I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while but didn’t quite know how to do it. But, when I learned about mural.ly this morning, I figured that it was an opportunity to view mural.ly and create the post.
The post I want to write is kind of a graphic organizer to show how a post that I make gets promoted by others on Twitter. I have this theory that the diehard readers use RSS to aggregate the feed from this blog among others. The real diehards will have it emailed to you. The random readers will pick it up with a news service like Flipboard, Zite, Pulse News, News.me, etc. But, I suspect that there’s a certain element that read a Twitter message from someone and then follow a link to get over here. A Retweet is easy to spot with the RT or MT in the message but there are some that are just difficult to trace.
So, I know a couple of ways that the message gets out because I’m the creator behind that and I’m just going to guess on the rest.
Yesterday, Shannon Smith gave a terrific interview about her first weeks as principal of Glen Cairn Public School in Ottawa. I’m really appreciative that she found the time in her busy new schedule to take the time for the interview. As I write this, it’s 9:30 on Friday morning and already the word has spread on Twitter about the post. I did some backtracking and found what I hope are all of the mentions of the interview at this point.
So, I did some screen grabs of the individual Twitter messages and put them into mural.ly to see what I could do. Here’s the result.
Click image to see it full size.
I know that I wrote the original post yesterday and sent it off to WordPress for publishing at 5:00am. I use the dlvr.it service to do that. I schedule it on WordPress and dlvr.it detects whenever something is posted there and automatically posts an announcement of same to Twitter. It serves me well and beats the heck out of blogging in the middle of the night. Thumbs up.
I’m not the only robot looking for something new. CanuckEduS monitors many Canadian blogger with Twitterfeed and announces whenever something new is posted. That’s great and reaches a bigger audience. All of these robots do cause some concern because one slip and they’re all over it. You can’t recall a notice once they send it!
More importantly, real people come along later in the morning. However they get a notice, they’re kind enough to pass along the word of the new post. You’ll notice that there were a few people that were good enough to do that. How they got their notice eludes me but I’m just thankful that they did.
But enough about me – back to creating the mural, er map.
Once I have the screen captures as raw materials, it’s a matter of drag/drop or copy/paste to put them into the workplace. Tape an element and you can draw it into place.
Each of these images now become an element. Tap to highlight getting the dots for a border around the object and you can pic it up, move it around, or rotate, resize or choose an option from the menu.
If you’ve ever worked with an interactive whiteboard, you’ll be right at home here. In fact, this may well be your primary memory mapping utility to actually use on your IWB.
A menu along the left of the screen provides flyouts for the types of actions that you’ll use when editing your mural. In this case, I’ve flown out a sample of the stickers that are available.
The last two options are really interesting. There is a show/presentation mode that let you present your ideas to an audience. I found that there’s a really nice selection of tools to do everything that I could think of with a memory map. When you first create a document, you have a choice of public or private which is nice. In fact, I think that most people start private until it gets ready for show time and then make it public or at least provide a link to the document.
Mural.ly shows its suggested workflow as you log in.
The whole process was very easy and you can really get a sense of the power in this tool. There are a good selection of options for sharing once you do decide to go live…
The link to my project is here.
I found mural.ly very easy and intuitive to work with. Give it a try; I’d be very interested in other opinions on this product.
doug --- off the record 