Twitter Annotations

After my post about Learning Design Summer Camp, Twitter, and building context from backchannel conversations, CogDog commented with a pointer to an amazing post by Tony Hirst that explains how to overlay Tweets on youtube video. Since my colleague Pat Besong had mentioned to me yesterday that the videos were starting to go up to the TLT YouTube space I thought I'd give it a try. I followed the directions which include using the advanced Twitter search to isolate a series of Tweets, running them through a script, and then uploading them as a CC track in YouTube -- worked fairly well with only a few limitations.

I didn't do the entire series of tweets from the Lightning Round, but I do enough as a test to see it in action. I'll try pulling this off with a larger session where there were hundreds of tweets blasting around the room. This has tremendous potential in my mind ... the ability to reconnect the backchannel to the actual event is an amazing step forward in preserving pieces of the event as it was experienced live. I can envision not only using the Tweets, but also targeting blog posts that reference specific moments by overlaying annotations. This requires some more exploration. Thanks, CogDog!

For now, take a look at the video and don't forget to enable the closed captioning.

Comments

[Alan Levine]

Hey that's very cool you did the annotation, but please, c'mon, give much more credit where it is due! Give the credit to Tony Hirst:

http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/easier-twitter-powered-subtitles-for-youtube-movies/

the Mashup God, who not only conceived the twitter annotating YouTube idea, but explained it in his usual lavish illustrated how to detail.

All I did was point you to his post.

[Cole Camplese]

Sorry, CogDog ... I thought I had given him the love with the "... CogDog commented with a pointer to an amazing post by Tony Hirst that explains how to overlay Tweets on youtube video." I should have mentioned the "Mashup God" title. My bad! It is an amazing concept and one that needs to be explored in greater depth. I am going to do a longer video today that had much more activity behind it. Thanks again for the pointer to the amazing mashup king, Tony Hirst!

[Mathieu Plourde]

Hi Cole,

This is definitely something to explore, but be aware that Twitter now purges his search result so fast that you need to retrieve the Tweets almost as soon as your event is over. I got burnt with the Sakai conference at the beginning of July because none of the Tweets are available in the Twitter search anymore.