Twitter Trial

Last Friday we decided to run an experiment using Twitter. What I'd like to call an ethnographic experiment whereby an anthro-film maker/participant observer updated a group of followers (who could be clients or other experts) on the life of a respondent/household. There was no detailed brief or objectives and emphasis was on method evaluation first and insights a close second.

I wanted to see just how regular updates of text and pictures would be used by followers and whether or not true collaboration would take place. I also wanted to figure out a set of user interface specifications for our web designer to build a site to enable this kind of research.

See the short introduction we sent out to followers.

Next steps are to sort through all feedback, then begin the process of building a site to incorporate text, picture and video updates for followers to collaborate with.

Many of you will know that I am a fundamentalist video ethnographer who believes effective ethnographic research cannot be carried out without video to record and allow scrutiny. So video uploads will be essential. The challenge is that length of video will not exceed 30 seconds or so. And this video length issue is pushing me as far out of my comfort zone as I have ever been.

Watch this space.