different backgrounds think of Pollan’s ideas that I would not have without Twitter.

Tags: Twitter

Finding nutrition Twitter users

September 16, 2009 by Colby · Comments
Filed under: Finding people on social media, Nutrition 2.0

Here are a few ways to discover nutritionists on Twitter.

This is a recent general nutrition group I created on TweepML, which allows for easy following of a large group of people with one click.

Click here to add yourself or others to the list.

Twibes has a number of nutrition groups: http://www.twibes.com/search?q=nutrition&search=Search

Add yourself to a wiki I created to better categorize nutrition related users: http://recomp.com/wiki/index.php5?title=Nutrition_2.0

Submit yourself or others from this form and I will add it for you.

The following are more difficult to find quality informational sources because they rank by follower number and are not human moderated:

http://wefollow.com/twitter/nutrition

http://www.twellow.com/search?q=nutrition&search_cat=

Please forward this page to followers; these lists will help those getting started easily find people to follow.

If you know of other good lists, let me know and I will add them to the Directories page.

Tags: tweepml, twellow, twibes, Twitter, wefollow, wiki

Sharing from Google Reader to Twitter

September 8, 2009 by Colby · Comments
Filed under: RSS

If you are like me, you might use an RSS reader like Google Reader to keep track of many nutrition blogs, news feeds, and pubmed queries.

Often I run into interesting articles that my Twitter followers might like to read. A single click on the Share button shares the article with followers on Reader, and is published to a public RSS feed, where it can be forwarded elsewhere.

I use FriendFeed which shows my Shared Reader items to auto-publish them to my Twitter account , but not everyone uses FriendFeed nor wants to.

Someone recently wrote a script to take advantage of Reader’s support of pubsubhubbub, posting Shared articles in Reader immediately to your Twitter account. Try it out: http://reader2twitter.appspot.com/

Tags: google reader, Twitter