using twitter digest to track sub groups of people on twitter, i.e., students on a course

I've been discussing the idea of students on a course using an agreed tag within their tweets to comment on their course. You could then search against this to collect the tweets together. Some of the previous blogs statements elaborate on this idea. However, Phil Wilson at the University of Bath has been using Twitter Digest (http://twitter-digest.appspot.com/), to follow people, not keywords. This offers an interesting alternative. You could use Twitter Digest to create your sub group of people. This involves you simply adding their Twitter usernames. After which it generate a url (including the search terms, i.e. the usernames) so then simply bookmark that page. When you re-visit it, it will update.

As a spin off, if you were interested in word clouds. Then you could use the RSS output from Twitter Digest to build your word cloud using www.makecloud.com

However, if you took this idea a step further. Then a simple but highly effective approach would be that the instructor (academic) on the VLE course would use the RSS infeed to display the digest for all people with access to the course ... those who aren't using Twitter or can't be bothered with setting up their Twitter Digest :-)