At the impromptu Blogging 101 session at my apartment I asked the group to keep the dialogue going and to get in touch if they had further questions or needed to be walked through anything on a one-to-one basis.  I had a request from Laura last night for some twitter instructions, I watched over 15 YouTube how-to’s meaning to just link something but couldn’t’ find any I liked, so I replied with a step-by-step email to the group instead, and thought I would post it here too.

(d) or online via your phone – not available for all – from m.twitter.com

• If you want to put a url in your update, most people shorten it by using a service called tinyurl http://tinyurl.com/
• If you want to refer to a person within your update put @ before their name – example http://twitter.com/alexjohnson100/statuses/923955330 this creates a hyperlink so that other people can click through to the mentioned person’s profile automatically
• This is also useful as some people have updates set up on their phone so that they can get a text everytime someone mentions their name, film, or any other keyword that they’ve chosen
• This is something you can do too by setting up a tracking system on your phone or IM (Instructions here – scroll down to second post http://blog.twitter.com/2007_09_01_archive.html)
• If you want to mention a place use # before the location – example https://twitter.com/saskiawb/statuses/890356597
• There are two ways to communicate on twitter

(a) through your friends timeline – if you see something you want to respond to click the arrow on the right – this is important as it creates a trail of responses that other readers can track back if they want to
(b) As above – refer to someone by name, using the @ system

• Obviously the more people you have following you the better as it means that your community is larger, and everytime you post something it turns up in more peoples’ timelines – there are several ways to do this

(a) follow people – they will likely receive an email that you are following them and this prompts them to check out your profile and follow you
(b) become involved in discussions – you become more visible to the community if that person responds, as their friends will see the response on their timeline – it’s a public forum – don’t be shy
(c) outside of twitter – post your twitter url (twitter.com/alexjohnson100)

I’ve been pushing both Natalya and the group to embrace documenting the process of what we’re doing for a variety of reasons.  I’d sent out a bunch of emails over the last week describing why, and with links to various examples and how-tos but felt that for the half of the group that worked in interactive – but are new to writing – it was just noise and for the other half – who are completely new to online – that a lot of it was confusing and difficult to get a handle on.

The Astral Apartments, Greenpoint

So Natalya and I decided to set up an informal, last minute workshop at my – newly moved into – Greenpoint, Brooklyn apartment (I live in the notorious Astral) for me to run the group through the reasoning behind: digital content creation, transparency and working across different platforms, the importance of being consistent and finding a personable voice, how writing (blogging) within an interactive context differs to a more traditional approach to text, how to find an angle/hook to a story, decision making about what and how to document and the value proposition of building both an individual and group following.

There were some interesting and very good questions – for instance, Jane wanted to know how to find her voice on Twitter and Andy questioned why it was important to both blog (editorial, past, reflective) and microblog / livestream (real time, unedited thoughts).

Jane taped me speaking for my own records but I decided to post the video here in case it might be useful to others.  What follows is Internet 101 but there may be some insights that people are able to use.  You will also see us talking privately about some of our intentions about how to brand the project.  It might seem contrary to make this public, but I do so in the nature of what we’re trying to achieve.

Video pending

Videos we viewed from As The Dust Settles:

and Mickipedia:

I was really pleased with how excited the group became over the possibilities once they were explained, how quickly they caught on and their keenness to experiment, even suggesting another meeting to regroup and exchange stories about what worked for them and what didn’t.

After the camera was turned off they also discussed ways that the offline audience might be able to interact with us/story during the live performance via different types of technology use, and different ways we could utilize devices and services/platforms to make the audience feel involved and closer to the creatives both leading up to, and during the event, which was great to hear. Though Andy was hesitant about how personally open he wanted to be publicly – a valid, and common, concern – their excitement and inspiration overall was a real validation for the work I put in – including the unread explanatory emails!

And my response to solving the noise/isolated experience of email reading?  I’m going to have them start to use Tangler, a real time discussion forum with a desktop notifier – that way I’ll know for sure!