Capturing base Twitter discussions

These are some of the steps Truffle uses to semi automatically capture Twitter discussions like #Agchat. They are not perfect and do require some understanding some information technology. Ideally this would have a simple interface where you supply the Twitter search term and magically returned is the HTML for your web page...

This whole post is mainly the technical / manual steps. What is missing is the editorial process steps and discussed in later post.

FYI, These steps rely on your having Ruby plus Hpricot (install and info) to interpret the support files.

• Grab twitter conversation and process with command line ruby tool GetFromTwitter.rb.  
• Use command line example

  ruby GetFromTwitter.rb 2009-12-29 2009-12-31 "agchat" "Agchat test" > agchat.html
  

  command link items are: start date, end date, quoted search hash tag without hash sign, quoted text that will be at top of page; note end date is not used right now but is needed in command line
• Post output to website as a standalone page, like http://www.trufflemedia.com/twitter/Agchat20081229Frame.html .
  
• Extract links with http://www.iwebtool.com/link_extractor using stand alone web page link from above.
• Copy data into Excel and sort with functions to find twitter participants and useful links.

• OrganizeChatQuestions.rb has code to scan and pull question response tweets from the twitter conversation captured (above).
• Use command line example

  ruby OrganizeChatQuestions.rb "question 1" 1 "http://website.com/agchat.html" > agchatq1.html 
  

  command link items are: quoted text that will be at top of page, question number, quoted url of twitter discussion to capture
• Push question files to server as web pages.
  

• Using questions web pages generated above, organize questions using Delicious; grab questions in reverse order (last one first). Tag links with agchat, date, and q (ex agchat, 20091026, q)

• Organize ref links in Delicious, order not important
• Tag links with agchat, date, and link (ex agchat, 20091026, link)
• Use Delicious tags and pull RSS feed into your website

• Edit html of transcript and reduce to just enough to have info you want.