The Scobelizer points to a cool Twitter mashup called Twittervision. Now this is one damn cool time waster. It’s kind of like watching the world Twitter. But consider how else something like Twittervision could be useful for generating interesting content for your blog.
Say you’re travelling/going on a tour and want your blog readers to be able to follow along. It doesn’t matter if you’re The Scobelizer, a rock star, a travel blogger, or whatever. While Twittervision does not have the ability to be configured to follow a single feed, someone will likely come out with that functionality in the near future. So assume it exists.
Imagine this: you can map out your travel plan for others to see. If you’re famliar with Google maps, you’ll know that little red pushpin icon. (It’s also at Twittervision). If you click on a point of interest (i.e., pushpin icon), you see an information bubble.
Here’s the exciting part (for me anyway): Google now lets you have a tabbed info box. So if you’re building a tour/travel guide map, each point of interest can have an info box with several tabs labelled, say, city, attractions, hotels, latitude + longitude, or whatever you feel is useful.
Take things a step further and grab a screencast as points are being added, and you have video content for your blog. The options are endless. And if that doesn’t do it for you, Google just launched MyMaps, which lets you create custom maps and share them with friends. Great for the visiting friend who can never follow written directions, or for the friend who can never give good directions.
As an example of how relatively easy it is to add interesting visual content to your blog, here’s a 40-second screencast of Twittervision. I’ve used free screencasting software called CamStudio, and uploaded the resulting AVI video file into a new SplashCast show, and voila, the player somewhere on this page. And it didn’t cost me a cent beyond my Internet bandwidth and a few minutes of my time.
Originally posted on April 5, 2007 @ 7:49 am