Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Wednesday 26 October 2011

If you're using Storify for conference or event tweets you *might* be doing it a bit wrong-ish, suggest Chirpstory :)

Well obviously I don't mean to be rude, you can choose whatever method you prefer of course but hear me out :)

I follow quite a few conference / event hashtags and have noticed that people often use the Storify tool / website to capture them. This is fine if there aren't too many tweets - as far as I can tell you still have to move each tweet individually (I've written a post over at Free Pint's FUMSI on how to use Storify) but two problems arise when the conference generates a lot of tweets (1) there's the danger that in clicking and dragging so many you'll get them out of order* and (2) it's a bit hard work.

*You can double click to move a tweet to the top, and if you hold down the shift key before double clicking the tweet will snap to the bottom of the list.

For larger numbers of tweets I've found Chirpstory to be the more pragmatic choice. You can move a page worth of tweets (I think it's 20 tweets [edit: I counted, it's 50]) so rather than having to do something to each one of 100 tweets you want to collect you can do it five times to five pages of them.

As well as that you can click a button to reverse the order of the tweets meaning that you can read the earliest tweet first.

I think Chirpstory is best suited to occasions when you want to bunch a couple to a few hundred tweets together as a record of an event and Storify seems best suited to fewer tweets where you want to add further commentary. You can add commentary in Chirpstory too but I prefer the Storify interface for that.

Obviously it does come down to personal preference but just in case you weren't aware of Chirpstory...

No Chirpstory don't pay me, I just find it a really really useful tool (as I do Storify) and I'm always on the lookout for info about tweet wrangling tools - see also A list of tools for finding or capturing tweets (30 May 2011, updated 14 October 2011)

3 comments:

  1. It just seems that for both methods there are still always WAY too many tweets. I think Storify is fine, but I don't need to see *all* the tweets from an event. Especially not the "lunch is starting now!" or "I'm on way to the event!" tweets, which lose relevance within minutes after they've been posted.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Eva

    Yes - if only a few tweets are of interest then both methods work easily well and it's pretty much the same sort of method to capture them individually.

    I am just lazy and prefer to do my processing-by-scrolling through the ones I don't want to read rather than attend to them in detail to decide whether or not to collect them ;)

    Jo

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  3. Thanks Jo
    I hadn't heard of chirpstory , I think it will be useful for events where there isn't much in the way of visual conent etc which I like to add in Storify.
    Lorna

    ReplyDelete

Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.

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