If you have never heard of Digg.com than you might not find this interesting, but if you are into sharing and finding new information then please, read on. Digg.com is a place where the public decides what “news” ends up on the front page. I used to head to this website on a daily bases, sometimes multiple times per day to see what everyone was sharing. That is, until Twitter came along. Twitter allowed me to only follow the people that I wanted to follow and this allowed me to “filter” the information that was being provided. Digg had all the content posted from anyone that wanted to share and of course, some of that was information that I was not interested in. Now comes along the newest version of Digg. Digg4 allows an individual to follow the people you want and you then have the choice to view just information shared and “Digged” by the people you follow or you can see Diggs from everyone. This now brings what I loved about Digg and Twitter together. The new version will also allow you to auto-submit content from a Blog or website that you own to Digg through an RSS feed. Digg4 is in private beta at this time but you can sign up to get in early at http://digg.com/new. If you get an invite and need someone to follow, I am iteachag on Digg and on Twitter.
UPDATE 8/5/11: Check out the update for Google Calendar to Twitter. It just might help with that pesky GMail verification code for forwarding.
UPDATE 1/21/10: I have just received information from Anil Chawla @anilchawla, creator of TweetyMail a competitor to TwitterMail. I have not had a chance to check it out but it looks promising. (See Anil’s post below)
UPDATE 1/19/10: TwitterMail is now working again through TwitterCounter.com. Thanks Boris… see UPDATE from 12/3/09
UPDATE 12/3/09: If you have been experiencing problems with TwitterMail here is what has happened: TwitterMail was purchased by TwitterCounter.com but according to TwitterCounter’s founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten “…it will be back soon.” Please check out their website. I hope that TwitterMail will come back stronger than before. Here is a link that gives an alternative method with an extra step. (http://bit.ly/5LClRD)
When I created our new school website over the summer one of the goals I had was to communicate with our audience in as many ways as possible. We now have news articles on the home page and we have an embedded Google Calendar. I also set up a page for the daily bulletin in written and video form as well as an RSS feed from two of our school Twitter accounts (LGHSCalendar & LGHSCafe) on the bulletin page, one to tell you coming events and the other to tell you the cafeteria menu for the day.
Communication in many forms was the primary goal, however a secondary goal was ease of maintenance. I did not want to personally tweet the cafeteria menu daily or the daily events. Automation was the key, but how? I decided the easiest solution was to find a way to send our daily reminders from our Google Calendar of school events and cafeteria schedule to Twitter. How to do this was the problem. I tried SMS-to-SMS and even RSS-to-SMS but could not get the accounts to talk to one another. The answer was TwitterMail.com. With this free service I was able to have Google Calendar send out an email reminder of an event to TwitterMail, TwitterMail in return would then post that reminder as a Tweet on our Twitter accounts. The only thing I need to do is keep the calendar up to date. As an added bonus Twitter has an RSS feed for an account profile, meaning that I can use that feed with an RSS reader gadget to post it dynamically on our website.
Again, communication was my goal and I was able to accomplish a big portion with a couple of calendars that were created already. Using these existing calendars we now are able to communicate in many ways with our audience.
Several people have asked me how I was able to set this up. I decided to create a screen capture of the process to help them out.
This is the step-by-step version with instructions.
I Teach Ag Blog 