Twitter and RSS

twitter and rss logos

Twitter has had a great deal of media coverage this month, from worldwide news stories like the Hudson River crash and Obama’s inauguration through to its discussion by Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross (@stephenfry and @wossy respectively) on the latter’s Friday night talk show.

I wanted to share a handy way of using RSS feeds to keep on top of specific Twitter topics of interest.

For example, during the build up to this week’s Learning Technologies conference, there’s been a lot of related activity on Twitter, and to make it easier to find those Tweets, they’ve been tagged as #LT09UK. There are various ways that you can find all Tweets with that tag, such as using the #Hashtags search,  but one of the simplest is to head over to http://search.twitter.com and use the familiar search interface.

That’s okay if you just want to do the search once, but what if you want regular updates? Well, you could simply come back and run the search again, or bookmark the url to make it a one click process. Or you could save time, and use RSS.

Once you’ve run your Twitter search, click on the RSS icon on the left of the page, and add the feed to your reader.

twitter search and rss feed

Now each time you check your feed reader, any new items matching the search criteria will be displayed. You can set up as many searches as you like and subscribe to them all.

Nothing Important to Communicate?

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Setting up this blog is something that has been on my mind for close to a year. That’s an embarrasing confession for someone who spends a great deal of time telling people that starting a blog is easy. There are several reasons that it’s taken so long to go from idea to reality, not the least of which was my decision to go from comfy corporate life to freelance consultant. But there’s more to it than that.

It’s about producing something worthwhile.

I’ve been reading Jupiter’s Travels, the story of Ted Simon’s four year journey around the world by motorcycle back in the 1970′s. Whilst travelling across Africa, he is reading one of Henry Thoreau’s journals, and reaches this conclusion;

“He wrote: ‘We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.’ If Thoreau were alive today he would have full confirmation of his fears. Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting…”.

So with no little trepidation, and keeping those thoughts in mind, it is my hope that this site evolves to be something useful. For those reading, and for me writing it.