Yesterday I received an email from #publichealthninja Camilo Erazo with a social media toolkit for a health and poverty conference taking place in Chile.  Not yet speaking Spanish (I'm working on it), I couldn't follow the program.  The hashtag #saludypobreza was in Spanish as well.

Chrome usually picks up on foreign language content and offers to translate it.  The results from the twitter search for #saludypobreza however were interpreted as English, since I was coming from the US search page.

I found two (now three) solutions using Chrome.

Solution 1:

Install the Google Translate extension.

Go to the Twitter search page for  saludypobreza and press the translate button.

Solution 2:

Or add a translate button for a specific language.

Go to the Twitter search page for saludypobreza and press the translate button.

Solution 3:

As I was writing this I thought of another solution. Go directly to the Twitter search page adding the Spanish language argument.

Thanks to #publichealthninja Cisco Grajales for asking if I had blogged this.  Great idea.  Done.

Do you know of other solutions or apps that translate Twitter feeds for following hashtags or events?

Lately, I'm seeing a disturbing trend on Twitter: people copying someone else's tweets and presenting them as their own.  I'm not talking about retweeting.  Retweeting references the author of the original tweet, either with "RT" or "via" and the author's name or handle.  Retweeting is a sign of respect.  It serves to not only propagate ideas, but lends weight to them with every post.   

Yes, 140 characters is a limited space.  Sometimes editing has to occur.  However, the author's name is the one item which should never be omitted.

Intention is irrelevant.  Omissions of ignorance damage the shared creative process which supports and nurtures us all, as much as deliberate presentation of another's idea as our own.

Both the Health 2.0 and Government 2.0 movements are focused on transformation.  Our ideas and thoughts are our resources and capitol.  They are the discoveries which drive innovation.  Viewed in this light, we are scientists and entrepreneurs.

However, we are also activists.  We are not creating ideas, as much as we are creating change.  Shirky said "revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new technology, it happens when society adopts new behaviors."

When we support each other, we achieve so much more collectively, than we could as the sum of our individual efforts.  We are pushing forward; disrupting and creating.  Together.

Be proud to be an information source, as well as a creator.  Don't remove someone's name from their tweet.

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Last night I tweeted from a sushi restaurant about something new I was going to try.  By now, Twitter has most of us trained to post just about anything with a modicum of interest. "The sky is blue." "I like ice." "I'm about to eat live shellfish."

Knowing there were a couple of friends on Facebook who might be interested in knowing what the sushi chef was poking in front of me (to prove it was still alive), I updated my status as well.

I found the timing of the responses and my reaction to them interesting.  Twitter started and ended quickly. After the initial responses, my original tweet was lost in the noise of the timeline.  On FB, the news feed tends to have lower volume and many of us scan backwards. When's the last time you heard of someone scanning back in his or her Twitter timeline?  (by the time you’ve read these first three paragraphs, you've probably missed a hundred tweets)

The Twitter responses were from someone I've never met, but with whom I have shared work-related RTs, and two from people I met a couple weeks ago at a conference.  They were all amusing.  There was a sense of connection; however it would be more accurate to say it felt as if they were watching me on TV.

On FB, the experience was quite different.  Responses came over the next hour or so. Friends I hadn't talked to in years replied. We had friended each other and traded a couple of initial messages, but that was it.  An old friend I had visited months ago replied. I went to his wall and left a comment. Someone else included an unrelated question. I replied on her wall.  (Kudos to the new iPhone FB app for making the transition between profiles seamless.)  When I read each person’s comment, I could hear their voice and imagine how they might say it.  My reaction to each was unique.

This is not to compare Twitter to FB.  The Twitter contacts were all professional. FB, all personal.  Ambient intimacy, though triggered by these brief connections, is limited by the existing relationship, in which I believe face-to-face contact eventually becomes a limiting reagent.

Point being, face-to-face contact is still a major turning point in relationships begun online.  The depth of a relationship enhances the contextual bandwidth; especially for those of us who speak low-context languages, such as English.

These are the notes I used for a Twitter presentation for my organization.  My goal was to increase knowledge and decrease anxiety related to social media.  There was a PowerPoint presentation with keywords and concepts flying (unnecessarily) across a black background.  I gave up on it 10 minutes into the presentation.  Good thing.  It was much more effective in helping me visualize the information, than in actually conveying it.  Maybe I’ll revisit it later.

At the presentation, I proposed a short trial (2-4 weeks) where anyone within my organization who was interested would sign up for a Twitter account.  We would explore using Twitter to enhance existing communication and information sharing within our organization.  I knew full well that one can’t start a group tweeting and expect the participants to remain solely within the group.  But that works, since a secondary goal of the experiment was to help my organization gain experience using social media tools.

We’ll meet at the end of the trial period to review the types of communications that evolved and evaluate their effects, as well as discuss lessons learned.

As @levyj413 says: Mission! Tool! Metrics! Teach!

These notes are a little sparse and don’t reflect all of the topics discussed.  The conversation that developed during the presentation was quite productive.  While it is sometimes difficult to encourage and maintain the conversation during a presentation such as this, I have found it to be a worthwhile balance with positive outcomes.

 Also, it should be noted that I have previously given presentations to my organization discussing how the concepts of web 2.0 / social media and the paridigm shift in communication, collaboration, and content creation apply within my organization's "market."  That foundation allowed me to move quickly over certain topics and focus more on Twitter from a functional perscpetive.

Twitter 140 (as opposed to Twitter 101)

• What is Twitter?
• The basic tech
• What was Twitter?
• Twitter in Plain English
• www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o
  
• What is Twitter now?
• Emergent behavior
• Twitter gets you fired in 140 characters or less
• http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/29796962/
  
• OMG! Shut up about Twitter already
• http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29534317
  
• Nobody cares…
• http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18445274/
  
• Fresh Bread
• http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23673447-details/Bakery%20tries%20to%20attract%20customers%20using%20Twitter/article.do
  
• Ambient intimacy
• http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/
  
• Emergency response
• http://steveradick.com/2008/09/23/social-media-in-action-twitter-and-emergency-response/
  
• Advocacy
• http://www.kstreetcafe.com/twitter-on-advocacy/
  
• Getting Started
• Create a Twitter account
• https://twitter.com/signup
  
• Twitter TOS
• https://twitter.com/tos
  
• Username (can be changed later w/o breaking connection to followers)
• Profile, Settings
  
• Protect my updates
• Name, Location, URL, Bio, Avatar, and some followers are visible even if updates are protected
• Who do I follow?
• How do I find them?
• Look for "Follow me" links on blogs, etc.
  
• http://life.outtacontext.com/
  
• search Twitter
• http://search.twitter.com/
  
• Privacy
• Anonymity is an illusion
• ID through profiles/followers/those followed
• Tweet maps
• http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2009/04/find-nearby-tweets.html
  
• professional v personal tweeting
  
• http://www.digitaldesignblog.com/2009/04/08/five-reasons-you-shouldnt-tweet-professionally/
  
• A few Twitter basics
• Tweets
• What to tweet?
• What not to tweet?
• How to tweet?
• keep it simple
• http://twitter.com
  
• phone (save for later)
• Twitter clients
• @ replies
• RT re-tweets
  
• D direct message
• tiny url
• http://bit.ly/
  
• Twitter clients
• TweetGrid
• http://www.tweetgrid.com/
  
• call for action
• organizational social media experiment

I'd be happy to have comments/suggestions.  My intention is to continue to develop this presentation and the associated materials and share the work-in-progress.