Tweetchats for InDesign Users
Every day, users discover interesting ways to leverage the power of Twitter in ways I doubt the founders expected. One of the most interesting uses, to me, is the concept of “tweetchats” (aka “Twitter Chats”). It’s like a group chatroom — or group IM — conducted over the Twitter airwaves. How can you tell which of the tweets bubbling up in your twitter app is part of the chat and which is just a regular tweet? By its hashtag — the “#[acronym]” bit of text that users include in the tweet itself, often at the very end.
A few weeks ago, I noticed that there were a number of tweets appearing in my browser (tuned to Twitter.com) that all ended with the the hashtag “#ePrdctn” or “#eprdctn”. I entered that hashtag in twitter.com’s search field, and whoa! My entire browser window filled up with tons of tips about ebooks and epubs from users I had never heard of, each tweet containing the tag #eprdctn. (When you do a search in Twitter, you can see tweets from everyone, not just those you follow.)
Here’s an example of one I saw today:
It turns out there’s a core group of users from around the world who work in more-or-less the same field (publishing), and they all wanted to learn more about epubs. So they decided to share information over Twitter with each other by using the #eprdctn hashtag. They even “meet’ once a week on Twitter and have focussed discussions or a guest Twitter-er who takes questions. Very cool!
One of the members of this core #eprdctn group turned out to be a production manager at one of my own InCopy/InDesign training clients, a local mid-sized book publisher. I called him up and he told me about a number of other tweetchats/hashtags that are great to follow, all having to do with book publishing:
- #isbnhour (tweetchat every Friday at 11:00 a.m. CST). If you’re involved with book publishing and epubs and Kindle editions, you know that ISBNs are a hot topic.
- #dbw — from DigitalBookWorld.com (run by F&W Media, who published my first book!), a conference that grew into a blog/community. They “meet” on Twitter at 12:00 p.m. CST every Tuesday and Thursday. It’s organized by @glecharles, a bizdev exec at F&W.
- #followreader — For authors taking control of their own ebooks. Weekly tweetchat Fridays 3:00 pm (CST). For more info, the website is http://followthereader.wordpress.com/. You might also try #followthereader, which some people use by mistake.
- #oclc — Metadata is king! This organization (http://publishers.oclc.org) helps publishers develop and integrate bibliographic metadata into their ebook publishing production.
As I write this, many of the denizens of these hashtags are at Book Expo America (May 25–27, 2010) which of course has its own hashtag, #bea10. (Most conferences these days have a concurrent “underconference” happening in the twitterverse via event-specific hashtags. For example, our Print & ePublishing conference used #pepcon).
Follow a Tweetchat
You don’t need to have a Twitter account or download any software to follow a tweetchat. Just go to http://tweetchat.com in your browser and enter the hashtag in the big search field. This free service will do a live search, refreshing every minute to show you the latest tweets that include the tag. You can follow any links people embed in their tweets, but you won’t be able to participate in the conversation (ask/answer questions in your tweets) unless you have a Twitter account. Sign up for a free one at http://twitter.com.
If you do have a Twitter account, you can use your normal Twitter.com home page to follow a tweetchat, just enter the hashtag in the Search field. Or, use free Twitter clients like TweetDeck or TweetChat (or dozens more) that can filter the twitterstream for you.
InDesignSecrets.com “Tuesday Tweets” Tweetchat: #idsl
When I told David all about these cool book/ebook publishing tweetchats that were happening, he of course wanted to dive in and start our own tweetchat! (Note to self: Never tell David about anything interesting other people are doing that we’re not.) LOL …
So starting today (in about 15 minutes, if I can quickly finish this post), and every Tuesday from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. CST, on a regular schedule to be determined 
you can use the hashtag #idsl for our “Ask InDesignSecrets” tweetchat! As David quietly announced in this post a few days ago, “Hang out with your favorite twitter client and look for the hash tag #IDSL. If you write anything with IDSL we’ll see it. We’ll do some impromptu Q&A, chat, and just see how it goes!”
(In case you’re wondering, hashtags are not case sensitive. #IDSL and #idsl will work the same.)
Even if you miss the “live” chat, you can enter the #idsl tag anytime to see what we talked about, and to continue the conversation.
And, if you want to make sure you never miss one of our tweets, be sure to follow our own Twitter feeds: @indesignsecrets, and our individual ones, @amarie and @dblatner.
Do you follow a certain hashtag that you think other InDesign users would appreciate? Let us know by telling about it in a comment!
Well, let’s just say I’m game to experiment with anything new. But I’m not ready to say that we’ll be doing this forever and ever!
(Or, as Mae West said, “I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.”)
My wife just stared at me when I told her we were doing this, like we were insane. But of course she likes things like the outdoors, real life, and analog things like that.
Okay, so I think the scheduled #dbw tweetchat is the same time as ours … or so I was informed.
I’ll update the bulleted list above.
Our first tweetchat had about … oh I don’t know, four questions? LOL. And I lost internet connectivity halfway in when the AT&T tech showed up for some maintenance. Still, when you consider the 15 minute lead time we gave, and the concurrent #bea10 and #dbw twitterchats, I’m excited we got 4 questions!
We’ll do this again, maybe at a slightly diff. time. Keep an eye out for updates to this post (or follow our twitter acct) for when the next #idsl session happens.
Still interested in other hashtags that our readers follow!
David, what is this “analog” you speak of?
Here are a couple I found for designers in general (as opposed to the book publishing ones above):
#dcth (Design Community Twitter Hours), Thursdays from 6:00 p.m to 7:30 p.m. (CST). They even have their own twitter account: http://twitter.com/dcth
#edcth (Europe Design Community Twitter Hours), Thursdays from 2:00 p.m to 4:30 p.m. (CST), as far as I can tell. One of the organizers is http://twitter.com/creative_guru
You can download some transcripts of these 2 tweetchats as PDFs here: http://michaelconaty.com/
Those look great, Anne-Marie!
@Bob: Yes, the analog world is apparently a whole other non-digital option. Fascinating.