Follow-up
In my prior My Five Ws of Twitter in less than 10 minutes (video included) post – How to follow section, I listed http://monitter.com as an amazing tool. Now, I’d like to show you a recording I made on Inauguration Day to illustrate that point.
How I monitored
- I went to http://search.twitter.com and looked for the hash tags (#) that folks were using to mark their tweets; “inauguration”, “inaug09” and “obama”.
- Opened http://monitter.com in my Chrome browser (simply because my blog theme matches it)
- Replaced my previous keywords in each column heading for the hash tagged terms I found in step 1
- Just for fun, I played around with the “Tweets within …” setting and entered “10 km” of “Washington, DC”
- Preferring a more global perspective, I cleared the “Washington, DC”
The tweets were coming through so fast, it was sometimes just a blur.
How I captured
- I quickly opened up my Camtasia 6.0 Recorder and choose a custom area setting of 1024×768. I knew this would be too large for my blog and too large for youtube, but there was so much content flying by that I figured I’d deal with that issue later.
- I started recording on 2009-01-20 at 11:46 ET
- I could see a few tweets coming in remarking how impressed some where that Twitter was handling the load and didn’t crash yet.
- Things slowed down around 12:12 ET for me and then nothing was coming in.
- I stopped recording and saved the file – which takes awhile for a recording that long.
- I then removed two columns from http://monitter.com by clicking the minus sign “-” at the bottom right hoping to improve things
- I started recording again changing my capture area setting to a more youtube friendly size (640×480) even though I couldn’t get things lined up nicely with my Monitter columns
- The second recording went from 12:33 ET to 13:13 ET.
How I tried to post to YouTube
This didn’t go well. I tried playing back my recordings and recapturing them in smaller area and uploading them. At first I got tripped up by the note on the upload page that tells me I can upload up to 1 GB. But there was no warning about not being able to upload videos more than 10 minutes. It took a few nasty error messages & trips to the Help to find that one out.
Then I thought I had it all figured out. I had played back, re-captured in 640×480 screen size, split into 10 minute files, uploaded a few files. And the playback was awful. I Googled, Helped, tried viewing in high definition, tried embedding here with various “width” and “height” values. All for not.
See for yourself. Here’s my inadequate 3-column version and a fruitless skinnied down attempt. All you can tell is the speed of tweets. And going to full screen is illegible.
How I finally published with the original quality
Sometimes the best solution is just too obvious. Techsmith, the makers of Camtasia are also the providers of Screencast. Nothing says “phew” like a good integration.
I quickly and easily uploaded my two large originally produced MP4 files with a click of a button. If I only realized that two days ago! In any case, life is good again. And even better if I just saved you a few days of headaches, or, enabled you to get that video published that you may’ve given up on. One more thing, Screencast has an free account option – which is what I went for. There’s a few limitations but I figure I can always upgrade later if need be.
This is it
Since its a large video, another browser tab, or, window will be opened: Obama Inauguration Tweets
Reflection
While I would’ve preferred the potential traffic generated from YouTube, Screencast is my choice when quality large resolution is required.
I hope you enjoy watching the tweets go by. Please let me know if you can see yours. My two attempts were not captured.