When is the best time to tweet your blog post?

I got thinking today about the fact that many people read blog posts because they pick them up in their Twitter feed, and there seems to have been a shift away from RSS readers.
So if you write a blog post, what is the best way to let people know about it? If you tweet it, there's a good chance that many of your followers are not online at that point in time. If you keep tweeting it, do you run the risk of over-doing it?


I figured there must be some sort of netiquette for this sort of thing, so I googled it. I came across this post which asks exactly that: "How many times should you tweet your blog post?" They quote @GuyKawasaki who suggests tweeting four times, eight hours apart. Among the reasons are the fact that your followers live in different timezones, and, as mentioned above, they are not always online anyway.


Then I wondered, are there any particular times of the day when tweets are most read? Surely someone has asked this question before. Sure enough, googling this question got me 164,000,000 hits! I came across @danzarrella the 'Social Media Scientist' who suggests tweeting late in the day and late in the week for the highest click-through rates.


Malcolm Cole did some research concluding that 4:01pm is the best time to tweet if you want to be noticed. The Social Media Guide, on the other hand, recommends 9am Pacific Standard Time, because it works well in three other timezones in the USA and UK. Unfortunately that corresponds to 4am here in New Zealand, and at that time I usually have better things to do than tweet.


So what is the upshot of all this? 

• It's ok to tweet about your blog post more than once, to give people a chance to see it. Maybe four times over two days?
• Afternoons and evenings might be best, especially nearer the end of the week - but you can't please every timezone.
• Obsessing over this kind of thing means one's life is a little out of balance!

Tweet freely for others and blog freely for yourself - can't go wrong.

Priceless

Says it all really...

(Image from http://despair.com/)

Political Pinocchios on Wikipedia

I had to laugh watching the news this evening: a government minister, Richard Worth is currently involved in a conflict-of-interest scandal, (which is not really all that uncommon for  a politician). The thing that made me laugh was that he was exposed as having edited his own entry on Wikipedia so that it noted not a 'potential conflict of interest' but a 'perception' of one! In doing so he earned a telling off by the websites editors. 

On the same page is a story about a Labour MP who fell victim to an April Fool's prank when someone set up a Twitter account in his name and started 'tweeting' from the House that he was upset about not being able to ask more questions. He accused a 'right-wing blogger' of pulling the prank.

It made me wonder how many other politicians have been caught out by web 2.0. Worth is certainly not the first politician to realise that web 2.0 has a huge amount of power to control discourse, and also not to realise that there are so many observers in cyberspace that this kind of malarky is unlikely to go unnoticed. You just can't get away with editing out all the embarrassing stuff from your Wikipedia entry!

This site has tips for budding politicians on how to avoid embarrassing themselves on Facebook, and this article (referring to Twitter) claims that, "Finally the Web has generated a product that is shallow and narcissistic enough for (politicians') needs."

Anyway, the education connection: this story (and the others like it) show us how important it is to teach our learners to be critical consumers of information on the Internet. How many of our learners know that anyone can edit Wikipedia, and the implications for the accuracy of the information found there (which some studies have shown to be incredibly high)? Perhaps more importantly, how many of them know that if you do make changes, the changes are recorded for all to see?

How do our learners know that the person whose tweets they are reading really is that person? I believe that the learners who have learned in an environment where these tools are used all the time (and used appropriately) are going to be so much more aware of how they can be misused as well. Those who know their way around a wiki will read other wikis more critically and know to check the history and discussions.

Those politicians running for office when our students are old enough to vote: Beware! If we as teachers do our job properly, you won't get much past them!

Twitter, TED and terrorists

I've just been watching Evan Williams on TED, recorded in February this year. For those of you who don't know, Williams was one of the co-founders of Twitter and Blogger (both started as side projects, as he explains).

The focus of his talk is the concept of Twitter itself and how its uses have been adapted by its users (now numbering an estimated 4-5 million) since it was launched in March 2006.

Some of the more interesting factoids he mentions are that plants (yes, plants) can tweet for water, and even babies can tweet when still in the womb! Talk about digital natives...

He ends his talk on a hopeful note, saying, "When you give people more ways to share information, more good things happen."

To demonstrate the power of the tool, by end of talk over 50 tweets about the talk itself were already on Twitter, providing an instant feedback mechanism (for better or worse, as you'll see at the end).

I hope he's right about more good things happening when people share information. That's our hope in education, of course.  I'm not so sure the US military shares the enthusiasm, according to this report in the Washington Post, which claims that this very 'information sharing' capability could lead to Twitter being used as a tool by terrorists! They give three examples of how this could occur, which I couldn't help but think was just giving the terrorists ideas!

The nature of web 2.0 tools makes them neutral in the hands of their users. Is this malevolent kind of use inevitable?