Twitter Board for Newsroom

It was nice to see the Boston Globe follow our lead and get a Twitter Board for the newsroom.

OK, a bit tongue in cheek. But ours went up in the Carolina Reporter newsroom this summer.

A bit of the old and new - the new Twitter board and, on right, a sculpture from old type.

Closeup of the board using Tweetdeck and Twitterlists. We put it together using a salvaged Mac Mini and money from the lab fund to buy the 32-inch screen.

Also, while they've been up for over a year now, we haven't really shown off our digital signs. I worked on getting these specifically to show off the work on Dateline Carolina, the sign on the right. The left sign shows announcements in both graphical form and a ticker and has a video feed that we automatically switch among CNN, the Weather Channel, ESPN and the local news depending on the time of day. During the academic year, it also switches over from 4-4:30 p.m. to display the nightly newscast produced by Carolina News for local cable.

We have these in two places in the Coliseum (our offices and classrooms are in the windowless basement for now - new digs coming in two years, we hope). The signs taped on the bottom of each ask people not to poke - oh how I wish we had touchscreen technology on these. Displaying partial stories from the website isn't perfect, but it does give us visibility we didn't have.

Thank to the dean and director for the $$.

Now, what I want to do is set up a second one for Facebook and some important local websites. Firefox has a plug-in that allows you to cycle among tabs - but it doesn't refresh the tabs. Suggestions?