Live blog with Twitter plugin for WordPress

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in an interesting experiment with Twitter – contribute to a book one tweet at a time.

The book project – Social Media Marketing GPS – is the brainchild of Toby Bloomberg and I was thrilled to be part of it.

But I wish I’d known about the Twitter LiveBlog plugin for WordPress at the time.

What this clever plugin does it notice all the tweets you write after the one in which you include a code string, and adds those tweets to a blog post.

To end the Twitter live blogging session, you add a closing code in a tweet.

So not only do you get the individual tweets, you also get all those tweets aggregated into a single blog post in chronological order, as the screenshot suggests, automatically published by the plugin to your blog and updated as you continue tweeting.

It’s that last bit – the updating – that makes this automated process extremely worthwhile for things like the Twitter book experiment I mentioned. It would be useful in any situation where you wish to use Twitter as a means to create a stream of commentary in 140 characters each time and automatically capture that stream in a blog post, presented in a natural way, ie chronological, rather than the reverse-chronological way of Twitter.

It brings to mind one such Twitter session I did in November 2007: live tweet a government apology about data losses and then add all the tweets into a blog post: a wholly manual process that was prone to errors and extremely time consuming.

The Twitter LiveBlog plugin is simple to use, although maybe too simple for me as I misunderstood the instructions when I started.

The only thing I’d like to see with the plugin is some means to let it know which blog you want to publish your Twitter-post to.

For instance, in my experiment, I installed the plugin on my tech blog, the output from which the screenshot at top is taken.

But I’m more likely to want to use my primary blog (this one); if I install the plugin here as well, I would imagine that tweets I make with the plugin codes will result in posts appearing on both blogs.

In any event, I think it’s a terrific plugin and thanks to Mashuqur Rahman for developing it.

Incidentally, I found out about the plugin from a Twitter LiveBlog post from Cuba (a great example of how this plugin can be used) that I came across while researching about Cuban rums.

Serendipity!