A Real Time Journal

As part of presentation that I'm preparing for NFAIS (the National Federation of Science Abstracting and Indexing Services, AKA the Federation) on mobile delivery of content (see here for details), I'm planning to discuss the importance of real time tools for authors, publishers and resellers. Real time tools provide a way to update consumers about your content. More importantly,  they provide feedback that ensures that the content stays relevant. 

I thought it would be fun to set up a Twitter account to provide an example of how it can add value to existing content and media. The focus of this test will be the area of neuroscience. Let's see how far I can get!

The rules: 

1. I won't spend more than 10 minutes a day on this project; 
2. I won't use any expensive services to move things along faster;
3. I'll report on the results every day for the next two weeks.

Ready, Set ... Go!

I need to set up a gmail account so that I can point Twitter and other web service tools to it. I also want to create a Twitter account with a catchy name. I try a couple variations of "neuro"  and find a combination that is available on Twitter: "neuronow". I create the gmail account first and then use the new gmail address to create the Twitter account. When I create the account, I skip all the parts that relate to following friends, or celebrities on Twitter's Suggested Users List. 

Next, I need to start sending tweets that are interesting to potential neuroscience readers. I'm not a neuroscientist, so I'm going to start with an already curated list of information about the subject. If you're an expert on a topic, you'd probably use your own blogroll of websites that talk about the aspects of your subject that you're interested in. 

I'll use Guy Kawasaki's curated information site Alltop for this experiment. Going to www.alltop.com, I search for "neuroscience" and get this page:

 

I'll use this combined feed of relevant neuroscience information at http://neuroscience.alltop.com/rss. The next step is to get it into Twitter.

I've used Twitterfeed before, so I'll use it today. Twitterfeed is a website that converts RSS feeds into Twitter tweets. I go to Twitterfeed.com and set up an account. During the setup, I sync my "neuronow" Twitter account to Twitterfeed. Then I paste in the RSS link for the neuroscience feed from Alltop.

I set the settings to get a lot of tweets on the account right away.

I'm ready to go (oops, took about thirty minutes this time, I'll work on that). I'll review how the twitters are going and start to follow people in Twitter tomorrow.