Hello there, if you clicked on this video, you're probably wondering why I took 1,024 photos of the Orion Nebula. In astrophotography, we use a technique called image stacking where those 1,024 photos are stacked together into just one photo in software. And this stacking process will bring our image from this, this is just one two second photo, to this, this is 1,024 two second photos stacked together representing a total exposure time of over 30 minutes. And if you've heard the term stacking before and found explanations for it, just completely bewildering, I really think this video is gonna clear it up for you if you really watch it all the way from the beginning to the end. To give you though upfront here my one sentence explanation for image stacking. Here it is, in this video, instead of taking one super long 30 minute exposure of the Nebula, we're gonna break that long exposure up into many shorter sub exposures of two seconds each taken one after another, just keeping the Nebula roughly centered and add up all of those sub exposures together so that in the end we've captured the same amount of light from the Nebula but just broken up into smaller pieces. And that's it, that's stacking in one sentence. And so now you might be thinking, okay, I get that conceptually. We break up the longer exposure into smaller pieces, add them back together to get our final photo. And that's roughly equivalent to just taking one long photo. But you probably still have some practical questions that this video will answer. Like, well, how much of a difference does stacking really make? How does it really work exactly? How many photos of the Nebula should you take? Is 1,024 really necessary? Or could we stop at 64 or 256? What's the difference? Well, to find out, let's start by going back all the way to the beginning, back to my very first picture of the night of Orion. And we'll take a look at the whole process from beginning to end. So this is my setup. I was shooting from a Bortl4 sky, meaning away from the city lights. I drove a couple hours away from Boston. And my setup was the Canon EOS RA camera, a Canon 85 telephoto lens. It was wide open at f1.2. It's on a tripod. I'm not using a Star Tracker. So I'm limiting my sub exposures to two seconds each to avoid star trailing. And I was shooting at ISO 6400. And I just manually focused the lens. I'm just looking at the stars on live view. I didn't even use a mask. I just made the stars as small as possible. And now I'm taking my first two seconds sub exposure of the night. And just like that, it's done. So let's pop it into Photoshop and take a look at it here. So it's okay. It's just a little boring. One thing that I wanna note is that if you take a picture, a two second picture of Orion Nebula, and it doesn't look exactly like this, don't worry too much, because you'll see as we stack, things change dramatically the more photons you collect and how it looks in a single exposure doesn't determine how it'll look at the end. Now, this looks pretty good, I think for a single two second exposure, partly because I was using very nice gear. I was using an expensive lens that opens up very wide to f1.2. And then I was also shooting this from a very dark location where I didn't have too much glow from city lights. But if I zoom in here, you can see there's a lot of noise in the sky background especially, but also in the transition areas between the Nebulae and the sky. And it's really hard to get rid of that. Even if I were to just apply a curve adjustment here and really crush the blacks, you can see we still have that problem of the noise and the transition from the brighter center of the Orion Nebula out here into the sky. And so the best way to get rid of all of this sort of random noise out here in the sky as we'll see is stacking. And so that's why I'm really excited to show you this video, to show you this transformation as we go. But I wanted to just show you what a single two second exposure with this gear looks like. And again, from a nice dark sky. And you can see the way that I framed this was I put the Orion's belt right in the middle. I put the Brightstar Rigel down over here on the right side and the Brightstar Beetlejuice over here on the left side. And that was just the way that I kept trying to re-center it so that I got the most out of the composition. And I think that it looks good with Orion to have those two stars in frame, which is possible with this combination of gear. Again, a full frame camera and an 85 millimeter telephoto lens. So now I'm taking the next three photos for four total and I'm taking them one after another. I'm not re-centering yet because it's just going so fast. But that's where we run into our first problem with stacking is that we have an alignment issue, right? If I take four photos and stack them on top of each other with Photoshop, look what happens. We get star trailing, which is exactly what we want to avoid, but we can expect because we didn't align the photos yet. And so this is the first key thing to keep in mind about stacking is you always have to first align the photos based on the stars. So in this next tab, I've already aligned them based on the star patterns with some free software I'm going to show later in the video. But when the photos are aligned like this, it's easier to see that each individual two second exposure is very noisy. But you can see that that noise is moving around when I blink between them like this. And that's actually exactly what we can expect from how light works. With the particle nature of light, photons arrive truly randomly. So let's say at an hour, this little spot in the sky where my most cursor is right now, should have a true brightness value of 80 photons in one hour. In just two seconds, we may get zero photons or one photon or three because it's pretty random how they're arriving. And so that uncertainty of what the true answer is for the brightness of this spot compared to all the other spots in the picture is noise. That's all noise or technically shot noise is. It's just the uncertainty of measuring light with your camera. And the cool thing is the longer that we expose, the more certain we become because we've captured more of those photons. So let's get back to stacking. First, let me show you simple stacking in Photoshop before we move on to better methods later in the video. I will select these four pictures that are already aligned and turn them into a smart object from the layers menu and then tell Photoshop to stack the layers in the smart object. And there are a few different choices here for how to stack them. I'm gonna choose mean. And if you remember from school, mean is one way to average. So let's first look at what the stacking of four photos did in terms of image quality compared to just a single image. So here on the left is two seconds versus eight seconds total on the right, four images stacked. And I'm just gonna put a small S curve on here just to see the difference a bit better. And wow, look at the horse head nebula here. You can really see that it's just sort of a featureless blob due to the noise in just one photo. But in just four photos stacked, the horse head shape is starting to come out. And you can also see this down here, this dimmer part of the Orion nebula. It's riddled with noise in two seconds, but by eight seconds exposures, it's starting to firm up and look pretty good. And then of course the background sky looks a lot smoother in a stack of four compared to just a single two. So this is the practical difference between one image and four images stacked, two seconds versus eight seconds total. But let's now look at what actually happened at the pixel level.  Let's zoom way in here all the way in. I'm gonna sample this pixel in the corner here. And if I look at how bright this pixel is, just in the red channel, we can measure it at 145. That's an eight bit scale. So zero would be completely black, two five five would be completely white. So let's note that down in the stacked image, this pixel has a value of 145 in the red channel. Let's look now at each of the four pictures that went into that stack for that pixel. The first one here has a value in red of 143. The next one has a value of 148. Next one's 144. And the last one is also 144. And remember, we picked just a simple mean for the stacking method. So if I add all these together, we get 579. We then divide that by four. It gives us 144.75. Round that to the host number that gives us 145. So in a simplified manner, that's how stacking works. The brightness of each pixel for each image in the stack is averaged together. And that has the effect of smoothing out the random noise as we're getting closer to the true nature of the sky, the more photons that we collect from it. Now you might have wondered why so far in this video I went from one photo to four photos and now we're about to see a stack of 16 photos. So we're clearly quadrupling each time. And the reason I did it this way is each time we quadruple the total exposure time, we're doubling what's called the signal to noise ratio. And I know a lot of big words there. So let me break it down. Signal means the actual light we're capturing and it always has this random noise associated with it. That's what we call shot noise or photon noise. And this type of noise is equivalent to the square root of the signal. So let's say your first photo you look at had at a certain pixel and you measure it and it measures 25. And you know that the noise for that pixel in just one photo then is five because the square root of 25 is five. So the true signal value for that pixel could be expressed like 25 plus minus five. That's the amount of variation we can expect in terms of the noise. So now let's do a stack of four photos and instead of averaging them together we can just add them together. So now that pixel measures 100. And again to find the noise we take the square root we find that the noise is 10. So while the overall signal increased by four times 25 to 100, the noise only increased by two times five to 10. And that means there's more noise and more signal but what changed is their proportion. So proportionally there's less noise in the photo because the signal went up faster than the noise. So we can say that the signal to noise ratio is five with one photo taken and doubles to 10 with four photos taken. And basically every time we can double that signal to noise ratio you're making the photo twice as clean because you're burying the noise with the signal. Okay, so enough theory. Let's see what actually happened by going from four photos stacked to 16 photos stacked. And I should say these images are stacked and processed by me. I applied the exact same processing to each stack to keep this comparison as fair as possible. So this is four exposures on the left and 16 total exposures on the right and zoomed out like this. They look pretty similar but just like we're gonna see when we do any of these comparisons a lot of the details are gonna be different once we zoom in. So let's go ahead and zoom in on both images. And I think here you can see that while we can see the shape of the horse head nebula there it's a lot more defined here and the nebula, the H-elpha nebula around the horse head shape also looks a lot more filled in and less grainy, noisy like that. Same thing with all of these details. The flame, let's go down here to the running man. And you can see it's still a bit noisy here but we're starting to see some of the bright dust in the 16 sub exposure. And here there's a lot of noise in that part while this is starting to get cleaned up a little bit the transitions are looking nicer. If we look at the sky in general I see that there's a lot of red and blue noise still in this four exposure stack in the 16 exposure stack we've lost a lot of the red and the blue noise which I feel like makes the green noise stand out a little bit more. There's two green pixels for every one red and one blue pixel on a DSLR. So that sort of makes sense. If we look at the witch head nebula it's not very prominent in either photo but I would say in the stack of four exposures it's, if you didn't know it was right there you probably wouldn't see it. In the stack of 16 exposures I think if you knew where it was sort of overall in the image you could pretty, it pops out a little bit there. I can see the shape starting to come into focus there. Okay at this point we need to re-center and with a star tracker this isn't necessary because the tracker follows the movement of the stars but when shooting on a static tripod we need to manually re-center every so often about every few minutes. And if we don't the nebula is gonna move right out of the frame. This isn't hard with a constellation like Orion since it's very easy just to use the bright stars as guideposts for framing and centering. But even with manually re-centering every so often if you look at each different sub-exposure you'll notice the stars are in slightly different places. And so I don't really recommend aligning or trying to align in something like Photoshop manually. It's much better to use an astronomy specific software for stacking like Deep Sky Stacker or serial. What these programs will do is they'll take in your raw photos align them all together based on the star patterns stack them with often slightly more advanced stacking parameters you still average but they do some other useful things like throw out outliers with something called clipping. And so if you think of a standard deviation anything that's an outlier just gets eliminated. So this is things like satellites, airplanes that'll often photo bomb your pictures and clipping just means throwing out those bright pixel values not including them in the stack. When you're done stacking in one of these astro specific programs one thing that's a little bit confusing is why the photo is black. So when I look at individual photos on my camera or in Photoshop they look normal. So why does it come out all black after stacking? And it actually is what we want but it is counterintuitive. So let me explain what's going on. A raw file taken with a digital camera collects all the information in what's called a linear space. So it's just the raw data about how each bright each pixel is but it's all compressed down. And if we look at a raw photo taken with a digital camera without anything done do it it'll look black like this. And you can think of this as you know the way that the digital camera sees it makes sense to the camera or a computer program but it isn't of much use to the human eye. The thing that most people don't know is even if you shoot in just raw when you look at that raw photo and playback on the camera or open it up in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw all of those places the camera, the Adobe software are applying processing transformations to your raw files automatically. So before you even touch any sliders or do anything to it the software has already debared your file meaning interpolating the right colors based on the color filter array in your camera and stretch the raw data using a standard curve called a gamma correction which is related just to how the human eye perceives light. So now you might be wondering okay well why don't we just do that with astrophotography apply the standard gamma correction so that it looks right. Well astrophotography processing is very demanding and so having control over the stretch and even more importantly when you apply the stretch from what we call linear space to a non-linear space is part of astrophotography processing. So while it's not typically part of normal daytime photography processing it is important to astrophotography. So we could just let a program apply a gamma correction automatically to your stacked image and then it would not be dark but that's a permanent burned in chain. So instead what most astrophotographic software does is it leaves that up to you when did apply the stretch if you want it to be an automatic stretch or a manual one. Anyways let's now look at 64 sub exposures stacked and processed and compare that to just 16. Okay going from 16 to 64 exposure stacks you could see this is a pretty dramatic difference actually zoomed out because the Barnard's loop area this red semicircle down here and the dust in between the Barnard's loop and these nebulae is really starting to pop in the 64 stack while in this one it's still pretty dim. If we zoom in a bit we can see though that that dust which I'm now able in this 64 stack to bring out a little bit looks okay zoomed out but once you zoom in you can see that dust is pretty noisy still. So I raised the exposure on this stack of 64 to bring it out but that has the consequence of when you zoom in the stack of 64 almost looks noisier than the stack of 16 because I felt confident that I could start bringing out the dust. So there's always trade-offs in processing that you make. I'm one who's sort of a, I think sometimes a maximalist processor I like to bring out as much detail that I can that I can even if it's a bit noisy. Same thing here, this is more restrained it actually probably looks better in terms of noise than this but you can see at 64 exposures was the first time I felt sort of confident about making the picture brighter. Now just as an experiment let's try making this picture as bright as this one so we can really compare them a little bit better. So I would say that's about similar brightness and you can see the noise actually is much worse over here but it's just that I pushed this one a bit more than this one in processing not really on purpose but just because I think I got excited about the details I was seeing. And the main thing that I noticed is when I push the brightness on this exposure it looks a lot, there's a lot more green color noise than there is in this one. Let's look at Orion now. And you can also see that there's certain details that are starting to come out like this finger feature in the dust right here in the stack of 64 that here in the stack of 16 are still completely lost in the noise. Let's look at our old favorite the witch head and you can see there's enough contrast here now in this one, let me zoom out a little bit so you can clearly make out the witch head there while in this one when I made it as bright as this one it really is getting sort of lost in the noise again. Okay, now we're really getting into the law of large numbers where we should start seeing some of that really dim detail coming out from the noise like dark nebulae and dust and things that I really like. So let's compare 256 now to just 64. All right, we have a stack of 64 exposures on the left and a stack of 256 on the right. And I think in this wide view, one thing that's interesting is this up here the angel fish nebulae next to beetle juice. The shape of it is starting to be clearer here. Here you could almost see it as a mistake because it's so dim. Barnard's loop is also firming up and we're also seeing more of the brown dust. We also see that this interesting outcropping of HA from Barnard's loop is coming out a lot stronger than this one on the right, the stack of 256 compared to the one on the left. Let's zoom in now to look at some details. So the main thing that I see here in the one on the right is just that everything is a little bit brighter and a little bit cleaner, right? We're getting into more subtle differences now but if you look closely in some of these areas you're seeing that everything, the gradations from bright to dim look a lot cleaner. They don't look as modeled as broken up and grainy but I would say that we're definitely starting to hit some diminishing returns, right? It's not, this isn't as a big differences from 16 to 64, I don't think. But where you do see bigger differences is on the really dim stuff, right? And that's sort of to be expected because here this dim object is sort of down in the noise floor and you can see it's pretty riddled with noise. Well here it still is pretty noisy but it's starting to really come into its own. We can really see how the nose is connected to the rest of the witch head there. Well in this one it almost looks disconnected from all the noise in the image. Well we've reached the end here, we've quadrupled again to get to 1,024. And usually around here 1,000 sub exposures is my practical limit for untracked astrophotography. Of course what really matters is just the total time. So this is 34 minutes total and astrophotographers will usually call this total integration. And that's basically synonymous with total exposure but by saying total integration I think the point is that it immediately makes it clear you're talking about stacking several sub exposures together. It's not just a single long exposure. So this image has a total integration of 34 minutes and a little bit. And the last one we looked at had a total integration of eight and a half minutes. So that's a pretty big jump from eight and a half to 34. But let's see if that extra time investment was worth it. And now we have 256 on the left and 1,024 photos stacked on the right and zoomed out like this I don't see a huge difference. It looks like the color balance is a little bit different. I don't know, for some reason it looks a little bluish on this one. And then I'm also actually seeing some more dust details up here in the upper right. Let's move this around a little bit and we'll take a look at that. Oh yeah, that's definitely some interesting bright dust up there. And I also see some dark nebula features near beetle juice here. But I think the bigger differences are gonna be when we zoom in on some of these dim things. So let's go ahead and do that. So yeah, definitely we're seeing some interesting dust features that I don't think I've ever captured before here around beetle juice. And the boogeyman nebula, we're seeing some nice bright dust and actually seeing the gradations from the darkest part of the dark nebula to a more brown gray dust around it, which I think is pretty cool in this 1024 stack. Okay, and then this is getting quite accomplished, I think. It's looking really good, the M78 reflection nebula here. Here we still have a bit of color model. We do get sort of the brown color of the dust around it, but it looks a lot more refined here and we're seeing more nicely gradients from a grayish brown to a darker brown to the black parts of the dark nebula. And again, this is just a difference between pretty good, 75% there to pretty much finished. I think that looks really nice, especially considering this is an untracked stack. Same thing with Orion nebula. Down here, if I was gonna nitpick, this is still a little bit noisy, especially if I zoom in a little bit more, you can see there's still a fair amount of sort of red color noise in there, some broken up parts where you can see a little bit of model left. But if we look at some things like the finger here, this finger of dust, there I can see it has a lot of green model left in at 256 and by 1024, that looks like a pretty solid, dusty brown color. So it looks a lot more finished. And then now let's look at one of my favorites, the witch head. Here's some interesting dust near the witch head. Okay, and there's the witch head itself. And you can see again, this looks nearly finished. This looks like maybe 90% of the way there. Well, this looks only half baked, right? It looks a lot more broken up when we see it compared to this one now. So I'm gonna zoom all the way back out. And yeah, I just want you to look at this because I mean, when you're looking at them zoomed out, you really don't see all these differences. But even in the witch head here, you know, but when you really zoom in and take a look at these differences, you can see that they are striking in some places, especially in the little fainter details that are sort of hard to see when we're zoomed out like this. But when we zoom in, we really can start to examine them. And that's something I love about S2 Photography is in a wide field image like this getting both the grand perspective, but then also being able to zoom in and look at smaller details and not be too put off by how noisy it looks. And now let's look at just some crops of each jump from one sun exposure up to 1024. I always find these kinds of comparisons can really drive home what's happening as we go from one to the next. Okay, so let's take a tour through the image here, just looking at some crops. And we're starting with the Boogeyman Nebula. This is a favorite of mine. It's not really the best object in a wide shot like this because it doesn't have a huge amount of impact wide, but it is starting to get interesting, I think, in the stack of 1024. It's definitely defined in this stack of 256. By the time we get to the stack of 64, it's barely visible. You could mistake that for just sort of weird noise structures. And then it's invisible in these three on the left. Okay, next up here, this is Barnard's Loop or part of it. And you can see Barnard's Loop by the stack of four. You're starting to see something there by the stack of 16. You can definitely see it. Stack of 64, it's looking okay, but there's still enough noise that it looks a little, the transitions aren't great. By the stack of 256, I think that looks pretty good. There's just a bit of red noise that's distracting to me. And then the stack of 1024, it's taking on a little bit of a lighter magenta color that might have been processing kind of thing. But I think that you really can only get that nicer color of it with the nicer gradations when you really have enough data to play around with. I think you're also starting to see some dust playing and intermingling with Barnard's Loop. Okay, and then we have the M78 Reflection Nebula. And I think, while this one is visible in all six, it's bright enough in that little core area to see a little bit of reflection, even in a single shot, it doesn't really look accomplished until we get all the way over here to 1024. I'd say in 256, it's passable. You get that nice bridge of dark nebula right there that's really coming across, but it's even coming across in this one, the stack of 64. But to really see all of the interesting structures that make up the dark structures around the reflection nebula, you don't really get that until over here. Okay, there's the flame nebula. The flame nebula is bright enough that I think even in this stack of 16, it looks pretty good. You can see that, I like to think of this dark part in the flame as being sort of like a tree, a tree trunk with some branches coming out. But I also see the idea of it being a flame. And I'd say that while it looks fine here in the 16, it really looks best by the time we get to 256 and then there's really not too much improvement over here. It's just a little bit cleaner in the transition areas. There's also this little reflection nebula right underneath, which doesn't, it's so small in this image that it's hard to really make much of it. But I think that that starts coming across at 256. The horse head, I think already looks pretty good at least at this scale in the 64 image stack, but definitely looks more accomplished in these two. We have another reflection nebula up here. I think this is a sharpness object, but I don't remember. It looks pretty good in the final two. Okay, here's the running man nebula. I think that the big issue with the running man nebula is it almost looks better in the stack of 16. And then we have to skip over the stack of 64 because in the stack of 64, I'm trying to start bringing out this brown dust all around it, but it's really not ready to do that yet until we get to the stack of 256. So that's just sort of probably a processing mistake on my end. I wish to kept this one darker like this one, but I just got overeager. But anyways, I think that even in the single one, we're already starting to see some of that detail in the running man. It definitely starts looking quite accomplished though here at the stack of 256. And then by the stack of 1024, we're just sort of refining the transition to the dust. The Ryan nebula. So the Ryan nebula is a really interesting one because I've blown the trapezium region even in a two second exposure at ISO 6400 F1.2. So the trapezium region, this little core area is so bright that it's so easy to blow out that it's really hard to recover. So I usually just don't really even try. I just know that I'm gonna blow it out, but you can see that by the time we get to 1024, that blown out core has extended quite a bit than from where it was here. And I didn't do any really kind of HDR effect on this to try to recover the core details. I could if I wanted to, but I didn't really try. So you can see that the core gets, you know, successively more and more blown out as we get over here. But I think that that looks natural in a wide field like this. I don't try to really, I like seeing the brightness relations of the different objects, I guess is my point. Around the Ryan nebula, the brown dust doesn't, I think look really accomplished until we get to the final one. If we move up here, this is some interesting colors that really are just look like noise here at the stack of 64. They look like something, but really still pretty noisy in the stack of 256. And I think here you can tell they are something, but they're still even at 1024 pictures really not defined yet like they could be. So that's an area where we could still, I think use more exposure time, more integration. This is interesting. I haven't really noted this that the star halo on bright stars also gets bigger and bigger, the more total integration you put in. And I think in a wide field shot like this, that looks good to have the bright stars have a nice big colorful halo. And so this is the bright star Rigel. And I really like how it has a nice bright blue halo so you can see that's a blue star. Okay, and then here's the chin of the witch head. Let's go to the nose. There's the nose and the eye. And really I think looking at it now, I think really it really only comes across well in the stack of 1024, so 34 minutes. In this eight and a half minute shot at 256, it's definitely there, we can see the structures, but it's still very noisy. And in this one, it's basically a battle between the noise and any signal we have. And then I'd say it's nearly invisible at 16 exposures and below. Hopefully at this point, I've answered how does stacking work? But another question I said I'd address is, when do you stop? How do you know how many photos is enough? How many to take? And I think that really has to do with your goal. After 64 photos, the Ryan Nebula looked pretty good already, but we've discovered as we've gone down that path that there's so much more that can be revealed in the scene with more integration. So if your goal is to bring out the dust clouds or M78 or the Witchhead Nebula, those are all much dimmer and that's gonna require putting in more time. And of course, adding a Star Tracker can really help in this respect because instead of having to take over 1,002 second shots, I could have just taken 34 one minute shots and saved a lot of hard drive space by just having 34 versus 1,000. It also saves the cameras shutter a bit. But that's a whole other topic, Stacker versus No Stacker. I've already done a video on that actually and I'll link it right up here. This video is a lot of work and it wouldn't be possible without financial support. So at this point, I wanna thank all of my wonderful patrons over on patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. And if you're interested in seeing your name in the credits of any of my long videos, any of the videos over 20 minutes, you can head over to this link and support me there. The support of the channel starts at just $1 per month and then I also have a $3 and a $7 tier. And there are a number of benefits included for signing up on my Patreon. These include a vibrant Discord community where people post their photos, get photo critiques, help each other with gear and processing and everything related to astrophotography. And we also have a monthly challenge object that's a friendly competition with some prizes. We have a group project, if you wanna work on something collaboratively with others. And finally, there are some exclusive videos including a monthly live Q and A that's always recorded and shared right on Patreon. So if you sign up, you can actually already watch 10 of those monthly chats. And then lastly, like I said, you get your name in the credits of any video longer than 20 minutes. So the link again is patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. I hope to see you there. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.


There we go. Hello and welcome to Encompass Live. We are back finally after a longer than expected hiatus. This is Christa Burns at the Nebraska Library Commission. We are back with Encompass Live here on August 12th and with a new system that we are using and hopefully it will be easy for everyone who is attending and presenting. Encompass Live is our Nebraska Library Commission's weekly online event that we do here every Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. Central Time. It is free. You can just sign up on our website to attend any sessions and it is recorded. So if you are not able to attend the live session, you can listen to the recording that we're doing right now. This morning we are going to teach you all about Twitter. As much as we can in an hour. Yeah. Michael Sowers, our Technology Innovation Librarian here, the Commission is going to do that for you. So go ahead and take it away. All right. Thanks, Christa. So let's see here. We need to switch over to, I'm going to switch over to my browser in one second. That probably just showed up in the recording but that's okay. We are going to talk about Twitter today. This has been quite an interesting little piece of technology. Many of you, I don't know how many of you are already using it. Maybe looking for some extra tips. But my assumption is that most of you have gone, I've heard of it. I don't get it. Why should I care? This seems to be whatever I get in front of an audience and mentioned Twitter that I get one or the other. Love it or what is it? Twitter is a web service that was started by a couple of guys who also started Blogger. One of those two guys is Ed Williams and he is actually from Nebraska originally. So yes, we can mention that that there is a Nebraska connection to Twitter and Twitter is designed as a service that has become known as micro blogging. The idea behind blogging was to share your thoughts, your feelings in a text based format and usually blogs tend to people write lots of verbiage, paragraphs, sentences, all sorts of things. It tends to be longer form sort of content. Twitter is kind of like blogging but you in each post you're limited to 140 characters and that's it. So micro blogging. The original question that was on the Twitter homepage which I'm showing you right now was what are you doing now and that actually was there for the last year or so until just a couple of weeks ago when they completely changed their homepage around and announced to share and discover what's happening right now anywhere in the world and what they're kind of doing here on this home screen is they're focusing on the ability to search all of the content that people are putting into Twitter. But we will get back to that. What I'm gonna start with is focusing on the actual setting up accounts, how you can use it, what are the features, why should you care that sort of thing. The one thing I want to say before we get into it too much is that Twitter is meant to be kind of a giant conversation. Yes you might have heard of Twitter and you might be saying to yourself okay great so Person X is blogging what they have for breakfast this morning on Twitter. They used to write an essay about it. Now they just say I'm having Cheerios with a banana because that can fit 140 characters. Well it's an interesting concept. I completely agree with you that in most cases I probably wouldn't agree that that would be an interesting piece of information. However it's only not interesting to me is because I don't care about what that person is saying. Yes that person is saying what they had for breakfast but they're not talking to me necessarily. They're talking to the people who follow them. I follow people and I might be interested what they had for breakfast. I might not on some days. Other people follow me. They might be interested in what I'm saying. That doesn't mean you're gonna be interested in what I'm saying or any other particular person was saying. Another way you can look at it is imagine if you are in you know you're at Grand Central Station and everybody's talking to everybody else and imagine that you could actually hear and understand what everybody was saying all at the same time. That's kind of like Twitter. Well you wouldn't want that because you don't care what just about everybody is saying in Grand Central Station except maybe that person standing next to you. That's your friend. That's a member of your family.  So you do need to learn to kind of filter the content that you get through Twitter to actually make it work for you and I'll show some of the ways that I've personally done that with my account. Now the first thing most of you would want to do if you haven't already is actually sign up for an account and you can do that by clicking on the sign up now. This is probably one of the simplest sign up forms in the world. You enter your name, you pick a username, a password, put in your email and then type in the caps code down there to prove that you're a human being and then you create my account and that's pretty much it. That's all you have to do. So it's maybe a 30 second process. Probably the hardest part will be picking your username. It just you got to make sure you haven't picked one somebody else's picked. So what I'm going to actually do is I'm going to go ahead and sign into my account here which I also could have done from the homepage and my username is msours and my password. Yeah, I will not say out loud and I can have it remember me but since the computer I'm sitting on isn't my computer, I'm not going to have it do that. I'm going to go ahead and click sign in and no please firefox don't remember my password and what we have here is my Twitter homepage. Now I have customized this a bit and I do realize that on this screen because of the sharing and the size of the screen we're on kind of the content down the middle is kind of overlapping the graphics I have on the background that we're not going to concern ourselves too much with that at the moment. Once you have an account there's a few things I want to go in and tell you about before we actually get to this whole thing about posting with Twitter and following people and things like that. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this profile link up at the top and that profile link is going to take me to actually not the page I expected I will be completely honest. That's actually taking me to the post things that I've made recently so we're going to come back to that what I wanted is settings. Yes, okay here we go. I've been reading a lot of books that people have written lately about Twitter and recommendations and the one I was reading yesterday actually said really you should go through and set up all these settings before you start posting anything and I thought that was really good advice because this is how you customize your account and how you kind of make it yours and you really want to make your account yours before you start putting your thoughts out there for other people to read and possibly trying to attract people to reading your content. So we have right here on the account you will have your name and your username and your email address will already be there from signing up for your account. You will want to change your time zone make sure that's accurate because it does keep track of when you post things. If you have a URL so if you have a personal blog you want to link people back to or if you're setting up an account for the library you can put in the library's URL. You get a one line bio. You get 160 characters to describe yourself.  Yeah a little longer than a tweet but not much so you really want to think about that carefully and usually what what again this book that I was reading recommended was list like writer blogger reader librarian loves Star Wars. You know kind of pick a couple of words that describe you and then say something that you like or enjoy on top of that and usually you can kind of fit that into 160 characters. You do want to mention where you are physically in most cases. Twitter is location aware so you can do things like search for people who have tweeted from Lincoln Nebraska or from Omaha or whatnot. What language would you be using Twitter in. I'm going to assume English for most of us and then protect my tweets. Now this is a little interesting. There are some privacy features here not a lot. This is pretty much it right now since that box for me is not checked. What that means is anybody who comes to Twitter whether they have an account or not whether they follow me or a friend of mine or not can read what I have posted. If I check protect my tweets what that will do is that only people I approve will be able to read my tweets. So if you're maybe you know not comfortable with it at first you might want to protect it. If you just want to you know tweet with your immediately immediate family and friends you might want to protect it. However if you're setting up an account for the library don't protect your tweets. Okay that that people will just frown upon that because defeats the purpose. Yeah it defeats the purpose. You want anybody to be able to find the content say from the library. I have a question. I'm not sure if you know it's not. Sure. Is that by default checked or no. I that's a very good question and I don't remember. Look at it to see. Yes. This is why you want to check through these settings before you actually start you know actually doing anywhere. You have a password tab. You can go ahead and change your password here if you wish to do so. You then have devices. This is where things get a little more interesting. You can actually hook your Twitter account to your cell phone and then you can post Twitter and you can receive tweets via text messaging on your phone. Now eventually as interesting as this might sound to you you need to be very careful with it because you can receive every single tweet via text message and I've heard of people who get so many tweets because they follow so many people that they can never make a phone call because they're constantly getting text messages. And if you have to pay for that on your cell phone plan exactly you know any tweet you send via text message or any you receive if you don't have an unlimited plan for text messaging you know you're going to be paying for that. So I have set up my phone there. There you know I'll have my cell phone number. That's all right. I live dangerously. I can now send tweets from my phone which I do periodically. I can then also on a case by case basis have certain accounts send me tweets to my phone. And then I've also set there please by the way do not send me tweets between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. because I kind of want to sleep. Notices will set up the ability to notify you about things about your account via email. I really like these. If somebody sends me a direct message which we'll talk about a few minutes I'll get a copy in my email because I might not always be on Twitter. If somebody starts following me I will get an email because I might not always be on Twitter. In fact actually if you're on Twitter there's no real way to know that. The only way you can know that some follow you is if you check this send me an email. Your Twitter itself does not do that. No. Exactly. Picture. You do want to upload a picture of yourself. There's my little picture there my little avatar guy. The funny part of that story is I was actually wearing that outfit on the day I created that avatar. I do have that Hawaiian shirt and tan pants. And so you could have a small photograph of yourself a logo image. My general recommendation is even if you use a cartoon stick to an image of yourself. I mean you really make it personal. Make it a representation of you that looks like a person. Some people will send you symbols or logos. Chris I think do you use a bat symbol for a while? I've used various things. But it is a picture of you now. It is now my picture. I had at one point I had the bat logo because I was in this Batgirl phase because Batgirl was a librarian. And when it was talk like a pirate day I changed it to little pirate logo for fun but then change it back. Some people do things like that where they change their logo for certain events to support certain events. They say you know color it a certain color and that shows that you are supporting whatever political thing that's going on. So and right here you can very easily do that. But it's good to like yeah if you're doing your own personal Twitter account having something that shows that it's you and then people who maybe who have seen you in person know oh yeah that's so and so I remember them or when they do see you they can match up with you're the one I follow that those things I saw your face on your Twitter exactly now if you're doing it for your library and you're you're twittering as you know so into a public library you might not want your face you might want the library or the library so it's going to depend on what your purpose of that account is. But one thing I want to stress regardless of all this is a very good point is you will get a default icon which is basically a couple of circles in a brown square and you really need to change that. I follow a lot of people and every once in a while I need to weed and I am not the only person who does this. One of the things I'll generally look at is has the person bothered to change their icon because you know if you haven't bothered to change your icon you might not be taking this too seriously you know you might not really be into it. So that is something I would actually consider in in deciding whether to follow people or not. And going back to the account information where you enter information about yourself in the bio one line bio and the URL location there are some people who and you'll see you'll see these people talking about it on Twitter who say if you don't have a bio that tells me who you are and you start following me I'm not following you back and I'm gonna block you. I don't know who the heck you are or why you're here or why you're online at all. I have no no reason to pay attention to you at all so very important as Michael said the beginning. First thing you do before you even start Twittering before you even start following other people go in here and get this stuff set up because if you don't have stuff in there there are certain people that just by default because you have not entered anything will immediately block you and you've destroyed the whole experience for yourself. The last tab I'm not going to talk about the connections tab today in the interest of time but design this is where you can change the background of your Twitter page and you'll notice that there are some built-in ones here you can change your color scheme what I've actually done is I've uploaded my own background picture which is that where you can see a book cover and my name down the left hand side basically what you're doing is you're setting up a wallpaper for your Twitter page so you can customize your own there are templates if you go to Google and search on you know Twitter backgrounds you'll find free ones that people created you've got some built-in ones here that you can pick so if you don't like the generic blue which I think this one is the default one you can change it to some of these others and you would just click you know you can select one of these by clicking you can change your background image that will take you to a screen where you can upload your own you can change the colors I'm not actually going to change mine although I'm thinking about doing it I'm thinking I'm getting good yeah it's been this way for about six months and I'm thinking maybe I need to change it just a little bit and I will point out real quick that at the bottom of each one of these screens was a save changes button please make sure when you change any of this stuff you click on save changes all right so I'm gonna go back home and this is my home Twitter page now you will see over to the right-hand side that we have some basic information there's my logo or my icon and my username I am following 403 people I have 1086 people following me which means they're reading what I'm posting the people I'm following means I'm reading what they're posting and I so far posted 8,878 tweets kind of have a little tidbit about Twitter here and then you have some links and the search bar and save searches which we'll come back to in a little bit so what we've got right here down the middle white section is these are all of the people that I'm following and these so this is what they have posted recently and you can see that this was posted less than 20 seconds ago half a minute ago less than a minute ago one minute ago and you scroll on down and the newest ones are okay so these are all folks that I'm following and these are people literally from all over the world and we're gonna we're here's there's Yop here he's in Denmark yeah he's in the Netherlands so we're actually gonna put that to the test all going all the way back to Mr. Wilson is right here in Lincoln yeah that's right yes pound Allen gay we'll talk about that pound symbol in a moment so I'm gonna answer the question what are you doing so I'm presenting Twitter to Nebraska librarians hey Twitter friends please give a shout out from wherever you are okay so I'm gonna go ahead and type that you'll notice over here on the right it's 33 characters left so I am under my 140 character limit if you go over it will turn bright red and will not let you click that update button so I'm gonna go ahead and click update and that's going to send out and notice now this is in my Twitter stream because it's the people I'm reading and me okay and we'll even say latest this is what I posted most recently and when I posted it okay so we're gonna give that a few minutes we're gonna come back to that in a second this is home what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna click on my username in the upper right hand corner and this page and this was also if I had clicked on profile up at the top which I did accidentally a few minutes ago this is now just the list of tweets that I have posted so it's not my stream it's just the ones that I've posted and I can do several things for these including delete them if I wish so wish to do so every once in a while you post something up there and you kind of go oh you know I really really misspelled something the meaning got totally lost you can delete it but I gotta say I can go back 8,000 almost and delete really really old ones but that doesn't mean nobody else has read them yeah I mean so you know if you're gonna delete a tweet delete pretty quickly so I'm gonna then go back home and let's see if anybody has responded yet and there we go we've already gotten three two direct responses oh actually one direct response we have info bunny her name is bunny and I'm the sheriff around here as you were she didn't actually say where she's from so this is one new tweet and what's going on here where it says here at M. Sowers it's basically saying I am replying to you or she is replying to me if I wanted to reply to her I could just type it up here or if you notice this little arrow kind of appears here I can click that notice automatically it changes to reply to info bunny and it says at info bunny and I can say where are you located I can't type and talk at the same time you think after 15 years of doing this I would have gotten that scale but no so no now notice this is reply because I'm writing a reply so it's kind of like chat you know if you can do chat you can also do Twitter so go ahead and hit reply now what Bill has done and he's in New York somewhere yeah this is very convenient I like how this is working out notice this is RT what's going on there is he is retweeting something in other words he saw something that a an account called Mashable posted and he wanted to pass that along to the people that read him so he's retweeting something go ahead and hit refresh and see if anybody else is online here okay so we're getting a conversation going here okay and this is good so we have hi from Elkhart Indiana and then we have Josh Neff who's a friend of ours says don't listen to the British buddy I'm the sheriff he's in Kansas and so then I asked where you located and she's responded to both of us saying that he is not the sheriff he's an outlaw which actually I would have to agree I'll have to agree on that so we go ahead and hit reply and that gets posted so you can see you can quickly get a conversation going here it's not always what you had for breakfast I will post a lot of tweets that are interesting articles that I find online hey I'm reading this great article go check it out I will also post things kind of like a I've done here is requests for help does anybody know a good site for X I put in together a presentation here's a link to it what do you all think and I get responses from all over the world with from the people I follow and that follow me we do another refresh here and then we'll kind of move on see if we've got some other responses here hi from my car driving across Washington listening to tweets I don't know how he's listening to tweets I'm gonna have to get back to him on that one so you know now I'm I'm hoping he's not texting something yesterday somewhere about being able to listen to your tweets on the iPhone just yesterday so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna I'm gonna ask him how he's doing that I'm gonna have to look into that and we'll get we'll get back to that one later now I mentioned that at symbol and notice I've now gotten some that have been responding directly to me if you look over on the right hand side here you will see at M Sours what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on that and that's going to bring up all of the tweets that have been directed to me that have at M Sours in them so we have NW Long Island London England she's at the Queen's House drinking tea Mississippi State University Libraries so I can go in and see these are just the things that people have sent to me okay now what's interesting about using the at symbol and this has changed recently so Krista can maybe correct me if it starts with at say M Sours then I see it in my stream but nobody else will if it mentions at M Sours somewhere in the middle then it's public so it's it's really kind of weird it depends on where the at username is located if it's at the beginning it's kind of like only to that person but if it's mentioned in the middle somewhere such as I was listening to at M Sours give a talk on Twitter then that would be kind of more public there used to be in the settings I thought there was something that you could control what level you saw right but it's not in the settings anymore I think they just kind of made a decision so there you might want to play around with that a little bit but what I want to lead that to is this thing called direct messages now I'm trying to think what direct messages I've gotten recently this should be okay to show and I Krista's now laughing okay these are good you can send a message specifically to another user and only they will see it it's like a private message so I can pick from a list of people here and I could pick CJ Burns and I can say this is a private message very in and click send and what that's going to do is it's going to say hey I sent a direct message this is my inbox these are the messages I've received spy masters a game we won't get into that and these are messages that I've sent to other people and we will see that here is this is the private message that I sent her also there is a spam account in Twitter where you can report people for being spammers and I've been doing that a lot lately so you've got this ability to kind of work through this system also and I'm gonna go back home here for a second one other thing greetings from Maryland is let's say okay memo has posted this I guess this flipper flicker link would help and I've got this little star over here I can mark this as a favorite I can say hey you know what I like that I want to get back to it later it's kind of like bookmarking a tweet so that what that will get me is if I click on favorites over here it will bring me up just the messages that I have marked as a favorite recently so there you go and I can get back to them and say hey what was that link I wonder what you know why did I want to look at that or I want to get back to that later so you can specifically bring that up now I'm gonna go back home again point out a couple of other things in this interface and it looks like he's using an app called Twitter hooked to the car stereo no less so you know what I would have favored that because I want to look at that later I think that's really interesting and what you'll see here is we have the less than five seconds ago and then it says from Tweety and this one says from Seismic and this one says from the web and Krista has a question do you want to open up to me oh yeah sorry we're gonna hide in the chat room and before we move on to other stuff does anybody have any questions comments anything about what we've um described so far about Twitter yeah we're kind of cranking along how to use it or anything anybody have any questions about it for you in a day demonstrate how to mark spammers I like the use of this fam I got okay really really simple in fact I'll do that right now thank you for that question um the first thing you need to do is you need to follow this fam account so actually let's before we talk about this Tweety Seismic in the web we need to talk about following people so this is this is the one thing we've not done so let's say for example I know there's an account out there called spam so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go to twitter.com slash spam there is a user called spam so I bring up their page and you'll notice here it says following that means I am already following them I'm what I'm what you would see is uh I'm going to unfollow okay and what you would see you wouldn't see this yellow bar but you would just see a button called follow okay so if you were to create a account today you would come to twitter.com slash msours because you want to follow me maybe you don't have to um but I'd appreciate it um so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click follow and now whenever spam posts something it will show up on my homepage okay once I'm following someone I can and they followed me back I can now send them direct messages okay so because I just unfollowed and refollowed this may not work but what I would then do is I would then go home and I've noticed that somebody's got a spammy sort of account okay so what I can do is I can go to my direct messages and I can send a message to spam and what the instructions are is just username in other words I think this person is a spammer and then these spam people at twitter will check it out that's all you need to do for that okay and that just actually started I think a month or two ago that's that's pretty recent okay so um if um so let's say I now know that there's a person out there called CJ Burns so I can go ahead and go to Burs are and I told you I can't talk and type at the same time um so I go to CJ Burns and load that up it should exist and in fact not only am I already following her I have then turned on device updates which means if she posts something I get a copy of it in my on my cell phone yeah a text message if I decided I didn't want that I would just say oops no I I want to turn to vise updates um meaning on the setting okay yeah I'm not sure what's going on there but if I actually do this I will be unfollowing Krista and she probably doesn't appreciate that notice her background there is the bat girl was a librarian image there so everybody you follow shows up in your timeline yeah actually what I'm going to do here they're going to pick somebody that Krista follows and I don't so let's say I probably don't file uh is that a good person oh NASA okay I don't follow NASA so I've got along here oh Krista follows NASA okay well hey this looks pretty interesting okay I'll click follow and I am now following NASA and you'll notice it says here device updates off because I really don't want them sending me text messages and this is where we can mention verified accounts too what why don't you talk about verified accounts I'm not too familiar with those yeah you can see that the very top of this particularly when it says verified account um this is something also relatively new last six months or so I don't know that um twitter has instituted anybody can create an account and twitter and a lot of people are doing fake accounts pretending to be celebrities or whoever um and sometimes it's okay the purpose of it is for parody and for having fun some places some people some people didn't think it was okay and some people wanted to say to show to the world this is my real account not someone else's if you really want to be following the real NASA the real whoever do a verified account and so people can go through the process of verifying their account with twitter and once they do prove that they are who they say they are they get that verified account icon at the top so that's how you can tell that that is the official NASA um twitter stream this one is Darth Vader um which is obviously um as you can see not a verified account because Darth Vader's not a real person but this is someone who yeah that's really bad color scheme on their part um who is pretending to tweet as Darth Vader for entertainment purposes for fun things um so it does not get verified um did you read their bio evil orphan Annie uh okay if you find that funny grown down um so this is something that you can follow so you can see the difference this is someone famous go to quote but has not verified their account because that isn't a real person yeah but um just a good thing to notice um if you are trying to follow someone in particular see if they are verified or not and then you know it's the real one also a way to tell if something from a business or a company or someone is real they will sometimes on their own web pages that you're using already or in emails they send you say hey we're on twitter follow us even if it's not a verified account obviously you can trust from the page you're starting at to do it um that's how i got the one that you're looking at the New Orleans um convention and visitors bureau i subscribe to them an email and they just sent me a new one saying hey we're on twitter now boom i signed up to follow them so um that's also a good way to know if it is the real people who are posting it or not all right so we've talked about posting i want to talk about a couple more ways of posting because one thing i found very quickly especially when i'm surfing around the net i read a lot of articles online and i want to share these stories with with my friends on twitter i it was kind of annoying to have to um you know have twitter open in one screen read an article in another um switch back to twitter write something copy the url from the other screen and and go back over so there's some ways you can actually make your life a little easier with twitter and one of which is called the twitter bar this is if you're a firefox user and i i live and die by this add-on in firefox okay what i've done here is if you look up towards the top right above my cursor there in the address bar you'll notice there's a little twitter t there so let's say i'm surfing along and i find a website that i'm really really interested in such as twitter bar and so what i've got here is i've got the url and i want to i want to tweet that url well but what i also want to do is i want to say i love twitter bar okay and include the url well now what i can do since i've added twitter bar is i can just go over to that t turns into a little plus it tells me i have 106 characters left and i click that and it will say are you sure and you know what don't confirm after this please just do it next time click okay it says posting to twitter and um because this is not my computer the first time you use this you need to do your account and say yes i really want twitter bar to have access to my account and it says authorization complete okay so let's try this again um and oh sorry i was on the wrong screen so i now it still says i love twitter bar so i'm gonna post that this is posting to twitter and it says post successful so now if i go back to my twitter page and i reload that we should see there's my post i love twitter bar so in other words it's just i'm there i write a tweet i click send it to twitter and it's all done that only works in firefox okay so what about those of you stuck in internet explorer which is most of us in this building actually um well what you can do is you can use a service called twit this and by the way we all have links for all of this at the end of class so you don't need to try to write down all these urls twit this one of the things you can do is you can use what's called a bookmark link and i've talked about these in other presentations before i'm going to go ahead and go to tools and then i have to scroll down here a bit and it says create a bookmark link and it says twit this and what i've got here is i've got my bookmarks toolbar open i'm going to take this link and i'm going to drag it and drop it right up here and this works in both firefox internet explorer safari opera chrome whatever browser you want okay so that now says twit this and so what i can do is now instead of typing in my address bar i'm on this screen i can say twit this i believe i will probably have to authorize this the first time again and it says okay well i'm using uh i'm reading about twit this i can change this i can say uh check out twit this and i say okay twit this and hooray it says it worked okay i didn't even have to authorize it so i close that up i go back to my twitter home page i click refresh and we get check out twit this and the link now these links you may notice what twitter will usually do is shorten the link using like a tiny url or um bitly or one of these services and that helps you sometimes just urls can be longer than 140 characters so most of these services will allow you to automatically kind of shrink the url that you're looking at to make sure it fits within the 140 character limit okay i do want to we're going to get back to searching but i kind of want to show you kind of the next stage okay everything i've shown you so far is on the twitter website at twitter.com i'm following 404 people now people could mean individual people could be organizing organizations companies services whatever well that can get a little hard to keep track of i mean new stuff's constantly coming in um some people you follow might be consider a little more important than other people that you follow i i hate to use the word important but you know the people that i work with i wouldn't want to make sure i kind of separate them out so you know if if they've tweeted something that i really need to know about i can i can do those and there's lots of different ways you can access twitter without actually using twitter.com i've already mentioned that you can use it via text messaging there are twitter applications for the iphone and the ipod touch there yeah kenly was talking about one that actually reads you your tweets i'm really gonna look into that um that's gonna be interesting doing a road trip and just listening to random tweets coming into your yeah i gotta check that out um there are if you have a windows mobile cell phone there are twitter applications that you can install there are desktop applications you can install on your pc uh seismic desktop and uh tweet deck are are actually used very well in fact here they're mentioning seismic right here and these are very powerful ways that you can organize your how you're using twitter christa you use tweet deck right is okay um i'm using something very similar to tweet deck that i'm going to show you i'm using something called twit hive twit hive pretty much works just like seismic desktop and just like tweet deck but it's web based so i don't have to be sitting at a particular computer i can log into twit hive from this computer my computer my office my computer home and and have everything be exactly the same someone else's house someone else's house pretty much as long as i have web access i can get here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to sign in and literally as long as you have a twitter account you can use this i'm going to go ahead and sign in with twitter and it says um that's not working okay let me just try something else this is going to make my life really interesting if it doesn't uh let's try reloading this i might need to log actually log out of twitter to get this to work okay reloaded let's try this real quick no i think it was that weird authorization that i was doing before kind of got a little funky basically i need i need to have twit hive ask twitter for permission to access my account which it should work it's just twit highs being real slow it's waiting it's waiting for twit hive um let me check the uh chat room um what is next to the hat okay um let's come back to that okay can christa because you're in a little note we will cover the hash marks i promise okay so we'll cover that kind of in searching all right so we're hey we're in my twit hive account remember i'm following over 400 people so this it's gonna be a little hard to kind of keep track of all this stuff this is my twitter account but via twit huff um uh um tweet deck also pretty much looks the same way here okay what it does is it gives you columns and you can totally customize what happens in each of these columns okay so for example my first column here is called favorites these are kind of like the people i know personally that i really want to keep track of what they say so they show up in this first column and i can scroll up and down within this column to to see what's in there then my next column i've called at m sours and basically this is going to be all of my replies so if somebody sends something to me mentions me in a tweet it's going to show up in this column you can see all of the other the people saying hi yeah and we still we're still getting more hellos of montreal dried in new york uh matizzi wyoming uh batrush nashville okay then my next column i've called organizations and famous people these are like um zappos shoes um tech delight andrew keen authors that i follow bookstores that i follow you know kind of like yes i want to pay attention to what these places are saying but i really don't want it all mixed in with the actual people i know or mentions of me you know because i want to track what people are saying about me on twitter um scrolling over i've set up a few more columns then i have the nebraska column and this is uh people i know in nebraska uh other nebraska librarians um linkin news 1011 nebraska tourism the state of nebraska christa um you know kind of my co-workers i've kind of put them all in a nebraska column and actually on a widescreen monitor which i have on desk all four of these columns fit perfectly so i don't have to be as do as much scrolling as you might think then kind of off the screen i have a few others like you know this is a particular friend of mine so i like to follow what's going on with her i have a direct messages column um then i have a public library column and this is actually a search result every time somebody on twitter whether i follow them or not mentions public library i get a copy yes i admit that's a little insane okay notice is really far off the screen i mean i have to get to it but i just kind of like to get an idea every couple of days what people are saying about public libraries and for you for your own institution you may want to have it search the name of your town or the name of your public library or your library and then you'll see whenever anyone is talking about your library or about your college or about your town obviously you can track what people are saying and reply to them if they're not following you already and you're not following them yet you'll see what people are saying and know someone had a good experience of library someone had a bad experience of the library um someone's curious about does the library do this and you can start reaching out to these people out of the blue and say yes we do lend dvds and they lend for two weeks and come in and see us you know um and they may be like oh my god they replied to me right i didn't even know they were on twitter this is also and then you get more people it's this whole and and i've actually done that random i i've i've seen a couple of public library results where somebody was just really really complaining about a bad experience they had at their public library and i've actually apologized to them i'm just i've sent them a tweet back saying on behalf of all librarians i'm sorry i mean you know and it just made them feel better that somebody cared if nothing else and then i have an everyone column which is all 404 people i follow which i almost never pay attention to i mean in some cases i randomly go through it but you know i i do follow some people that i'm vaguely interested in but i don't really know them and so you know i can i can kind of once a day kind of go through this column and and see what's there so i mean this and this automatically refreshes itself um just every couple of minutes or i can force it to to say hey please show me you know what what the new stuff is for a particular column i can click new update and i can post right from here or send a direct message i'm now posting from twit hive and click update and it will send off my tweet i can reply to people i can retweet somebody because i thought what they said was interesting click reply i can create a new channel which allows me to create a search or any you know new column that they have here and i can even do a search okay so on that let's talk about search and to do that i'm actually going to go back to the twitter homepage here and we have over on the right hand side there's my tweet this is now posting from twit hive is we have a search box you can completely keyword search twitter okay for example that public library search i have i can use quotation marks public library and click search and what this is going to do is here's my real-time results for public library and if we give it long enough although this might not be the greatest search to do it on it will actually tell me that there are new results i haven't seen yet okay um let's let's try something a little more um open-ended here um the do you know anything that's trending yeah well give me a um let's uh you always can search for something let's just search library how about that we'll just we'll just do a quick search on the word library and we'll say real-time results for library and here are the mentions for that now hopefully as i'm talking here one of these we found new results live will show up um now one thing i want to point out to you over to the right of real-time results for library it says save this search this is pretty cool i'm going to go ahead and click save this search it looks what has happened if you look kind of in the green bar towards the bottom okay it now says library it says quilt it says pound nla 2009 notice it now says three more results since you started searching refresh to see them i click refresh and it shows me the three new and there's one for marshall i didn't even know marshall was on so you know what i'm on twitter so i'm real quick no this is a real-life situation this was how twitter works i know marshall breeding he's a very smart guy i didn't know he was on twitter so what i've done is i found his account i'm going to click on his name it's going to open up his page i'm going to go ahead and click follow and i am now following marshall breeding hey all right okay somebody you should really pay attention to yes very small world and there's nine more results since i started searching that's a very broad search there oh yeah well i wanted something that was going to show more but if you see here over in the right by save searches i can now say well okay how about quilts i did a search what's the recent results for quill then we have one here i save search for pound nla 2009 and this was someone's question notice no results that's okay not yet all right this is called a hashtag and that's that the hash mark compound symbol what happens there is sometimes like when you have an event such as Nebraska library association 2009 conference um people get together and agree that while they're at the event and they're going to be tweeting about the event they stick the hashtag at the end of their tweet so the idea is that while people at the conference if they're tweeting about the conference they're going to make sure they put pound nla 2009 at the end it could be a real word it could be a made up word this is obviously a made up word and the idea is that then through the searching you can kind of organize and collect all the tweets about a particular topic christa and what is also good and interesting about hashtags they're not just for twitter people will use hashtags in flicker in blog posts in all sorts of things and there are search and things that you can use that can search for any of these hashtags mentioned anywhere um if it is in some other service as well sure okay um just to say how cool this can get um this is somebody taught me how to do this i don't look at this very often um this is a search for library okay but remember i said that twitter was location aware so i put near lincoln nebraska within 25 miles right so literally now some of them you'll see are us but then we have here uh somebody mentioning uh library cards are free for residents of lincoln and land caster county so they mentioned the word library they're tweeting from somewhere within 25 miles of lincoln nebraska crafty cash is also mentioning uh library um and there's christa and this is a hashtag that a guy in lincoln said hey if you're tweeting about lincoln how about you add pound l n k and what he's done oh can i remember this website give me give me one sec here um to show you what you can do with this sort of thing i think it's called in l n k dot i n and he's actually set up a website here we go that collects all of the tweets that mentioned the hashtag l n k okay so now instead of searching through twitter for mentions of pound l n k you can just go to this website and he's pulled it in and one thing i haven't mentioned and by the way for those of you who are familiar all of this through twitter the searches any of this stuff completely available through rss also so if you want to subscribe to a search of twitter through your rss reader you can easily do that also so there's lots of things you can do here with the search um i mean especially if you want to know what people are talking about on a particular topic now this lincoln thing is based on the fact that people put that into their profile yes it's yeah you the the geolocation stuff in twitter is a little interesting um right off the top it is going to assume that i am always in lincoln because that's what i put in my profile however let's say i went to visit my parents for a week what i could actually do is i could set a twitter a message it says l colon uh one four one four six two six that's their zip code yeah that's their zip code or i could say rochester new york okay and if i update that what twitter will now do is it will think i'm in that zip code until i say otherwise so when i come back home i would say l colon six eight five two two and click update and it now thinks i'm back in lincoln nebraska that's totally cool i never knew oh you didn't know that now i actually use another service called bright kite when i've seen people use it i tell bright kite where i am and bright kite then tells twitter for me but i mean there there's all sorts of services you that work with twitter i mean literally we're gonna give you a url for hundreds of links of things you can do with twitter let me wrap up with one other thing you can do with twitter this is a service i use called fuel frog and literally what it does is i follow fuel frog on twitter okay and then what i do is i send them a message when i fill my gas tank and i so i say so i'm on my text messaging on my phone and i say okay i'm sending text messages to twitter i say at fuel frog and then for like the example down at the bottom here i tell it how many dials i've driven since my last fill up how much i just paid for gas uh or and how many gallons i bought and so what happens is fuel frog collects that information and allows me to then track the fuel efficiency of my car it's getting crappy yeah well and if you notice this goes all the way back to october um i can explain this um i pretty much only drive back and forth to work in my car now which is three and a half miles each direction so i get horrible gas mileage back in november october november december i would do long car trips to Omaha and to colorado and it would get better gas mileage now that my fiance is here with her new car when we go somewhere any distance we take her car so that's that's right so that's why i'm getting less gas mileage but see i know that because of twitter and fuel frog um there's another one called tweet what you eat and you can track what you can do food logs and um your weight if you want to i mean there's hundreds of these services that integrate with twitter and it's just that you're just sending to these sites it's not like you're telling the whole world yeah it depends on how you do it right exactly uh i don't i don't um i when i send the fuel frog i actually do it publicly i do with an at symbol because i don't care what people know about my gas mileage um if i'm tweeting my weight notice i'm not showing you that screen um that i send us a direct message that way nobody else sees it um so there's literally hundreds of these services that that allow you to um pull this up it's also nice if you looked at my records here you'll notice i fill my gas tank about once a month because i almost never drive anywhere in my car anymore so anyways that is twitter in a nutshell that's a lot i mean that that is literally a lot in in just under an hour here we have a few minutes left um and just wondering if there are any other questions um we if you want if you want to ask audio just like send a question mark via the the chat room we'll turn your microphone back on if you want to just ask the question via chat just go ahead and type that um basically i encourage all of you to sign up and play with it and don't sign the library up this afternoon sign yourself up play with it i'm on twitter m sours christa cj burns is is on there um you know follow us see what we do get the hang of it it might work for you it might not explore it first before you start using it for your library um look for other libraries that are using it you'll find lots of them some that we follow some that we don't yet we don't know about pick a hobby do a search on it search on quilting or quilt right because i know we got quilters out there um and find people who tweet a lot about quilting and start following them you don't have to know people um this is kind of erin what we're getting into with your question there um you know how do you find people search on topics search the word librarian search libraries um ask um actually i i did mention one other thing that you can do when you sign up for an account if you have like a hotmail a yahoo mail or gmail account it will give you the option of going through your address book in those services and see if any of your friends are already on and automatically follow in search for you um you can do that and it literally especially if you're looking for um and i'll get to your name question a second um people if you're looking for libraries okay and libraries follow me follow christa and then look at the list in the green sidebar go to our pages go to twitter.com slash m sours okay in fact i'll bring this up real quick here and then right over here on the right see all these little icons these are all the people i'm following and you can view all see who i'm following and start following them i mean really um okay you'll see more about them because they're on those little pictures it's kind of hard to see yeah there we go when you see if you all then you get the name of the of the person it is um possibly their real name where they are and their um this is new too the bio that wasn't there i don't know but so you can see um who it is that um we're following and then on the right hand side are actions you can then follow them as well if you think it's something you would be interested in and rachel is mentioning and i'm gonna back up here there's a hashtag called follow a librarian so i'm gonna actually back up here and do a search for pound pound follow i'm hitting the wrong keys and so what people have done is um actually are suggesting librarians you should follow um how do i see this using using a k8 curriculum wow uh yeah there um go ahead who's the one that they're just twittering tweeting his diary oh okay yes john adam john quincy Adams here's an example think of things that are part of the curriculum and see if someone like the Darth Vader when we had there that's a fake person doing something um someone pretending to be them there may be things out there where people are pretending to be famous people or historical figures see if it's out there follow it for a while yourself and see if it's good stuff um that they're doing it seriously and have your um the students follow that or like nasa if you're doing a um a section on um space travel have them follow nasa when the mars the mars rovers up on mars they're twittering actually as as if the mars phoenix was pretty as if it was the the um the robot was the robot itself saying i just landed and you know things like that so you can follow that this one um michael can explain about yeah i'm really cool i'm the american history buff here john quincy adams uh actually starting in um august of 1809 was an ambassador to somewhere in europe i don't remember exactly where um oh russia sorry well part of russia's in europe um and so and he kept a diary a daily diary and he wrote about one line a day so what they're actually doing starting this earlier this august they are actually reprinting each diary entry on each day from the original diary um now they might have to abbreviate a little bit but he actually mostly kept it under 140 characters believe it or not um so this was his diary entry for today and you can actually follow along on his trip of several years i guess this is going to go um it will keep going into a lineup day for day uh actually how they were doing it so this is this is yes somebody presented pretending to be john quincy adams but they're actually his words on the right days i mean it it's it's actually very well done so as much as dark vader is funny um john quincy adams this is actually his words so um i would also creative you could use it i mean you know start that way or find other teachers who are twittering and ask them i mean i know librarians i don't know a lot of uh school librarians to be completely honest but i know they're out there i know they're using it um so check it out okay we are over time so we are going to cut this off um thank you all for coming do i want to um first of oh the the links yes that's the url at the top of the screen you want to write down delicious dot com slash travel in librarian no g slash twitter and this is 243 bookmarks related to stuff you can do with twitter um so don't get overwhelmed yes please yeah there's a lot but that's good though you'll find things that are good for you um this will be included this link also if you didn't get it written down that's fine when the recording of this goes up um i will include this as well in that information um thanks laura we're very glad to be back as well she's glad encompasses back yeah it was a rough month or month and a half of trying to figure out what we're doing but we are back and we're back on schedule we've got um two more sessions coming up um if you do have any questions um comments concerns anything you want to know more about contact michael or you can contact me too i mean we both do twitter all the time um and you know contact us after the fact and we can answer any questions help you along with things um with using twitter um so thank you very much for attending today next week we we have um scheduled a tour of the new e library interface that susan nicely will be doing for you so i hope you will join us then and i want to say one last quick thing if you do follow either of us um in twitter make sure you put in your bio that you're a nebraska librarian and we will follow you back if you don't tell us that we don't know who you are so all right thank you very much bye bye


NCSSN's IBC Calculus Course is a two semester course sequence with the false course entitled Honors Calculus and the spring course entitled AP Calculus AB. When you seek admission to this course, it is with the understanding that you will take both semesters. A passing grade in the fall course is required in order to move on to the spring AP course. This is a traditional, rigorous, quick-paced, and technology-rich course. Possession of a college board authorized graphing calculator is required. During our daily IBC sessions, we will be online together in a web-based conferencing platform and it is through that platform that the lessons will be presented. This course is intended for students who want to be challenged by mathematics and who are prepared to work hard for the entire year from start to finish. You will need to bring to the table a solid background and knowledge of algebra, trigonometry, and pre-calculus as these topics will not be retaught as you need those skills in this calculus course. In the six units of study over the course of the year, you will cover the entirety of the college board's AP Calculus AB curriculum on limits, differentiation, and integration. You will walk away with a solid foundation in single variable calculus as you would see covered in a first semester college calculus course. We also take time to prepare you to sit for the AP Calculus AB exam in early May. Should you have any other questions about this course, please do reach out to us.


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