My love with Twitpic

I saw my friend, Jer using Twitpic to post his photos, and it automatically sends a link to Twitter. So, I went to explore that site too and found it really handy to upload my own photos. Since I use Twitter a lot, this site is actually more useful for me than the Flickr.

Twitpic is an additional photo managing application offered by Twitter. If you have Twitter account, you can sign in with your Twitter username and password. You can even embed Twitpic gadget into blogger. Here is the simple instruction:

layout > page elements > add a gadget > search for Twitpic > choose the gadget "Twitpic Update".

Please scoll down to the bottom of my front page. You will see my most recent Twitpic photos with updates too. Twitpic Update is different from Flickr Photostream. Photostream only shows thumbnails photos; on the other hand, Twitpic Update shows the latest photos with description. Another good thing about Twitpic is, I can use my mobile for twittering and also uploading photos to share with all my followers.

This is very good tool to use in live broadcasting of an event. In February, I have observed how MSO (Melbourne Symphony Orchestra) has used Twitter and Twitpic to do a live broadcast on their concert event. For us as information mananger (to be), we can use microblogging linked to social photo and video sharing sites to run our special library events. VALA has used this for their big conference in February 2010.

My Twitter 'goodies'!!

Here are some individual tweeters and organisations that I have been following for quite a while. I did a rough categorisation today, and this is my result.

I have:
22 librarian tweeters
16 innovators, leaders in web technology, social media tweeters
17 food bloggers
9 organisitional tweeters
4 coursemate tweeters
1 musicans tweeter
1 friend

Lirarian tweeters, innovators and leaders in web technology and social media, coursemates are all information and knowledge management related. I was surprised that I only have 1 friend tweeter, haha, which means all my other friends are not into twitter except me and this friend.

Another surprise was, the first tweeter I followed was an organisation, the ABC Classics FM. I think it was September last year, when the top 100 list of favourite symphony voted by Australians was released through Twitter and ABC Classics website. I used my mobile to access that list when I went travelling to uni. This was because by accessing Twitter, it is quick and straight to the result I need without using too many MB downloaded to my mobile. Therefore, that was the first time I realised the powerful of using twitter in promoting and even running big public events. It was like live, short news in 140 characters that you want to know about what had happened to certain event (in my case, which symphony was voted which place out of top 100).

In February this year, MSO (Melbourne Symphony Orchestra) used twitter to promote and broadcast their live event, the famous free concerts opened to public at Sidney Myer Bowls. On 3rd concert, it was an MSO-tweeting night. The conductor Benjamin Northey actually posted live tweets (msointhebowl) pre, interval and post concert. During the interval, some interesting tweets were read to the public. In addition, live photos taken from that concert can be accessed through that twitter site too.

I like twitter!! ^_^

NLA newspaper digitisation program

Our proud national collaboration project in digitising historic (out of copyright) newspapers (1803-1954) owned by each states. The greatest thing about this project is, it invites public to join the project in correcting errors on digitised newspaper articles. It was initiated by The National Library of Australia in 2007. I have browse and read through its program overview. I was amazed by its Project Details page which has included: project details and progress reports, the processing and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of newspapers, metadata, system architecture, content management system, search and delivery system, statistics of service usage, public collaborative text correction and tagging of newspaper articles. It also listed which newspapers are available and how we as public can involve in this project.

The public contribution in text correction opened my view towards newspaper digitisation, and how a national digitisation program can benefit the entire country through the collaboration of each states and community libraries. This program not only provides searching capability for historic newspaper articles, it also serves as a teaching tool for primary, secondary and ESL students in learning Australian History, English and etc. It also benefits for researchers especially who are specialised in Australian History and Genealogy.

Here comes the actual site, and its wonderful quick and easy online tutorial on how to search and correct the text. The article that I have chosen was about the launching of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) in 1906. I guess the original article must be really old, and the digitised image through OCR is really poor on this particular article. Please refer to the first 13 lines of the article on left. I barely can see the correct spelling, neither can the OCR. The accuracy of OCR technique used in this project averages from 71% to 98.02%. But I still can read over it with zoom function. And I have made some corrections to the first 6 lines of the text. That's why public is encouraged to participate and contribute to the correction of the digitised text.

I love to contribute in this project. It is simple to use and no strict rules as the wikipedia and other scholarly collaboration sites. This is good and suit my current level of collaboration work to public project.

THE PROJECT IS REALLY COOL!!!