April 14, 2008
Twittershow - Modifying Feedshow to Provide Twitter Powered Presentations
Over the weekend, I came across Twitter presenter, a proof of concept way fo using a Twitter feed as the basis for a presentation inspired by a tweet from @ewanmcintosh: "Can one present by Twit?"
The feedshow link presenter takes and RSS feed in, typically from a social bookmarks site, and uses it to provide a set of links to web pages that are to be talked around during a presentation.
I've been meaning to add an option to feedshow that lets you preface a displayed web page with a comment, provided either by the title or description element of the input feed, so as a step on the way to that, here's a quick proof of concept sideshoot from feedshow - Twittershow (or should that be TweetShow, or even Tweeshow?! (original typo...;-)
If you want to try twittershow out, here's the URL: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/feedshow/t/
If you want to look at just your own tweets, go to your own twitter page - e.g. http://twitter.com/ewanmcintosh - and use the RSS link from that page (e.g. http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/625753.rss).
If you'd rather look at the twitterings of random people based on a search using something like Tweetscan (which also provides an RSS output feed for every search), just use the appropriate feed URL. For example, here's a Tweetshow on "Twitter in education" (from a search on Tweetscan) that uses the feed http://tweetscan.com/rss.php?s=twitter+in+education.
There are obvious usability issues - the show works with a fixed number of only the last so many tweets, there is no auto synching to the twitter feed - but then, I only spent 20 minutes on putting the demo together... and 10 minutes putting this post together...
I also need to pull out any links contained in the tweet, and use them as pagelinks (as for example in a 'normal' feedshow).
Whilst mulling around that idea, it seemed that as an alternative to showing a comment and then the web page, I could maybe provide a caption area underneath the main presentation window, that displays the comment at the same time as the linked to web page?
Don't you just love RSS? ;-)
Tags: feedshow, twittershow
Posted by ajh59 at April 14, 2008 12:24 PMNice :-)
Any way to get live urls into the slideshows? Lots of the long urls are truncated.
I just added a routine that will make anything that looks like a URL a clickable link (though it wonlt be highlighted as a link style wise; you can still click through it though...)
if the link in the tweet is displayed in a truncated form (e.g. something like "http://example.com/a-long-truncated...") then it will of course be broken....
Posted by: Tony Hirst at April 14, 2008 01:16 PM