Over the weekend I got the bright idea of asking OmniGroup to ask an iPhone voice recognition application (like Dragon Dictation) to add a link to the OmniFocus iPhone application. That way I could simply dictate new inbox items on the iPhone rather than laboriously typing them with the on-screen keyboard. Before making the suggestion, I searched the OmniFocus User Forum for “voice recognition” to see if anyone else had suggested the same thing. As it turns out, there were a few posts that had instructions from people using Twitter as an intermediary. Unfortunately, they either required a desktop Twitter client to be running all of the time or used the now deprecated BasicAuth-based Twitter authentication scheme. So I created my own.

The Script

Registering your Application with Twitter

Tweet Privacy Checkbox

Because I marked it as private, the script can’t read the home timeline of tweets without authentication. In order to authenticate with Twitter, I need to register the script with the Twitter API service to get a “Consumer Key” and a “Consumer Secret”. The registration page looks similar to below, but you’ll need to pick a different name. (Application names must be unique across Twitter.)

New Twitter Application screen for twitter-to-omnifocus

After submitting that form, you’ll see a page that will have your key information. Replace the sample keys in the tweettoOmniFocus.cfg file with the ones from this page.

You’ll need to run the twitter-to-omnifocus application once interactively on the command line in order to complete the process of registering the script with Twitter. First, change the mode of the script so that you can execute it, then run the script:

  chmod u+x twitter-to-omnifocus

  ./twitter-to-omnifocus

You’ll be promted to go to a website to get a PIN:

  Authorize this app at http://twitter.com/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=nnn and enter the PIN#

When you get the PIN, paste it into the terminal window and hit return. Two new security tokens will be added to the configuration file.

Getting the Script to Run Periodically on the Mac

Lingon configuration for twitter-to-omnifocus

All Done!

iPhone Dragon Dictation screen

In the end, this is quite an effort and a moderately fragile setup for doing what I want. In particular, the dictated entries don’t immediately appear in my iPhone OmniFocus app database. I’d like some tighter integration between the applications, but I’ll settle for this for now.

Emily Clasper of the Suffolk County Library posted about some work she had done to embed status messages in the catalog using Twitter. This sounded like a really great idea because it is an out-of-band (e.g. something that doesn’t rely on OhioLINK infrastructure for reporting downtimes) way to get messages to member staff and users. But I didn’t get a chance to work on my implementation for a while, so for over a year ideas have bubbled around in my head about ways to apply this technique and improve on it. I finally carved out some spare time to actually work on it, and came up with my take on the concept. The result is the OhioLINK Status-Via-Twitter service.

A demo of the TwitterJS implementation using a copy of the OhioLINK homepage.

In Emily’s approach to putting messages on public pages, the staff would first post a message to the public status Twitter account which would then be turned into a block of HTML inserted into the public catalog page via JavaScript. The JavaScript would query the feed for the public status Twitter account and insert any tweets found there into the page. When the information in the tweet is no longer needed, the library staff would delete the tweet.

In my conceptualization of this service, there would be individuals or agents other than the catalog JavaScript code that would be looking to the tweet stream for updates on services. Those individuals and agents won’t know when a tweet is deleted, so an “all-clear” message needs to be posted to the tweet stream for those consumers. And, of course, we wouldn’t want an “all-clear” tweet to be posted ad infinitum (or at least until the next service message) on public web pages.

I would also like to include the tweeted service messages on all pages on our site, not just the homepage. But if we do that, then every page hit for one of our users would hit the Twitter API to get the tweets from the public status Twitter account…with possible privacy and capacity overloading concerns. So there would need to be a way to cache messages from Twitter for a period of time.

In bulleted-point form, what I was looking for was:

• A bit of JavaScript that would dynamically insert HTML into a <div> tag that contains the text of tweets.
• The script would not display tweets that contain a set phrase (e.g. “returned to normal”) or were older than a pre-defined period.
• The script would cache messages as cookies and only read new messages from Twitter after a pre-defined period of time.
• The script had to be compact and self-contained (e.g. not rely on external JavaScript libraries) for speed and simplicity.

The Implementation

The bottom of ‘twitter.js’ in the OhioLINK-Prod branch of the twitterjs project has an example of how to configure the JavaScript function. It looks like this:

getTwitters('ohiolinkstatus', {       // <div> to insert text
  id: 'OhioLINKstatus',               // Twitter id
  count: 20,                          // Maximum number of tweets to show
  ignoreReplies: true,                // Ignore @-replies (true or false)
  ignoreOlderThan: 36*60*60,          // Ignore tweets older than this (in minutes)
  stopIfSeen: 'returned to normal',   // Stop display tweets if this text is in tweet
  cookiePrefix: 'TwitterJS',          // Preface cookies with this prefix
  cookieDomain: 'dltj.org',           // Cookies stored for this domain
  cookieRefresh: 5                    // How often to check tweets (in minutes)
});</div>

To make this work on your pages, you’d need to follow these steps:

1. Download the twitter.js file from GitHub. At the end of this file, add the configuration to match your needs. At a minimum, change cookieDomain to match the domain of your website, or this won’t work. You probably also want to change the id unless you want to monitor OhioLINK services. ¹
2. Download the CSS file for twitterjs and modify to your tastes.
3. (Optional Step) Run your JavaScript through JSMinify to reduce its size to increase website performance. Do the same for the CSS file.
4. Upload the JavaScript and CSS files to your website.
5. Add these lines to the <head> section of any page you want to use this:

       <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://your.host.name/your.directory/twitter.css" type="text/css" media="screen" charset="utf-8" />
   	<script src="http://your.host.name/your.directory/twitter.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

6. Add this line to the <body> section of the document where you want the tweets to appear:

       <div class="twitters" id="ohiolinkstatus"></div>

   Be sure the id attribute value matches the first parameter of the getTwitters() function call in the first step.

getTwitters() will run the main body of code after the page is finished loading. If it finds a twitterjs cookie for the current domain, it replaces whatever is inside the <div> with that information. If it doesn’t find a twitterjs cookie or the cookie has expired, it pulls the feed of tweets, parses them, stashes the value into a domain cookie (even if the value is the empty string), and replaces whatever is inside the <div>.

For extra credit, note that you can do a lot of styling with the CSS file. For instance, the version of this I’m demoing at OhioLINK has an GIF encoded as Base64 data in the background of the unordered list of tweets. (We do the Base64 encoding like this to avoid the overhead of another round-trip back to the webserver to get the small graphic.) You can create your own graphic, translate it using a Base64 encoder, and replace that value.

If you end up using this, please let me know in the comments.

Footnotes

1. Note that at the time this is being posted, OhioLINK is not using this in production so don’t rely on this Twitter ID for actual outage messages.

Okay, I know this is starting to seem like an obsession, but I can’t figure out why someone(s) would be constructing tweets that consist of my blog post headlines and links back to my postings. I’m wondering how wide spread this problem is, so I constructed a list of URLs to blog posts based on the Planet Code4Lib Atom feed and pointed them to the Ubervu service. Ubervu has a view into the Twitter firehose, and constructs reports of Twitter mentions of URLs. For instance, I can see all of the odd headline tweets for my previous postings through this service. I can then easily scan through the list for other people that seem to be affected by this strange phenomenon.

Eric Schnell has a great summary of these posts and related comments called Is a Twitterfarm Pranking the Jester? in his blog The Medium is the Message. Thank you, Eric.

Here are the results. In all cases except for one, the ‘twitterfeed’ service was used as the bridge between some feed of blog postings into individual tweets.

• Ubervu service view of scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2009/12/making_author_authority_easier.php
• Ubervu service view of elibtronic.ca/content/20091229/anatomy-pown-pownd-part-2
• Ubervu service view of dltj.org/article/twitter-spam/ [Me -- 7 questionable tweets, described in previous post]
• Ubervu service view of people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/805
• Ubervu service view of peterbrantley.com/reality-dreams-for-libraries-213
• Ubervu service view of commonplace.net/2009/12/old-library-new-library/
• Ubervu service view of orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002040.html
• Ubervu service view of catalogablog.blogspot.com/2009/12/marbi-meeting-minutes.html
• Ubervu service view of people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/804
• Ubervu service view of www.lisnews.org/librarian_h_o_p_e_hackers_planet_earth_conference
• Ubervu service view of orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001392.html
• Ubervu service view of scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2009/12/top-down_or_bottom-up.php
• Ubervu service view of dltj.org/article/alamw10-schedule/ [Me again -- 5 questionable tweets, described in previous post]
• Ubervu service view of infomotions.com/blog/2009/12/good-and-best-open-source-software/ [2 questionable tweets: Twitter ID 'audio_college' (3,240 followers) and ID 'DTcomputers' (10,204 followers)]
• Ubervu service view of catalogablog.blogspot.com/2009/12/isbd-area-0-in-rusian.html [1 questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'rem_simanovski' (658 followers)
• Ubervu service view of go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2009/12/case-against-using-spoofed-e-books-to.html [1 questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'ispicey' (8,177 followers)
• Ubervu service view of orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002039.html
• Ubervu service view of orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002038.html
• Ubervu service view of orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002037.html [4 questionable tweets: Twitter ID 'peterpains' (1,017 followers); 'LostInDaSources' (1,057 followers, other posted links in twitter stream to spamy web pages); 'JackOOler' (914 followers); 'FreePsyche' (123 followers, is adding text to blog post titles in tweet)]
• Ubervu service view of john.mignault.net/blog/2009/12/26/coffee-exchange/
• Ubervu service view of bibwild.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/issn-search-field-in-solr/
• Ubervu service view of people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/801
• Ubervu service view of www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1090000309/post/1950051395.html?nid=3565
• Ubervu service view of hublog.hubmed.org/archives/001891.html
• Ubervu service view of catalogablog.blogspot.com/2009/12/cookery.html
• Ubervu service view of catalogablog.blogspot.com/2009/12/character-sets.html
• Ubervu service view of go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2009/12/holiday-product-management-and.html [1 questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'holiday_gifts' (3,237 followers)]
• Ubervu service view of community.oclc.org/hecticpace/archive/2009/12/jingle-books.html
• Ubervu service view of ptsefton.com/2009/12/23/bye-bye-word-2007-custom-xml.htm
• Ubervu service view of scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2009/12/tidbits_22_december_2009.php
• Ubervu service view of inkdroid.org/journal/2009/12/22/hacking-oreilly-rdfa/ 1[ questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'soslab' (122 followers, also reposted a DLTJ post)]
• Ubervu service view of www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/e-book-privacy
• Ubervu service view of litablog.org/2009/12/last-standards-announcements-of-2009/
• Ubervu service view of catalogablog.blogspot.com/2009/12/anatomy-of-catalog-record.html
• Ubervu service view of efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2009/12/online-learning-in-virtual-environments-final-report.html
• Ubervu service view of blog.iandavis.com/2009/12/new-blog-url-blog-iandavis-com
• Ubervu service view of catalogablog.blogspot.com/2009/12/cuttering-at-national-library-of.html [1 questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'jadep2008' (account now suspended by Twitter)]
• Ubervu service view of community.oclc.org/hecticpace/archive/2009/12/hectic-shame.html
• Ubervu service view of miskatonic.org/2009/12/21/my-code4lib-2010-t-shirt
• Ubervu service view of miskatonic.org/2009/12/21/dchud-and-nunanishi
• Ubervu service view of mblog.lib.umich.edu/blt/archives/2009/12/further_tweaks.html [1 questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'FastestFood' (124 followers, profile URL leads to "get rich quick" site)]
• Ubervu service view of blog.threepress.org/2009/12/21/nook-1-1-0-firmware-update-report/
• Ubervu service view of maisonbisson.com/blog/post/14198/apple-netbook-newton-emate-300/
• Ubervu service view of go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2009/12/copyright-enforcement-for-ebooks.html [1 questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'OnlineTVNews' (160 followers, using "RSS2Twitter" rather than twitterfeed, profile URL points to a commercial TV-over-IP service)]
• Ubervu service view of efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2009/12/scanning-horizons-for-the-semantic-web-in-higher-education.html
• Ubervu service view of code4lib.org/node/346
• Ubervu service view of orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002036.html
• Ubervu service view of orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002035.html [1 questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'workfanatic' (878 followers, tweets include part of post, may be a legitimate consulting service)]
• Ubervu service view of john.mignault.net/blog/2009/12/20/calibre-quickstart-for-kindle/
• Ubervu service view of www.frbr.org/2009/12/20/last-week-in-frbr-11 [2 questionable tweets: Twitter ID 'soslab' (122 followers, also seen with other Code4Lib planet posts); 'CTSeven' (3,968 followers, profile URL seems to point to a legitimate business)]
• Ubervu service view of www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1090000309/post/300051430.html?nid=3565
• Ubervu service view of www.parser.ca/z678/2009/12/18/this-is-what-im-talking-about-evergreen-ils/ [3 questionable tweets, all with the same profile URL that seems to point to a legitimate business: Twitter ID 'GlowPaint' (1,559 followers, prepends fixed text string to tweets); 'BlackLightInfo' (943 followers); 'FutureOfGlow' (5,090, prepends fixed text string to tweets)]
• Ubervu service view of scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2009/12/authority_control_then_and_now.php
• Ubervu service view of mblog.lib.umich.edu/blt/archives/2009/12/hathitrust_reac.html
• Ubervu service view of futurearchives.blogspot.com/2009/12/virtually-jodconverter-ii.html [1 questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'archivesopen' (701 followers, profile URI points to a Blogspot blog, seems to be legitimate)]
• Ubervu service view of litablog.org/2009/12/lita-happy-hour-mw2010/ [1 questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'library_breath' (253 followers, profile URL points to Japanese site)]
• Ubervu service view of catalogablog.blogspot.com/2009/12/xforms4lib.html
• Ubervu service view of www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1090000309/post/1840051384.html?nid=3565
• Ubervu service view of vphill.com/journal/?p=2740
• Ubervu service view of digitalcuration.blogspot.com/2009/12/more-activity-on-semantic-publishing.html
• Ubervu service view of www.librarywebchic.net/wordpress/2009/12/17/learning-and-loving-jquery-for-the-most-part/ [1 questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'clearvisage' (1,405 followers, profile URL points to a "skin rejuvenation" site)]
• Ubervu service view of futurearchives.blogspot.com/2009/12/virtually-jodconverter.html [1 questionable tweet: Twitter ID 'careersoft' (2,648 followers, profile URL points to a site without a DNS entry)]
• Ubervu service view of futurearchives.blogspot.com/2009/12/t.html [2 questionable tweets from the same account: Twitter ID 'archivesopen' (701 followers, profile URI points to a Blogspot blog, seems to be legitimate)]

Interestingly, in one case — inkdroid.org/journal/2009/12/22/hacking-oreilly-rdfa/ — ‘twitterfeed’ seem to be legitimately used by Eqentia for a Twitter account called ‘semanticnews’. The bio on the twitter account says: “Tracking what’s new in the Semantic Web space. 2,500+ articles indexed via Eqentia’s semantic platform. Sign-up and experience Semantic-powered News”. Ubervu also shows that the ‘semanticnews’ tweet was the start of a Twitter thread of three other tweets on the same topic.

Analysis

I went poking in my server’s access logs searching for occurrences of ‘twitterfeed’ and came back with a surprise: where I expected to see ‘twitterfeed’ in the User-Agent string, I actually found it more as a Google Analytics parameter on URL requests in these two forms:

• ?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
• ?utm_source=GAlert&utm_medium=twitterfeed&utm_campaign=CDT_RSS&utm_term=TechNews

At this point, I’m not sure what is introducing those parameters. I can’t find documentation for it in the Google Analytics help system, but I suspect it might be coming as a part of Feedburner. I’m pretty much a newbie when it comes to Google Analytics, so if anyone has any insights, I’d appreciate it.

There are two cases where ‘twitterfeed’ is being used as part of a user agent string (or "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3 twitterfeed" more specifically). I’m going to set up a honeypot for twitterfeed using mod_rewrite conditions on my server:

## Attempt to block twitterfeed
RewriteCond %{USER_AGENT} "twitterfeed"
RewriteRule feed.* /atom-feed-for-twitterfeed.xml [R=302,L]

The “atom-feed-for-twitterfeed.xml” file consists of:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
 
	<title>DLTJ Twitter Honeypot</title>
	<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://dltj.org"/>
	<id>http://dltj.org</id>
	<updated>2009-12-30T17:47:10+00:00</updated>
	<generator uri="http://dltj.org/about/">An annoyed jester</generator>
 
	<entry>
		<title>Twitter and Twitterfeed honeypot</title>
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html"
			href="http://dltj.org/article/questionable-twitter-posts/"/>
		<id>http://dltj.org/article/questionable-twitter-posts/</id>
		<updated>2009-12-30T17:28:07+00:00</updated>
		<content type="html">&lt;p&gt;This is a honeypot to try to catch Twitterfeed when it injects postings into Twitter.  For more information on why I'm trying this, see &lt;a href="http://dltj.org/article/questionable-twitter-posts/"&gt;this blog post on &lt;acronym title="Disruptive Library Technology Jester"&gt;&lt;i&gt;DLTJ&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/acronym&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;</content>
		<author>
			<name>Murray, Peter</name>
			<uri>http://dltj.org/about</uri>
		</author>
	</entry>
</feed>

Yeah — I know I’m breaking the rules by giving different content for the same URI. But remember, this is just a honeypot.

With this, I’m going to see if my honeypot entry shows up in one of these Twitterfeed-injected posts. Am I showing signs of being obsessed with this? Yep, no doubt. But I really want to know how and where my content is being used. This itch definitely needs to be scratched.

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The following may not be news to those who regularly hang out in Twitter-land, but the extent of the problem recently became clear to me: there is a bunch of spam in Twitter. More specifically, there appear to be robots that do nothing but scan the web for keywords and create tweets with links back to them. There appear to be some that value this service (judging by the number of followers of these Twitter users), but for me it just adds to the general clutter I find in Twitter.

So — here is the situation. Yesterday I posted a blog message that has my upcoming ALA Midwinter meeting plans. I’ve got a WordPress plugin that injects an announcement of that post into my Twitter stream. Since I like my blog to be the definitive source of discussions surrounding my blog posts, I also run another plug-in (from the Backtype service) that takes commentary found in other social media sites and adds them as comments to my blog posting. I’ve set the latter plug-in to add such comments to my “pending” queue rather than posting them automatically.

When I looked at my pending comment queue this morning, I saw that Backtype found not only my own tweet of the post¹, but also five others from “people” I haven’t encountered before. (No links here because I don’t want to offer any Google juice if there is something nefarious going on.)

A couple of things to note:

• In all cases, the Twitter IDs seem to be unlike other spammers — ones that I typically associate with spammers are names with a string of numbers. These look like real names.
• Three of the five accounts have over 1,000 followers — usually the mark of someone legitimate. Heck…that is more than I have by far!
• Three accounts (TechnoTrendz, ddaville, and FrankyConnelly) also add an excerpt of text from deep inside the post: “Next planned event is the discussion mee” Two of these three use the same bit.ly short link.
• The original post did not use a third-party URL shortener.² These five posts contain 3 unique bit.ly short links, with three of the five using the same short link.

All told, this looks suspicious. It is also the sort of thing that leads me to use third-party tools to distill Twitter content into something more manageable and less spam-y. Have others noticed the same thing? Do you have any coping strategies for dealing with the Twitter stream?

Evening Update

So the question would be — for what purpose? To as fodder to mask truly spamy tweets? Because the account owner thinks their followers might all be interested in what I’m saying? What I do know is that this practice — at least for my blog posts — has increased dramatically in the past few weeks. I don’t think this was happening earlier this month…

Footnotes

1. Oddly, I didn’t get a tweet from InfoPeep — the reposting service based on the Code4Lib Planet.
2. I’m happy I have an inherently short URL to start with, so am using yet another WordPress plugin to internally direct users from short URLs to canonical ones.

Image capture of NPR Tech Team Twitter account.

The new NPR site is now live. Kudos to the team for bringing the new site to its opening, and in doing so showing good practices for shared Twitter accounts.

As a youth I remember intently studying the troubles of others — what they did when they got into trouble and how they got out of it. If the saying “You Learn From Your Mistakes” was so true, I wanted to be able to learn from the mistakes of others. I don’t do that as much anymore — probably because I have more than enough of my own mistakes now to learn from — but every once in a while a situation comes up where this urge strikes. The case of Clinical Reader resurfaced that youthful urge.

I started the previous post thinking I would quickly get to the end and summarize some observations and recommendations for libraries considering their official entrance into Twitter and other social media spaces. As I kept saving the draft of the post in my blog software each evening, it kept getting longer and longer as the story of Clinical Reader got stranger and stranger. (At one point it became a Herculean effort just to keep up with the Twitter account changes to make sure the links pointed to the right place. There are probably some that are still wrong.)

So I moved these observations and recommendations to this new posting, and at the same time changed the tone of the writing from a formal case study to a more informal blog posting. While this posting is meant to be read and appreciated in isolation from the description of the troubles of Clinical Reader in the previous posting, you may want to skim through it to get an appreciation of how the mistakes that were made were seen by me and others. I will repeat the backstory from the first post, however, to give context for what follows.

Repeat of the Backstory

Clinical Reader was brought to life in 2009 by a junior doctor and a small group of forward thinking young tech programmers spread across London and Toronto. The conceptualized idea was to manage clinical information overload and deliver relevant news from an authoritative source on a daily basis.

On the technical side, it is a website that syndicates content via RSS/Atom from various journals, news sources, blogs, and social media outlets. There is the appearance of editorial decision making in the form of an “Editor’s Choice” list (with no apparent description of how or why something makes this list), but mostly it seems to be a way to hide the complexity of syndicated content readers from those in the medical profession who could care less about such complexity.

Observations and Recommendations

Given Enough Eyeballs, All Falsehoods Are Shallow.

The original discovery by Nicole Dettmar of the questionable endorsement is a prime example of this Jester’s Law. Hundreds if not thousands of people that used the Clinical Reader website prior to Nicole’s blog post on July 13th probably thought the endorsement by the National Library of Medicine was real. It was Nicole, however, that knew better, and she had a platform with which to call attention to the issue. There are other examples of Jester’s Law — the copying of the “tangled strings” graphic from the Feedstitch service (later refuted by the Feedstitch developers), and changing inflammatory wording in their newsletter (the previous wording was found in the Google search engine cache).

If you have something to say in the social media space (or anywhere else, for that matter), be as truthful as you can. The opportunities for others to find your falsehoods grows dramatically in social media, and the same social media can be used to spread word of those falsehoods.

Mistakes Happen, You Can’t Hide Them.

Mistakes Happen, Own Up To Them.

There are probably lessons to be learned here that can be taught by the world of public relations and “damage control,” and likely better descriptions of ways make sincere and decisive statements that show you are taking the issues seriously and fixing them. Again, as a counter example, what Allan Marks of Clinical Reader did has not — to this point — instilled the confidence of the library community he was courting as a way to spread information about his service.

140 Characters Is Too Short To Say Important Things.

A corollary to this observation is that, even with just 140 characters, spelling and grammar count towards (or detract from) credibility. More than one person had access to the Clinical Reader account, and while this was admitted to in the course of the issue one could also tell by the bad spelling and grammar of at least one person.

Establish Ground Rules for Shared Accounts.

Don’t Simply Abandon Your Online Presence(s)

Other Commentary

Tweet from Twitter user 'loriekloda' on Friday, July 17, 2009 at 11:16 EDT

Commentary on the Clinical Reader has been coming in from various corners of the web, and interestingly (I think) the commentary has been coming in from people outside the medical librarian community. This, too, is an effect of the nearly frictionless nature of social media. For instance, Jill Hurst-Wahl has a list of do’s and don’t for her clients. The principals behind Clinical Reader acknowledge Jill’s recommendations, but the community has yet to see them in practice. There are also postings in FriendFeed by Rachel Walden and Steve Incandenza with further observations. Lastly, Nicole Dettmar, as the person initially in the center of the controversy, notes some issues (and, if your learning from this example, some recommendations) with Clinical Reader’s response in the form of an open letter to its management.

Conclusion

The text was modified to remove a link to http://twitter.com/amarks7/status/2619628917 on February 11th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://twitter.com/amarks7/status/2689499674 on February 11th, 2011.

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Footnotes

1. The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Steven Raymond, version 3.0 (dated 2-Aug-2002), chapter 4.
2. A “black hat” is someone who uses nefarious means to achieve a goal. See the definition in Wikipedia for more information.

As libraries feel the need to join the social media landscape to meet a segment of their user population already there, it is useful to step back and get acclimated. There is a pace of information flow that is unlike anything else in the physical world, and a minor incident — be it an ill-advised policy decision or an unfortunate slip of the tongue — can quickly spiral out of your control. And that is probably the key word: control. You don’t, can’t, and won’t have it. It isn’t the nature of this media. “Damage control,” if you want to think of it like that, is honest, sincere, decisive, and quick communication with your users. As a counter example, I offer the case of Clinical Reader.

(What follows in this post are the specific details of the Clinical Reader example. If you are not interested in the specific details, you may want to start by reading the observations and recommendations post instead.)

The Backstory

Clinical Reader was brought to life in 2009 by a junior doctor and a small group of forward thinking young tech programmers spread across London and Toronto. The conceptualized idea was to manage clinical information overload and deliver relevant news from an authoritative source on a daily basis.

On the technical side, it is a website that syndicates content via RSS/Atom from various journals, news sources, blogs, and social media outlets. There is the appearance of editorial decision making in the form of an “Editor’s Choice” list (with no apparent description of how or why something makes this list), but mostly it seems to be a way to hide the complexity of syndicated content readers from those in the medical profession who could care less about such complexity.

Clinical Reader got some buzz, including a “Check out this site” message from Medical Library Association president Connie Schardt (an endorsement of sorts that was retracted two weeks later).

The Spark of Controversy

Graphic from Eagle Dawg Blog

It is bogus as far as the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is concerned since the U.S. Government doesn’t endorse or grant 5 stars to anything. The NLM Copyright Information page offers more elaboration, bold emphasis mine:

Endorsement: NLM does not endorse or recommend any commercial products, processes, or services. The views and opinions of authors expressed on NLM Web sites do not necessarily state or reflect those of the U.S. Government, and they may not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes.

Ms. Dettmar also notes the use of two copyrighted, unattributed images:

Clinical Reader also currently uses two copyrighted images on their Partners (specific original source, copyright notice at bottom) and Advertising pages (from somewhere on Signalnoise). A ‘credit’ link to a source doesn’t honor an image copyright. Even free open source images, such as this set of Springer Images, are often limited to usage for noncommerical purposes. Commercial organizations can well afford to purchase or design their own graphics.

The Response

Ms. Dettmar started a minute with replies later via Twitter that could be interfiled with the initial four tweets from ClinicalReader — her first tweet at 11:40 in reply to the 11:36 ClinicalReader tweet, and her second tweet at 11:45 in reply to the 11:39 ClinicalReader tweet.

Others Take Notice

Representatives behind the ClinicalReader account — it becomes apparent soon that there are at least two people that have access to the Twitter account — start to address some of the issues. They address messages to those who are retweeting the earlier messages from Ms. Dettmar and Mr. Lawson. (Oddly, they are not using the “reply” function of Twitter for reply messages and they show a tendency to retweet themselves, as demonstrated in the second to last message of this group.) They are in contact with a Twitter user called ‘signalnoiseart’ about some of the unattributed graphics, and they report that they have permission to continue using them. (There will be other allegations of use of unattributed graphics later in the week.) And, lastly, they show and openness to communication — and admirable trait under the circumstances.

Someone from the group of representatives using the ClinicalReader Twitter account takes the lead in responding to the issues by saying that he/she will start using his/her initials in messages; we’ll refer to this person by those initials: AA. (This is also evident in the change of client used to post messages into the Twitter stream from Tweetie to TweetDeck, with AA apparently using TweetDeck exclusively.) The fact that gender inclusive grammatical constructs are being used in describing this individual shows one of the remaining mysteries of this episode. (The ClinicalReader Twitter account is later taken over by someone who identifies him-/herself as “Allan Marks” but even nearly a week later observers can’t be sure of the identity of this person.) AA indicates that the images showing endorsement will be removed from the Clinical Reader site, and gives an estimated time for when the changes will be apparent to internet users. Indeed, a few hours later the graphics start to change to remove the implied endorsement of the National Library of Medicine. Although AA indicates that he/she is the founder, AA then makes a classical leadership mistake of blaming a subordinate: “We are keen to engage the twitter community the tweet made by a junior member of the team was poor judgment (AA)”.

At the end of the first day, Luke Rosenberger (userid lukelibrarian) notes what he sees as a discrepancy between Clinical Reader’s desire to positively engage with librarians and language in the Clinical Reader newsletter. Mr. Rosenberger tweets, “good grief http://bit.ly/uniXw ‘wave goodbye to the library journal shelf’ and yet @clinicalreader wants love from librarians?!” (The link, http://bit.ly/uniXw, goes to the current newsletter on the Clinical Reader website; at the time this is being written, that web address is returning a “403 Error because this area is restricted” message.) ClinicalReader responds: “@lukelibrarian Your browser is lagging behind says ‘Make effective use of the library journal shelf’ at http://bit.ly/uniXw” (this message has subsequently been deleted, but is recorded in the archive of ClinicalReader tweets). Mr. Rosenberger responds, “@ClinicalReader i see that you have removed ‘wave goodbye’ in the last few minutes. don’t blame my browser, just admit your error. #fail” The DLTJ author noticed that a copy of the newsletter webpage was still in the Google search engine cache and created an image of the page.

Day Two: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

At the end of the first day, Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre posted a tweet warning users away from Clinical Reader. On the second day of the incident, this would become one of the main focal points. As Ms. Dettmar notes in a follow up post, one of the representatives behind the ClinicalReader Twitter account has been deleting tweets, and so this conversation can’t be pieced together in the typical way. Ms. Dettmar, though, had been starting to save messages using a service called QuoteURL; QuoteURL “group[s] different Twitter updates from different people into a single page that has a permanent URL.” The thread of conversation between Mr. Goldacre and ClinicalReader is recorded in four QuoteURL aggregations: one, two, three, and four. Mr. Goldacre asked several questions of ClinicalReader (not all of the responses are linked to in Twitter because the tweets have been deleted):

• BenGoldacre: can you let me know in what way you are supported by the guardian, as your website claims?: Yes we attended a camp organised by Guardian when we we’re developing our project , they provided excellent advice. We’re in touch with Jemima Kiss who writes a fantastic blog – to feature in Elevator Pitch (she’s on maternity at the mo)
• BenGoldacre: so youre supported by the guardian in the sense that you went to an event they organised and some people gave you sm advice?; BenGoldacre: so you’re supported by the guardian in the sense that jemima might write about you at some stage in the future?: bit more than that, I sense your still skeptical, but I kinda understand
• BenGoldacre: that’s great. i guess now i’m intrigued about your name.: I’m sensible, the account belongs to the project Clinical Reader and not anyones personal opinion, lets email correspond (twitter)
• BenGoldacre: maybe i like to know who’s saying i got stuff wrong. and stuff. in the nicest way. maybe i want to sue you!: See you’re getting into the zone, so will quit while ahead
• BenGoldacre: i think you need a reality check. if you regret your threat then great. but bizarre to tell people they got the story wrong.: Story is correct and unfortunate must add – for someone of your stature and position just thought you jumped on it
• BenGoldacre: so nobody else was wrong, you were just bullshitting. thanks for clarifying. great escalation skills on ur part, respect!: RT @ClinicalReader We’re learning fast, also important to be humble & admit mistakes, see @eagledawg twt
• BenGoldacre: er, look, i wanted to go and work, but that British Library endorsement, did you use their bogs once or something?: Ha ha, okay getting silly, nice interacting with you and look forward to a face to face mtg (twitter)

Day Three: No Steps Forward, Third Step Back

Tangled Strings graphic from FeedStitch

Tangled Strings Graphic from ClinicalReader

The discussion is not limited to Twitter and blog posts. Other social media outlets are carrying on the discussion as well. Noted in this arena are FriendFeed postings by Rachel Walden (with five additional comments) and Mr. Lawson (a.k.a. Steve Incandenza on FriendFeed, with 51 additional comments). One delicious.com user added notes to the entry for the ClinicalReader homepage: “Clinical Reader has been called out by medical librarians because of sloppy copyright practices and use of false implied endorsements by NLM & others. To gain credibility as source of authoritative content, CR team needs to tread carefully!” Still, either with a naive sense of how social networking tools work or in an attempt to put a brave face on what is happening, the people behind the ClinicalReader Twitter account post updates that seem to think all of this questioning of the ethics of the service provider is good for business.

Day Four: A Step Forward?

The fourth day does not start well. There are reports of ClinicalReader fabricating a quote posted in a retweet and making up a retweet entirely.

Then it would seem that some sanity has returned to Clinical Reader. First there is a message that Allan Marks has “taken control of this [Twitter] account” (At this point, Allan’s name appears in the Twitter profile for the ClinicalReader account). Then there is more action to remove the FeedStitch tangled strings graphic from the ClinicalReader site, with apologies to FeedStitch, Mr. Rosenberger, Mr. Goldacre, and others. Mr. Marks thinks that the damage is contained; Mr. Rosenberger is not so sure.

There are more questions about the endorsement of people listed on the ClinicalReader pages. In one case, Dr. Ves Dimov says, “In case you are not sure: tweets and links do not represent endorsement, approval or support…” This is apparently in regards to Dr. Dimov’s inclusion of Clinical Reader on a list of medical RSS aggregation services. Mr. Rosenberger responds, “@DrVes re: tweets as endorsements: @ClinicalReader includes a @vesd tweet under ‘what others are saying’ on this page: http://bit.ly/SZ3SQ” (the shortened URL goes to the Clinical Reader latest newsletter page, which, at the time of writing, returns an “unauthorized” error). To which Dr. Dimov replies, “@lukelibrarian The product interface is still good, the management however has made some very strange decisions.Updated: [list of RSS aggregators].” But Mr. Marks replies, “Hi yes thats correct please liaise with @vesd for confirmation – more than happy to be open thanks” (original tweet now deleted; text taken from archive). Mr. Rosenberger then says, “dude, @vesd = @DrVes, who just tweeted ‘tweets …do not represent endorsement, approval or support’ http://bit.ly/QGIvS” and Mr. Marks replies, “happy to get this removed if @vesd says so luke” (original tweet now deleted; text taken from archive).

On the following day, Medical Library Association president Connie Schardt tweets “RT@ClinicalReader I did NOT endorse your product as President of the Medical Library Association; please remove the misleading endorsement” followed shortly by a mysterious another tweet: “@gabeboldt — I didn’t endorce this product as the President of the Medical Library Association; you gave them a misleading endorsement” – there is nothing in Twitter user gabeboldt‘s timeline from around this time that would account for that message. Ms. Schardt was reacting to an image of a tweet in the “Twitter Buzz” section at the bottom of the “Health Tweets” page. This page is no longer on the Clinical Reader site at the time of writing, but a screen shot of the Google web cache version of the page is available.

The Weekend

Some time overnight on Saturday, the original ClinicalReader Twitter account was renamed again from “clinical_tweets” to “amarks7“. We know this because the history of tweet updates and the list of followers remain intact. This is presumably the same Allan Marks that described himself as the co-founder of Clinical Reader. In addition to renaming the account twice, Mr. Marks deletes controversial Twitter messages. (This may continue and, as a result, some of the links to Twitter in this posting may no longer work; they were functional at the time this document was originally posted.) Another individual subsequently creates a new “clinical_tweets” with a real name of “Ex Staff” and a Canadian flag as the profile image. Is this someone from the fired staff of Clinical Reader? Without an acknowledgement from an official Clinical Reader channel, we can’t be sure.

On Saturday afternoon, a twitter account “clinical_reader” was created with these messages and other messages that give the appearance of being the official Clinical Reader Twitter account. With the subsequent registration of the “clinical_tweet” Twitter account and no postings on the Clinical Reader website, we can’t be sure which of these channels are official.

Updates

Observations

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The text was modified to update a link from @lukelibrarian%20Your%20browser%20is%20lagging%20behind%20says%20′Make%20effective%20use%20of%20the%20library%20journal%20shelf’%20at%20http://bit.ly/uniXw to http://bit.ly/uniXw on January 13th, 2011.

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The American Library Association annual conference is getting more social each year, and as a long-time member of ALA and often a critic of the, well, un-togetherness of ALA’s electronic capabilities, it is nice to see the trend continuing this year. Take, for instance, the Blogger’s Room. Initially just a LITA thing, it is now being promoted as an association-wide service. As I write this, that page has about two dozen entries for individual and group blogs that say they will be covering conference events.

Or take Brian Eisley‘s unofficial Twitter reflector. (Brian calls it a group; I’m calling it a reflector; it is something different than a Twitter Hashtag.) He has put up some instructions on how to get signed up to receive and how to sent messages to the reflector. There is also the Twitter hashtag #ala08. I’m a Twitter newb, so I don’t know the differences, advantages, and disadvantages of each. But I’m interested to learn…

Speaking of tags, the ALA Annual Wiki defines ala2008 as the official conference tag. That’s not such a stretch to assume — it is a logical choice — but the establishment of an “official tag” (as much as anything is official in the social tagging space) does help collocate meeting content in the blogosphere, in Flickr, and in del.icio.us. (What?!? …you say? That’s the function of subject analysis and description? Here in the unwashed folksonomy space? Blasphemy!)

Did I mention the Official ALA Annual Wiki? It is now getting prominent placement in the navigation area of the primary conference pages. The fifth link down — pretty impressive. And it is easy to see why. The Official Wiki holds a host of information not previously found in the American Libraries insert or even on-site. Links to policies and procedures, a Google map of area restaurants and hotels, an “Unofficial Events” page, and a Conference Presentation Materials site to put all of the PowerPoints and handouts from meetings.

It is nice to see ALA providing this space where grassroots organization and promotional efforts can be shepherded in on co-located space. There was a time that this was spread out over various hand-coded web pages, blogs and other web services. Way to go, ALA; and way to go ALA members!

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It was only a few months ago that I was teasing Dan Chudnov for joining Twitter. Now I’ve gone and done it myself. I don’t expect to be using it much, but after observing the “Falls Church, VA” incident yesterday, I thought it would be an useful tool to have at-the-ready. Here’s the story of what inspired it.

Someone on the Code4Lib IRC channel (was it ‘lbjay’?) asked if anyone knew about an explosion in the Falls Church, VA, area after reading a report about it on Twitter. I ran a search in TweetScan for “Falls Church, VA” and was able to watch the event unfold as the “DC emergency tweet network” fired up. Eventually it was determined that it was indeed an earthquake event, but the discussion of the event via Twitter was enough to catch the attention of at least one media blogger.

It reminded me a great deal of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California. Many of the landlines were down or jammed with too many people calling, but the internet stayed up and an IRC channel was set up so that reports of the earthquake effects to be broadcast from the region. If the same thing to happen today, Twitter — through the internet or through mobile devices — would likely be the tool used to track the event.

Now, back to Twitter, here are the parts that I can’t figure out. Almost immediately after I registered for the service and signed in for the first time, I was automatically following betseymerkel, someone who appears to be working with open source software in a Cleveland-area library. I don’t remember doing anything to cause me to start following her, although I suppose it is possible I made a stray click somewhere. And through the first 24 hours with the account, four people are following me. I didn’t tell anyone else about my activities — the only two tweets I’ve posted dealt with setting up the account. I don’t think I know any of these people (betseymerkel is one of them), so I don’t get why they would spontaneously start following me. Thoughts?

Oh, and you can start following me, if you want. I’ll probably follow colleagues during library conferences, but then use something like TwitterSnooze to turn off the chatter in-between events.

Next Day Follow-up

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