Tweeting Science

You may have noticed a new addition to the Connecting Science main page: Jon Copley’s Twitter feed, live from a deep-sea exploration expedition in Antarctica (Twitter page here). Jon is experimenting with using Twitter (a “micro-blog” service that only lets you post messages of 140 characters at a time) as a form of public outreach.

The idea is to give people a feel for what the process of doing science is like, as well as offering them the opportunity to interact directly with Jon by commenting on his “tweets”. Please do take a look and feel free to give feedback--either by responding to Jon’s posts or adding comments to this blog.

I posted a question on the psci-com mailing list, asking list members if they had had any experience of using Twitter as a form of outreach, and whether they could offer any advice. Several helpful people responded with some top tips. You can read the full thread here, but here are some of the key points:

1. Don’t tweet too often: you risk overwhelming your followers with information, and they may stop following you. Consider linking to a blog if you have a lot to say.

2. Sharing useful/ interesting links always helps

3. There are a number of tools available to help you deal with the sheer volume of tweets on Twitter: Monitter keeps an eye out for any tweets containing particular key words, for example.

4. Twitter also offers a widget that lets you display your feed on your web page--which is what I’ve used to display Jon’s feed on here.

Several people suggested interesting science-related feeds, which I’ve saved on Connecting Science’s de.licio.us bookmarks (bottom left hand side of the main page). One really good use of Twitter was NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander. The tweets were written in the first person, from the point of view of the Lander, as it landed and explored the planet. Great stuff!