If you are a fan of TwHistory you may have already heard the news. We have developed a new site to make creating and sharing TwHistory reenactments easier than ever. Check it out at http://beta.twhistory.org.

We shared it at the Open Education conference as well as Mozilla’s Drumbeat Festival this week in Barcelona. We would love to have your feedback on the new beta so we can keep making TwHistory better. Thanks!

Our presentation is also available: http://slidesha.re/twhistory-opened10

We invite you to come create your own Twitter reenactment. Two that have just been added include the History of the Internet and Titanic Tweets (100th Anniversary Edition), which will launch (and sink) April 2012.

TwHistory was a runner-up in September for the Pepsi Refresh contest. This month we are ranked even higher (currently #9 out of over 1000 ideas). We need your help to stay in the top 10 and win! Please vote daily for us and our partners until the end of October. We have set up an alliance page to make it easy to vote for all 10 ideas every day!

A few months ago I helped a friend win the Pepsi Refresh Challenge, which gave $25,000 to one of my favorite music associations, the Associate of Redlands Bowl. The following month he did it again, this time at the $50K level. The basic idea is that there is strength in numbers. So TwHistory has teamed up with other groups to form an alliance by supporting each others’ projects.

We are competing for a $25K grant for TwHistory and we have a month to collect all the daily votes we can. It’s simple: if we are in the top 10 with the most votes at the $25K level at the end of the month, we get the funding. We are currently ranked #16 out of over a thousand entries, so we are definitely in the running. Here are our deliverables:

• 10 lesson plans built around historical documents
• 1 example of a virtual historical reenactment (Sinking of the Titanic)
• 1 ‘how to’ video posted on our site for educators to learn the TwHistory process

Vote early and often

Vote for TwHistory and its partners here. You can sign in using your Facebook account, so it’s really easy. You are allowed to vote for up to 10 projects each day, so please vote for our partners as well.

Thanks for voting! For daily reminders and links, add me to your Twitter or Facebook. Forward, march!!

PatriotCast is an eight-year online reenactment of the American Revolution via Twitter. Created by TwHistory partner Jason Phelan, PatriotCast follows the events of the war in real-time, including Paul Revere’s famous ride tonight and tomorrow’s events at Lexington and Concord. These important moments mark the beginning of the war and the first major events broadcast via @PatriotCast on Twitter. It is also a great way to celebrate Patriot’s Day! PatriotCast follower ehartmanrealtor says: “Your project is probably the best use of twitter so far. I’m really enjoying it.” For more information visit the PatriotCast blog or start following it directly on Twitter. PatriotCast is listed in the TwHistory reenactment directory. If you are organizing a historical reenactment on Twitter and would like to be listed in the TwHistory directory, please contact us.

The 1847 Pioneer Trek is under way, and it’s all happening on Twitter. The Deseret News printed a front page article on it this morning:

“Leaving Winter Quarters with 6 of my teams,” tweets Heber C. Kimball — a man most LDS know only as a faded, 1800s-era daguerreotype staring out from the pages of a church history manual.

Another well-known (but long-dead) pioneer tweets a couple hours later to report some horse trouble.

It’s not a joke. It’s the latest trend in historical re-enactment.

The article also describes the basic idea of TwHistory, which is worth sharing:

The pioneers’ posts are near-direct quotes from journals kept during the 1847 journey. Jensen and Caswell rewrote the entries in present tense and, at times, condensed the wording to better fit Twitter’s 140-character limit. They estimate, according to the activity, what time to broadcast each tweet.

“If you were just following one of the threads it would be very boring,” Caswell said. “But when you listen to them all in concert it really does paint a picture. I feel like there’s this group out there experiencing something historic, and I get to be a fly on the wall.”

We hope you’ll join us on this 4-month adventure. If you don’t already have a Twitter account, it’s quick and free to sign up for one (see our FAQ page for more info). We also have a section that explains how to get updates from the Pioneers via Twitter. Even if you don’t “get” Twitter, we hope you’ll give it a try. The pioneers are on the move, so jump in and join them!

Note: We have set up a Media Mentions page to track and acknowledge news organizations. We are excited to see so much interest in TwHistory!