I've become pretty accustomed to taking screenshots anytime I wanted to talk about something someone posted on Twitter. Of course there's Storify which is cool in its own right, but I can't say that creating a new "story" and searching for tweets, putting it all together, and publishing, and then moving to the blog to embed and try to make it look clean is at all user friendly. Then I happened to come across a plugin called Twitter Blackbird Pie today. It makes it easy to paste a tweet into a blog post by just grabbing the permalink of the tweet and pasting it into the body of the post. But what's really great is that Twitter announced today a new embed API that makes it a lot more interactive. You can reply directly to a tweet from these embed, as well as favorite, retweet, etc. Pretty awesome actually! I could see this being incredibly useful to tell stories in a blog post. Grab a list of links and paste and you can narrate a particular story. The recent shootings at Virginia Tech are happening as a right this post and I can document some of what I'm reading in realtime right on my blog as demoed below: https://twitter.com/vtnews/status/144832773797064704 https://twitter.com/collegiatetimes/status/144834699880177664 https://twitter.com/vtnews/status/144835427881328640 https://twitter.com/collegiatetimes/status/144845050835251200 https://twitter.com/vtnews/status/144860069627039747 https://twitter.com/jeffhalliday/status/144840841544994816 https://twitter.com/gardnercampbell/status/144859597793009664 https://twitter.com/collegiatetimes/status/144855779722268672 https://twitter.com/umwbullet/status/144863975388090368 https://twitter.com/umwbullet/status/144864822733967360 On the backend that is just a list of links but it displays beautifully and each tweet is completely interactive. Seems like a great way to visualize messages from a service I use more and more everyday and that demo highlights for me again how important Twitter has become as a mechanism for gathering breaking news. I'm not a cheesy "change my avatar/we are all hokies" kinda guy but I'm definitely keeping them in my prayers right now.