Tag: twitter

Recap: Edmonton Photography Tweetup 1

The first Photography Tweetup here in Edmonton was held tonight at Red Robin downtown, organized by @TonyRatcliffe and @bruceclarke – thanks guys! The idea was simple – an opportunity for any local Twitter users interested in photography to get together to meet one another, share tips and resources, etc. About 20 people showed up, a really great turnout!

Edmonton Photography Tweetup

We went around the table and did introductions, and then enjoyed lots of chatter over food and drinks. Near the end of the tweetup, @TonyRatcliffe led a discussion about what the group hoped to achieve and what future events should look like. Everyone was there to learn, basically!

The next Photography Tweetup will be on May 12th, at 6:30pm at Ezio Farone Park (roughly 109th Street and 97th Avenue, just before you head south over the High Level Bridge). Keep an eye on the wiki and the #yegphoto hashtag for more information.

I love events like this. There were people who came out tonight who haven’t been to any of the other tweetups, or to any of the other tech events for that matter (DemoCamp, Social Web Meetup, etc). It’s a great opportunity for them to get introduced to everything that is going on Edmonton, in tech and beyond.

With that in mind, check out Edmonton FlickrMeets, a group of local Flickr users. They too have regularly scheduled photography meetups for anyone interested!

I posted a few more photos and short video here.

Twitter Race: Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN Breaking News

As you may have read recently, Ashton Kutcher and CNN are having a light-hearted contest to see who can become the first to amass 1 million followers on Twitter. At the moment, @cnnbrk has 980,761 followers while @aplusk has 980,001. It’s a tight race! If he wins, Ashton has said he will donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity in honor of World Malaria Day, an offer than CNN quickly matched. Electronic Arts, Oprah, and others are getting in on the action now too.

It’s great that some charities will benefit from all of this, because it’s a silly race. Having said that, it’s also a good opportunity for me to write down some thoughts I’ve had over the last few months as more and more celebrities have joined Twitter:

  • If I were TMZ or PerezHilton, I’d be scared to death of Twitter. When celebrities themselves are breaking the stories that the gossip blogs would normally cover, it doesn’t paint a rosy picture for the future of sites that depend on getting the news first. And it’s not like they’re very good at analysis.
  • Related to that, what a great opportunity for celebrities to take back some control over what is said about them! If a negative or untrue rumor hits the net, a celebrity can post a tweet about it immediately to clear things up. Not to say that celebrities are honest 100% of the time, but you get the idea. Posting to an official website just isn’t the same as directly tweeting half a million engaged followers, who will in turn spread the word.
  • I think this’ll humanize some celebrities. I’m sure they all use Facebook, but we can’t be their friends or see their activity there. With Twitter, anyone can see whatever a celebrity posts. They don’t get anything special – they have the same account as everyone else.

As for the race, I hope Ashton wins. He’s becoming a sort of celebrity ambassador for the web and all of the cool things people are doing with it. For instance:

[Larry] King has invited Kutcher to appear on his show, "Larry King Live." Kutcher, saying "this is a saga for the Internet," asked King to come on his Internet show to settle things.

Among other things, he’s the Creative Director for VoIP startup Ooma, and he continues to experiment with online video through his company Katalyst Media. Who knows if any of his projects will be successful, but the fact that he’s out there experimenting and paying attention to what’s coming next is encouraging.

Apparently @Oprah’s first tweet will be tomorrow when Ashton is on her show. I’m interested to see what she does with the service.

What do you think? Do you care about celebrities on Twitter? By the way, CelebrityTweet is a site that tracks celebs on Twitter.

UPDATE (~12:15 AM MST): Ashton did it, he beat CNN to 1 million followers!

Twitter lovers: watch out for baseball bats!

I was in the mainstream media here in Edmonton twice today for Twitter-related stories. Basically, the local media’s love affair with Twitter continues! First up, Metro Edmonton (@metroedmonton). They asked me about politicians on Twitter, and specifically about Councillor Don Iveson, who I encouraged to join the service. Here’s my quote:

“It shows that governments are in the know, connected and paying attention to what people are passionate about,” said Edmonton tech guru Mack Male (@mastermaq). “Right now, young people seem to be big on Twitter.”

I was responding to the possibility that Councillor Iveson and others may use Twitter as a way to connect with a younger demographic. I think that’s totally possible, and I expect we’ll hear more about that at ChangeCamp. I think it’s great that Don has joined, and that it’s actually him tweeting.

Secondly today, I was a guest on CBC’s Wildrose Country phone-in program (@WRoseCBC). They were interested in my recent live tweeting of an Edmonton Symphony Orchestra event. One of the people who called in was ‘Bob’. He thought my tweeting was entirely disrespectful and said:

“mastermaq should be hit in the head with a baseball bat!”

I’m not sure why he felt the need to be so violent, but his reaction isn’t entirely surprising. Many people are afraid of social media because they don’t understand it, and they react accordingly. On air, I advised Bob and others like him not to focus on the individual, potentially meaningless tweets in isolation, but to recognize that once aggregated together, there’s incredible value in the noise that Twitter facilitates. It’s going to happen (helping you make sense of the clutter), whether Bob likes it or not. In the meantime, tweet away!

I also feel that the “disrespectful” feeling about tweeting is largely a generational thing that will change over time. I could be wrong about that, but I don’t think so. If everyone is used to others texting in a variety of situations, it’s no longer odd or abnormal. Perceptions will then fall in line.

I’m guessing that CBC will post the segment online, but I’m not sure – check the website for details. I’ll update this post with a link if they do.

Thanks to everyone who listened and sent me encouraging comments this afternoon during the CBC segment. I have to admit that having Bob on the show made the discussion a bit more interesting, and if that’s what it takes to get Twitter more accepted and into the mainstream, I say bring it on.

Just watch out for crazy people with baseball bats!

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – March 2009

Welcome to the first State of the Calgary Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary. After receiving many requests for this from Calgarians after my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere posts, combined with my own curiosity, I figured it was time to do some stats for Calgary. I only captured half of the data for March 1st, but otherwise I think these numbers are fairly solid.

Using Twitter Search, I collected anything posted by Calgarians, or about Calgary. If a user has his or her location set to Calgary, Airdrie, Okotoks, Cochrane, Strathmore, or matching lat/long coordinates, they are considered a Calgarian. If a tweet is “about Calgary” it contains either the word Calgary, the #yyc hashtag, or both.

For March 2009:

# of local users: 3717

To clarify, that means there were 3717 users who posted at least one tweet in March 2009 with their location set to something that makes them a Calgarian as described above. This number should be treated as a minimum – there are probably many more Calgary users without their location set or that were not captured for some other reason.

# of tweets by local users: 147549
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 2936
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 51721
# of tweets by local users containing links: 28902
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 4463
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 5821

This graph shows these numbers visually:

Though perhaps a little inaccurate, here are the best numbers I could get from Twitter for the number of local users created per day during March:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates (remember that web includes all unidentified API calls too):

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • The ten most active local users (most tweets first): codsta, wikkiwild1, strategicsense, yuki_hime, izzynobre, darylcognito, pigazine, MitchyD, dblacombe, devlind
  • About 54% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 3.3 tweets per minute in March.
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was March 31st at 6518. On average, 4760 local tweets were posted each day.
  • Of the 51721 replies posted by local users this month, 14650 or 28% were to other local users.
  • A total of 693 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 542 local users posted just once this month.

And finally, the top ten users in Calgary (as of April 11th) by # of followers: douglasi, MarkIsMusing, tessaru, VeerUpdate, nolanmatthias, strategicsense, codsta, dayhomemama, scrawforditm, CalgaryRealtor.

I may put together another post to compare Edmonton and Calgary, but in general I’d say that although Calgary seems to have more users, they don’t seem as connected to one another as Edmontonians are (as evidenced by the # of tagged tweets and replies to other local users). I’m a little surprised that #yeg is so much more active than #yyc, actually.

Thanks to @andrewmcintyre for helping me with these stats (he ranked #13 on the most active users for the month btw). If you have any comments or feedback let me know so that I can improve these statistics in future months.

Edmonton Media Organizations on Twitter – Update 1

Back on March 3rd, I posted a list of local media organizations on Twitter. At that time, there were roughly a dozen organizations with official accounts. It was easier to count the number of organizations using Twitter, than those not using it.

That’s no longer the case.

Here are the local media organizations using Twitter as of April 10th, 2009, by category.

Print

Television

Radio

Of course, these are just the official accounts. For each of these, there are employees and personalities with their own accounts. That list of names is growing ever longer!

So which organizations are missing?

  • 101.7 World FM
  • 105.9 Shine FM
  • 790 CFCW, though there is @stella790cfcw
  • Access TV, though they do have @ABPrimetime
  • AM930 The Light
  • EZ Rock 104.9
  • Magic 99
  • OMNI Edmonton
  • SEE Magazine
  • Shaw TV Edmonton
  • The Team 1260, though there is @CoreyGraham

Some of these organizations may never get on Twitter, I suppose.

I think it’s fair to say that we’ve reached critical mass with regards to the local media on Twitter. It’ll be interesting now to see how they use it, especially as more and more Edmontonians join the service.

Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues (EFCL) and Social Media

Can an antiquated organization use social media to become relevant to younger generations? The Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues (EFCL) may soon give us an answer. They’ve started to create a presence on Twitter and Facebook, and promise that more is on the way.

First of all, what is a community league? From Wikipedia:

A community league is an organization of community residents who represent their community at large in communication with a municipal government. Community leagues are organized to provide such services as providing recreational opportunities to the community, addressing municipal issues which address the community directly, and keeping community residents up-to-date on happenings within the community.

Edmonton was the first city in Canada to adopt the idea of a community-based organization, according to the EFCL history page. The Crestwood Community League was formed way back in 1917! Today, there are 150 community leagues under the EFCL umbrella.

So far, EFCL have created a Twitter profile and a Facebook page. They are “slowly slipping [their] toe into the waters of social media.” I contacted Michael Janz, EFCL’s Marketing Director, to ask for his thoughts. He quickly corrected my initial assessment of the organization:

“I would challenge the notion that EFCL is ‘antiquated’ – I think ‘established’ is a better word. EFCL has been here for 80 years. People know what it is and what EFCL can accomplish.”

He did concede that the younger generations are much less familiar with the EFCL however, which is what I meant by “antiquated”. The organization’s main membership drive kicks off in September, and the goal this year is to have a more coordinated promotional effort, making use of both traditional and social media. Michael told me that the EFCL is getting on Twitter and Facebook now to be prepared. They are “moving to where the puck is going”, Michael said.

I asked Michael about the challenges EFCL faces with adopting social media, and learned there were other, bigger challenges: “As of March 2008, only 50% of our leagues had websites. We’re now up to 70%.” Clearly having a web presence is an important first step before making the jump to Twitter! EFCL’s mandate is to serve the community leagues, and helping them get websites and email addresses setup is the focus for now. Social media tools will follow.

The first community league to follow that trajectory is Crestwood. They have a regularly updated website, full of information for members. Recently, they joined Twitter and have been posting an interesting mix of tweets – some community-specific, some related to Edmonton as a whole.

I think it’s great that EFCL is mindful of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media tools and services. They’re fortunate to have someone like Michael on board. I look forward to following their progression in the world of social media, first in September for the big kick off, and beyond.

Recap: EdmontonTweetup4

Our fourth “official” meetup for Twitter users in the Edmonton area was a success! About 45 people stopped by Vintage Lounge this evening. The team at Vintage deserve major thanks for handling everything so smoothly, as we had many more people show up than was guesstimated a week or two ago.

Actually, I was quite impressed with the turnout. We had about the same number as Twestival back in February, but in comparison did little or no marketing. There were certainly no front page stories in the local newspapers for tonight’s event! Once again, there was a nice mix of new and familiar faces.

EdmontonTweetup4EdmontonTweetup4

It looked like lots of orders of Mini Burgers came out from the kitchen. I ordered the Italian Sausage Macaroni for dinner, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The food menu at Vintage isn’t extensive, but it is good. Worth checking out.

Here are a few select tweets about tonight’s event:

  • @rlesueur: Tonight attended first #yegtweetup. Good evening, good people. I’ll be back!
  • @bruceclarke: Nice seeing everyone and meeting some new people at tonight’s #yegtweetup.
  • @alexismac: Had more fun at #yegtweetup than anticipated. Damn – now I have to go the next one.
  • @chrislabossiere: That was a great #yegTweetup thanks @alexismac for the wine, I owe you.
  • @thechadj: So extremely tired. #yegtweetup proves to be too much! Good times!
  • @ammneh: Ok that was fun! #yeg #tweetup
  • @ink_slinger: #yegtweetup was pretty good. Still going strong, but I’m heading out now.

Coming up next week is the NHL Tweetup, taking place at the same time and place as Techwing Wednesday, so it should be a big, diverse crowd. As always, check out the EdmontonTweetup wiki for other upcoming tweetups or to plan your own!

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight – sorry if I didn’t get a chance to chat with you! A partial list of attendees is up on the wiki, so feel free to add yourself.

See you at EdmontonTweetup5!

Live Tweeting at the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (ESO) Sunday Masters

Last year, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra invited a number of local bloggers to live-blog Symphony Under the Sky. I remember reading Adam’s posts from the event, and thought it was a cool initiative; a rather unique way to try to get a different crowd interested in the ESO. When I was invited to do the same this year for Carmina Burana, I readily agreed (I received two free tickets and a CD previewing the 2009/2010 season).

Of course, I decided to live-tweet the event rather than live-blog it – you can see my tweets here. I tried to do a mix of details from the program and observations. Two other bloggers sat next to me, though they weren’t live-blogging: Jim Tustian (a former photographer for the ESO) and The Choir Girl. We were up in the Gallery, which was sold out despite not normally being open for Sunday performances.

The Winspear Centre

Snagged this photo before the show started, ignoring the sign about recording devices!

The first piece was Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor: Polovtsian Dances. It was immediately recognizable. At just 13 minutes for the performance, I was left wanting more! I’m a sucker for the contrast of Disney-esque sections and the familiar booming sections.

The second piece was Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, consisting of all eight movements: Prologue, Pastoral, Nocturne, Elegy, Dirge, Hymn, Sonnet, Epilogue. I was thankful the performance was just 23 minutes long, because I couldn’t get into it. Before the performance started, conductor William Eddins said that you need a strong tenor, strong horn player, and strong string section to perform Britten’s piece. He joked that getting all three was as likely as the Edmonton Oilers winning the Stanley Cup this year!

The main event was after the intermission – Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Again, this one was instantly recognizable, though with about 65 minutes of music there were definitely long sections I had never heard before. I enjoyed it all, but my favorite part was definitely Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, O Fortuna which both opened and closed the performance.

As I mentioned, William Eddins was the conductor. He’s currently in his fourth season as Music Director for the ESO. Performers today included Allene Hackleman, French horn, Bonaventura Bottone, tenor, Illana Davidson, soprano, and Hugh Russell, baritone. The Cantilon Chamber Chorus and the Ukrainian Male Chorus of Edmonton provided the rest of the vocals.

The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and Social Media

Before the show and during the intermission, I had the chance to ask Philip Paschke, ESO’s New Media Specialist (he must be one of the only people in the city with a title like that), about their travels into the world of social media. He told me their website needs work, and in the future will hopefully incorporate the ESO Blog, and potentially Twitter, Facebook, and other services. Like so many organizations, they are hearing a lot about Twitter and the other social media tools and are struggling to understand how to best make use of them.

I think the blogger initiative is a good one. There’s another concert being blogged on April 16th, and Philip hopes to get at least one more before the season ends. One of the biggest challenges thus far has been fielding complaints about “the inconsiderate texters” from other concert-goers. It’s definitely a challenge to make the click-clacking of keys seem welcome inside The Winspear Centre (fortunately my BlackBerry was relatively silent).

I’m not sure if my live-tweets were of interest to anyone, but I had fun doing it. If nothing else, tweets and blog posts during a concert just help to remind others that the ESO is still putting on great concerts.

Thanks to Philip for inviting me to participate – I really enjoyed the show, and I look forward to the ESO’s future adventures with social media.

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – March 2009

Welcome to the third State of the Edmonton Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton. You can see last month’s stats here, but note that I recently discovered a few of the numbers were wrong and I have since updated the post. The two key figures, the number of local users and the number of tweets posted by local users, remain unchanged.

The source of the data this month remains the same – Twitter Search. If a user has his or her location set to Edmonton, St. Albert, Sherwood Park, Leduc, Nisku, Stony Plain, Fort Saskatchewan, Beaumont, Spruce Grove, or matching lat/long coordinates, they are considered an Edmontonian. If a tweet is “about Edmonton” it contains either the word Edmonton, the #yeg hashtag, or both.

For March 2009:

# of local users: 3421 (an increase of 160% over February)

To clarify, that means there were 3421 users who posted at least one tweet in March 2009 with their location set to something that makes them an Edmontonian as described above. This number should be treated as a minimum – there are probably many more Edmonton users without their location set.

# of tweets by local users: 151146
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 6634 (4.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 55234 (36.5%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 24449 (16.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 3701 (2.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 5401 (3.6%)

This graph shows the above numbers compared to the correct numbers from last month:

I think this data is a little inaccurate, but it’s the best I could get from Twitter – here are the number of local users created per day during March:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates (remember that web includes all unidentified API calls too):

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • The ten most active local users (most tweets first): britl, fcedmonton, angelzilla, AndyGroenink, bingofuel, TrinaMLee, akomuzikera, grempel, foomanizer, adampatterson
  • About 55% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 3.4 tweets per minute in March, compared with just 1.8 per minute in February.
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was March 20th at 6061. On average, 4876 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 2598 in February).
  • Of the 55234 replies posted by local users this month, 25398 or 46% were to other local users.
  • A total of 668 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 550 local users posted just once this month.

And finally, the top ten users in Edmonton (as of April 1st) by # of followers: Pat_Lorna, mastermaq, LesM, redneckmommy, cleversimon, ianbakewell, melanienathan, babyrumps, revtrev, ctvedmonton

As expected, the number of local users grew even faster this month than last. The local media’s recent love affair with Twitter no doubt has a lot to do with that! I suspect growth will taper off a bit in April, but will still be impressive.

A common request for these stats is to see how Edmonton compares with other cities. Within the next week or so, I’ll be posting the same stats for Calgary, so stay tuned!

Don’t forget to check out EdmontonTweetup4, taking place on April 7th. Hope to see you there!

EdmontonTweetup4 – April 7th

It’s time for another tweetup! Though it has been nearly six months since EdmontonTweetup3, there have been many other events since then, including Twestival. It’s great to see the community using the wiki to organize tweetups of all kinds! Still, it’s nice to have an “official” tweetup every now and then.

Join us a week from now for EdmontonTweetup4:

WHO: Twitterers and the Twitter-curious in Edmonton and area!
WHAT: An event to meet one another in person.
WHERE: Vintage Lounge, 10124 124th Street (map)
WHEN: Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 6:30pm
WHY: Because you’ll have a great time and will meet fascinating people!

Thanks to Brittney (@britl) for helping me get this going. You can follow the @edmontontweetup account for updates.

There are almost 30 people registered on the wiki already! You don’t have to add your name there, but it does help us if we know roughly how many people are attending. You’re welcome to simply drop by though!

If you’re new to Twitter, you might want to read this article I wrote for Connect2Edmonton.

See you there!