The social media response to the 2010 Canterbury Earthquake has been fascinating. I’d like to know more so I’m appealing for people to help with their experiences of social media, its usefulness, how informative it was (or not) etc, during this event. What can we learn?

If you are willing to help, please fill out the form at http://moourl.com/eqnzstudy. Thank you!

The New Zealand twitterverse is still abuzz, as people share information about the 2010 Canterbury Earthquake and its consequences.  Now, 3 days in, these tweets are increasingly about services being restored, relief offers and businesses and organisations exchanging information & aid.

Here I want to make a special mention of the University of Canterbury which has set up a special Twitter account for news about its recovery.

Also interesting to watch organisations like ASB Bank & the NZ Red Cross supporting each other through Twitter.

Most people and official news outlets are now using the hashtag #eqnz, thus consolidating the information flow. As of this afternoon it had been used 18199 times on Tuesday at 6.30pm (updated Tue 07-09-2010).

I’ve been following the use of social media in this event and reported a little about two of the hashtags that were in use in an earlier post. I’ve been RTing useful tweets with the now prevailing #eqnz tag so they get a better spread.

In this process I’ve also received a few nasty tweets and comments about what some are calling “the hashtag war”. One person commenting:

“I don’t want to extend the #eqnz vs #christchurchquake war. I think it is the most stupid bit of fussing when the world is literally falling down around us.”

When the world is falling down around you, you need a few things: water, food, shelter and…information

If you are not a regular social media user, you may well agree. However, when the world is falling down around you, you need a few things: water, food, shelter and…information.  In the early hours, many grabbed their mobile phones (closer to their beds than the battery-powered radios in their survival kits) and went to Twitter, because Twitter is all about sharing information. But to do this effectively, the information must be A. findable, B. usable and C. shareable.

A. Findable

The information that you broadcast through Twitter is publicly available on your Twitter profile page (here’s mine). However very few people will go and visit this page. Instead they will access their own home page, which displays a steady stream of the latest tweets of all the people that they are ‘following’. This stream is updated almost-live, every minute or so.

So now you find yourself in a major event, and you want your information to be findable beyond the 143 odd people that follow you.  You also want to find information from other sources than just the 156 odd people that you follow. Saturday morning at 4.35 they may not have been awake yet. Well, this is where Twitter search but more importantly, hashtags come in. By using a common hashtag (a keyword preceded by the hash symbol) and then doing a search for that hashtag, Twitter users can have a shared conversation beyond the boundaries of their usual Twitter network.

In the case of an event like this, it is impossible to  have a pre-agreed hashtag as people do for eg conferences (see ULearn10 in Christchurch this week). So instead you monitor the wider Twitter stream for a while, doing several searches, until you find common hashtags. In the initial stages you may use 2 or more hashtags, but once a dominant hashtag emerges, it is essential that you use this. If you are the provider of crucial information, eg NZ Civil Defence or a news channel, using the common hashtag is how your tweets will be findable.

B. Usable

The information you broadcast, your tweets, must be usable.  The 140 character limit of a tweet is its strength but also its weakness. For your tweet to be usable in a crisis, it must be immediately informative in those few characters. If you want to share more, then link to a place where the rest of the information can be found. Links can become quite long (not desirable in a tweet) so you use a ‘url shortener‘ to make them an acceptable length (abt 20 characters). Most Twitter applications will do this automatically. If you do make use of links, then also make sure your tweet is an accurate description of what people will find when they click on that link. In a crisis, you don’t want to be wasting anyone’s time.

Informative #eqnz tweet by @siobhanbulfin:

One of the less usable tweets coming from the NZ Civil Defence Twitter account:

C. Shareable

In the case of a major event the information needs to flow, it needs to spread. So you design your tweets to be easily shared. How do you do this?

• Don’t take up too much space with Twitter functionality such as your username. Of course during the event it’s too late to change your name, but if you are about to open a twitter account then consider this: @minedunz would have been 5 characters shorter than @mineducationnz.
• Use the shorter hashtag. Of course you will be driven by the prevailing hashtag, but if you get in early, then encourage the use of the shorter option.
• Use short sentences. It helps to write in the active voice, leaving out definite articles (such as ‘the’) and prefaces eg ‘Cracks in windows.’ rather than ‘There are cracks appearing in the windows”.
• Aim to make your tweet a re-tweetable length when the hashtag is included. The formula for this is: 140 characters – your twittername characters – 4. How does that work? Well 140 characters is standard length for a tweet, but when it’s retweeted, it will include the following: RT @twittername. So that would be 14 characters. However you may want to make it shorter yet to give retweeters some room to add their comments. Often done by adding eg “<- important!” or “<- wow!”. 100 characters is probably a very good length for a tweet in a crisis event to keep it shareable.

So that’s what we can keep in mind for the next earthquake or volcanic eruption, whichever comes first here in New Zealand: we should try to keep our information on Twitter findable, usable & shareable.

With the earthquake in Christchurch yesterday morning, Twitter has become an important source of information, aid, support & humour. And its not just pointless babble (as an aside: the qualification of pointless babble was refuted by the excellent Danah Boyd). Here’s some of  the things people are sharing through their tweets:

• pictures of damage
• videos of the quakes and of damage
• checking in with friends, family & whanau
• reactions & commiseration on the aftershocks, the loss of electricity, the loss of property, the cold
• information on safety eg turn off your gas & power mains
• links to information from the seismic drums at Geonet
• links to news articles (both New Zealand and around the world)
• information about road closures and the curfew last night
• links to public information, eg how to claim for damages with the Earth Quake Commision or which schools are closed on Monday

And the twitterstream is not just being fed by people living in the region, but from across New Zealand and beyond. With all this it can become quite hard to track all this earthquake information or get an overview of it.

So here’s a short demonstration of how I’ve been monitoring the earthquake twitterstream. Hope you find it useful.

Note: most Twitter clients have a version available for smart phones. It’s much easier than tweeting by txting.

This morning at 4.35am I woke up, not quite sure why. But I was wide awake, so I picked up my iPhone and immediately saw a tweet from @kalena: Earthquake!!! So that was what had woken me up. This in itself is not surprising in NZ where we have over 1400 earthquakes a year, about 150 felt by people. But being an immigrant to this country, I get excited about these things and so I went to check the Geonet site. And then I saw the magnitude: 7.4 and not in Wellington or here in the Hawke’s Bay, where we are used to regular earthquakes with magnitude 3-4, and so possibly prepared. But in Christchurch. This was big…

Picture from the Geonet Science site

I returned to the Twitterstream which had now exploded with tweets mentioning “new zealand”, “earthquake” and “christchurch”. And pretty soon the first hashtags started forming: #earthquake, #quakenz, #nzquake, #nz, #christchurch and combinations of these. And of course there was the inevitable question after Indonesia, would there be a #tsunami? By around 5am one hashtag began emerging: #eqnz. Here are the earliest mentions I could find by @noirbp and @rougebp in the Twapperkeeper archive I created for #eqnz:

Why did the #eqnz hashtag prevail?

• It was short, 5 characters (only 1/28th of a 140 tweet).
• It was descriptive, eq= earthquake, nz=specifying its location New Zealand, at a time when it was not quite clear where exactly the epicentre had been.
• This made it an easy tag to remember
• And quick to type,
• It was being used enough by the people who were tweeting at the time to attain critical mass,
• And initially those people used multiple tags in their tweets, to cross-pollinate the different tag streams.

This critical mass was further encouraged as the more expert Twitter users realised that the only way to effectively pool information in a Twitter conversation is to have one (1!) hashtag. And they began gently coaxing other users in to using the #eqnz hashtag. Often this is called the ‘official hashtag’ even though it is not in any way endorsed by an authority…

Why the #christchurchquake tag failed

Then at around 6am, out of nowhere, came a new tag: #christchurchquake. It was used by@mrsgooding and @fmcampers for a few tweets, but then adopted at 6am by the official twitter account for NZ’s Civil Defence authority: @nzcivildefence. This account is followed by 2,800+ followers and so could weigh in as an official, regularly updated source of information.  Unfortunately the account seems to be run by a bot, and is updated only hourly with information from the website.

Why it failed?

• At 18 characters, it was way too long. It takes up 1/8 of a tweet. Even #ccquake would have been better,
• It takes too long to type, particularly if you are submitting your tweets via a mobile phone,
• It came too late, after other tags were already established
• Not many people outside of New Zealand know where or what Christchurch is,
• It wasn’t being promoted often enough, the Civil Defence only using it once an hour.

So who decides the hashtag for an event?

Well from the evidence of today, it seems it’s not just those who are first to the party that decide the hashtags, and not even the officially invited guests, but those who stay at the party and mingle a lot in an easy manner.

How do you participate?

What can you do as a civil authority, service provider, tv station or newspaper to ensure you are a contributing and consuming part of the information stream by using the ‘correct’ or at least prevailing hashtag or hashtags?

• Make this someone’s job
• Ensure that person is an avid twitter/social media user and understands its dynamics
• Don’t just let this person broadcast. Also let them read, listen and respond during the crisis…
• See whether there is a tag already trending for your crisis (a few Twitter searches will tell) and use that
• If there is a clash of hashtags and you have the clout, try to force a decision (can only be done if you are actively involved in the stream and are perceived as having some authority)
• Who is tweeting a lot? Who is influencing the twitterstream? Listen & respond to these people
• Build up your Twitter following during non-crisis times, again not just in a broadcast capacity. Ensure you are already connected to major Twitter players in your geographical and specialist area.

Here’s an example of the NZ Herald twitter account beginning to us its ‘clout’ around 10am (5 hours into the event) and choosing a hashtag. They are now using #eqnz.

Earthquake New Zealand Hashtag Wars: Who Won?

As of 3pm, the score stood at #eqnz: 6847 tweets v #christchurchquake: 502 tweets. Oh and we’re still not trending worldwide on Twitter. That honour goes to Duke Nukem and #camprock2…

Last week Friday I started a fun little Twitter event called Tour de Moodle. Interested in seeing other people’s Moodle setups, layouts and themes, I asked people to share a link to their Moodle homepage.

Tour de Moodle tweetout

I thought it would be a perfect end-of-year activity, but last weekend was embarrasingly quiet (cue: tumbleweeds). However, after a week the Tour de Moodle now seems to be getting a little traction (thanks to @adzebill, @moodleman, @moodlerific, @dafyddhumphreys and @joseph_thibault).

You can see the stops the Tour de Moodle has made so far at What the Hashtag (my favourite twitter archiver at the moment): http://wthashtag.com/Tourdemoodle

Participating is easy, just send out a tweet including:

• a link to your organisation’s Moodle homepage
• the hashtag #tourdemoodle
• the hashtag #moodle
• optional: “Pls share yr Moodle too”

Looking forward to watching your Moodles race by! Currently the yellow jersey holder is @kineoopensource.

I love serendipitous learning. This week I followed the ASCILITE Conference held in Auckland on Twitter (am still kicking myself for not being there). There’s many thoughts, links & ideas I need to follow up on with regards to education technology in higher education. But what I love about  the powered up information exchange between people who share a passion that builds around an event like this, is the accidental or perhaps offhand tips that get shared that otherwise you’d never find out about.

An example of this today was a Twitter exchange between James Clay & Mark Smithers. Although they were discussing the role of IT departments in higher education, in passing James suggested that Mark install WPTouch for Wordpress so his blog would render better on an iPhone.

I hadn’t optimised my blog yet so decided to install WPTouch as well. It took me about 5 seconds to install and it makes my site look just shiny on the iPhone. Thanks James!

Over the next few months I will be testing an iPhone for work. They’ve asked me to make a project out of it, so I’ll blog about issues & opportunities I encounter in iPhone use here. This is now my first post for this project – check!

The leading thinkers on Open Education gathered in Vancouver last week for the OpenEd09 conference.  It was a sight & sound to behold – an open storm. Ustreams, Flickr pics and a Twitter avalanche, meant many of us around the world felt part of the event, as virtual attendees. (I got up at 4am in New Zealand on Saturday, to watch the Friday keynote at 9am Vancouver time.)

Social media are such an extension of conferences and events. Pre-social media we used to hear from the 15-20 selected speakers at a conference. And probably about the bunions of the man you were unfortunate enough to sit down next to at lunch and were unable to ditch. Now we can hear from everyone at the conference, and select those we want to hear more from. For 6 days, the #opened09 column in my Tweetdeck dispensed precious ideas & information. I began following new people, feverishly bookmarking urls and favouriting tweets for follow-up.

my #opened09 fav tweets in Tweetdeck

And that’s where I hit a snag – the tweets.

1. My favourite tweets don’t make much sense without the context of the other tweets. And unfortunately, the Twitter search is ephemeral and will not let you retrieve those later. It’ll let you set extensive date parameters, but these don’t give you the desired results.  This was a harsh lesson from  the EDUCAUSE Australasia conference in Perth this year, which was one of the first well-tweeted events I attended. We lost a lot of witty and valuable tweets…

2. And a more academic problem -  some #opened09 tweets are such gems, I’ll likely want to quote and re-quote them. How do I give credit where credit is due and correctly reference a tweet?

But then I came across Gunther Eysenbach How to cite twitter, how to cite tweets, how to archive tweets which solves both problems. In it he gives a detailed how-to of the WebCite service which not only gives you the correct reference for a website, but perhaps more importantly, also creates a permanent archive for that site. And it works for tweets too.

So I can reference and archive Scott Leslie’s individual tweet like this:

A favourite opened09 tweet by Scott Leslie

Leslie, Scott. Twitter / Scott Leslie: are you supposed to get ch… . 2009-08-18. URL:http://twitter.com/sleslie/statuses/3310928225. Accessed: 2009-08-18. (Archived by WebCite^® at http://www.webcitation.org/5j7I0nnKZ)

or the entire Twitter stream for the #opened09 hashtag like this:

[Multiple Authors]. #opened09 – Twitter Search. . 2009-08-18. URL:http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23opened09. Accessed: 2009-08-18. (Archived by WebCite^® at http://www.webcitation.org/5j79icRhc)

These archived tweets are now static at WebCite so they can be referred to and retrieved. Of course, that was 2 hours ago. The #opened09-ers go on. Even as I’ve been writing this post, the Twitter search tab is showing 7 new results ’since you started searching’…

I’ve just transferred my blog from Edublogs to this new location. The last post on the old blog was about Twitter Mosaic. Unfortunately the mosaic was a. broken and b. hopelessly out of date. So yes I’m re-hashing an old post, but it’s for a reason.

A Twitter Mosaic is easy to create. Just type your Twitter username, choose between Twitter Followers or Twitter Friends and the site creates a mosaic out of their avatars. You can then edit it, removing those you don’t want (you may follow @BBCNews but it’s not really your friend, is it?) and your mosaic is done.

You can copy & past the code to embed it in a website. But of course, the clever people at Twitter Mosaic are also willing to print it on cards, mugs, bags, mouse pads and t-shirts.

I will admit I am sorely tempted by the mug so I could take my PLN to morning tea with me. (Obviously with only my tablet pc and my iPhone, I don’t come across as nearly geeky enough in the staff room). However last time I checked it came down to NZ$60 incl shipping. Apparently printing anything Twitter-related on anything, is still good business.

Get your twitter mosaic here.