David Wescott of It’s Not a Lecture wrote a post called Green Tweeting, which was inspired by my Green Twitter post. He went a step further than I did and thought about what could be done with the RSS feeds of the individuals postings about the environment on Twitter. To be perfectly honest, it did not even occur to me to do this and I am a little jealous of David for having the idea. I am, however, glad that he shared his article with me (through twitter, of course).
David used the twitter feeds, excluded news sources such as the BBC or feeds that were solely blog postings, and aggregated them using Yahoo Pipes. The purpose of this was to create a discussion of environmental issues. By doing this not only did he attempt to create the conversation but he also created a feed that he was able to post on the sidebar of his blog.
The problem with this method is that the people posting about the environment on twitter are not only discussing the environment. They are individuals with a variety of interests and are posting on a variety of topics. So, David’s aggregated feed is gathering all of the postings of those interested in the environment but the feed is not solely about the environment. This is fine if you want to aggregate the postings of a subset of twitter users but does not work so well if you only want information about the environment. I suppose, however, you don’t want a discussion to only be on one topic. If my friends only discussed one issue with me repeatedly, I would probably get tired of talking to them.
Do I have a solution to this? No, I don’t. I am not sure how to filter out the “noise” and create an aggregated twitter feed that is only on one topic. But, then, I am certainly not an aggregation or filtering expert so maybe one of my readers can point me in the right direction. Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas?
And thanks to David’s article, I now have some more users to add to the list of Green Twits and to the opml file.
Thanks Kim – you raise an interesting point here. The “green tweeters” are absolutely talking about a whole host of topics, and if you’re looking for a 100 percent eco-talk feed, this isn’t it. (Chris Baskind’s environment room at FriendFeed might be a better place for that.) But I do think this might teach us a little bit about both the green community (at least this particular group) and about how people use Twitter.
It’s interesting to know which tweeters are singularly focused on eco-stuff and which ones use twitter to share other (perhaps more personal or informal) information. It’s also interesting to compare the discussion from this crowd on Twitter with the discussion taking place in a separate social media channel like a blog. If we took the feed of your opml file and ran it through a cloud generator – like I do on the blog Virtual Vantage Points for a number of online communities – and compared it to the cloud generated by this new Green Tweet feed, I bet the clouds would look a bit different.
A bit nerdy perhaps, but interesting and hopefully illustrative of both the community and the tools they use. Thanks so much for getting this line of thinking started!
David Wescotts last blog post – Alltop