Tag Archives: Micro-blogging

Tumblr

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Tumblr is an example of a tumblelog. What’s a tumblelog? It is a type of microblogging platform that some people say is better than Twitter.

Tumblr home
Tumblr home

Wikipedia describes tumblelogs as

  • a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs are frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary.

Tumblr specifically lets you share your links, photos and thoughts via your browser, phone or email.

Tumblelogs are being used for creative and artistic reasons such as displaying artwork and photos. It could be used in school libraries for quick book reviews, photos of displays or links for particular assignments. Students would not be able to sign up for a Tumblr account as it restricts users to those over 18 years of age.  However, the Tumblr site is visually attractive and could be of some to use to school libraries.

Plurk

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Plurk is a tool that enables members to have an online social conversation with multiple friends. You can join conversations by topic, or use the micro blogging tool to send ‘plurks’ which use a maximum of 140 characters (like Twitter). Updates from friends are shown on your page as a timeline in chronological order.

Homepage

Homepage

Plurk’s aim is to introduce a balance between blogs and wikis, instant messaging and email. Users of the micro blogging tool use verbs to explain how they are feeling.

Example

Example

There is a great wiki that lists schools and other educational institutions that are using Plurk. The wiki provides links to the projects that the schools are undertaking, and currently there are at least seven Australian schools, with three of those from Victoria. Many of the projects linked to the wiki are outstanding and definitely worth investigating. If you like the sound of Plurk and you’d like to learn more about how it works, click here.

Twitter – a quick communication tool

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Twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ tool that lets you send and receive short messages. Tweets, or messages, contain no more than 140 characters including punctuation and spaces, so messages have to be short and sweet. The information you send in your message is meant to answer the question, ‘What are you doing?’ 

Twitter
Twitter

You can invite contacts to join Twitter and you can decide who can read your updates. Your updates can be displayed on your Twitter homepage, sent via email, instant messaging, RSS, (SMS but this is currently only available in USA, Canada, UK and India) and to Facebook pages. You can also set Twitter to ‘quiet time’ when you don’t want to be interrupted, or you’re just sick of being able to be contacted all of the time.

Twitter could be a useful tool for colleagues working together in different locations, or for students collaborating on projects.  Other applications such as authoring tools, mashups, search engines and voice to Twitter (Twitterfone) have been developed to complement Twitter. However, not all of the applications have been devised by the people behind Twitter. The Twitter Blog is a useful tool that lists a range of Twitter applications. The blog keeps up to date with what’s hot and it also provides a dictionary of ‘Twitter lingo’.