Take Twitter 101 at University?

University Lecturers at Griffin University, Australia are to start teaching a new course all about Twitter. The move will see Journalism students take a manadory course in Twitter that is aimed at improving the quality of young people tweets, which according to senior lecturer Jacqui Ewart lack “depth.”

The introduction of the course was met with mixed reports from students with some even saying that it was a “waste of time”. Surprisingly some even commented that they didn’t know what Twitter was!

This is a very positive move by a University Journalism course to embrace new media into the curriculum and see that the way we interact with news is changing and has to change in order to keep up with the fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

[From: The Sydney Morning Herald]

Real-Time Search via Bing and Google

Twitter have signed a deal with Microsoft and Google that will see real-time search of twitter status’ come to Bing and Google Search.

The deal will not only increase the ongoing rivalry between Google and Microsoft but will allow users to search on either search and have their result include up-to-date tweets from Twitter users anywhere in the world.

Microsoft have already created their Twitter Search function and it will enable users to search by trending topics as well as seeing general results in their search including tweets in chronological order. (I’ve not been able to test this as it doesn’t seem to be functioning in the UK yet – any UK users tried this yet?)

Google have said they will implement their Twitter Search shortly.

Marissa Myers, writing in on the Official Google Blog about the deal with Twitter, said

“the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favourite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information”

How to making your blog post stand out.

Everyday some great blog posts get missed by the masses. Authors (bloggers) write some amazing posts which get lost into the ether even though they reach out to their readers. With serivces such as Twitter and RSS feeds, it’s easier than ever to get a blog’s content to users but still a large of proportion of great content doesn’t grab people’s attentions and so doesn’t get read.

I read a lot a RSS feeds and scan through thousands of tweets everyday from a massive variety of sources. With restrictions on people’s time it’s only the posts that stand out in someone’s RSS feed or Twitter stream that will be read. I’m no different. After a long drawn day today of reformating and reinstalling on my main machine I had some time to catch up on all of my feeds, some 400 potention articles and posts (I kid you not) but I only ended up reading around 10 of them. Why? Because those 10 had post titles that stood out and completely grabbed by attention, stopping me from skimming on through to the next post.

You can easily grab someone’s attention and make them read your work by starting out with a great title. Don’t just slap any old thing up there but take sometime to think it through. You shouldn’t spend hours thinking your post’s title but at least give it some of your attention, it might just make the difference between your work being read or ignored.

Image by Dr Stephen Dann