Well, folks, here’s what I’ve been up to so far in my Day With Twitter: I’ve been following a few streams, an eclectic bunch: Oblique_Chirps, openculture, ParleFrancais, learnkanji, janchipchase (a cultural anthropologist employed by Nokia Design), and warrenellis (graphic novelist, among other things).
To follow my streams I initially set up TweetDeck on my machine, but I found it a little too clunky and unwieldy. So I went instead with the Firefox plug-in TwitterFox, which sits unobtrusively in the corner of my screen. I also found another plug-in that allows me to post urls directly to Twitter.
So . . . the first question I’ve encountered is probably one that everyone who starts with Twitter asks at first: what do I say? I feel that I’ve been in part narrating my Twitter experience, so some of my tweets have been about that. I also have been doing some of the banal stream-of-life (but hopefully not stream-of-consciousness) tweeting that some find so annoying. I actually find a little bit of that kind of broadcasting useful — if they somehow signal milestones in one’s day, guideposts for mapping the outlines of my day.
I’ve also tweeted questions or musings I’ve had. Like the latest one: “thinking about the thinness of the cloud I currently inhabit.” If I consider Twitter as a way to plug in to the cloud of people who might conceivably share some of my interests and be interested themselves in my questions and observations, then I have to conclude that as of right now I’m a long way away from that. I’m simply not connected enough. But that’s to be expected; I’ve only been doing this in earnest for half a day.
If I were to pursue this further (and I plan to do that), then I’d find ways of getting more followers, and beginning to create my own cloud. For instance, tonight I was editing the English of an article on the religious landscape of the Republic of Macedonia. There was a reference to the Bektashi community there — but I wasn’t sure about the proper English form of the group’s name. If I were in the right cloud, I could tweet my question and maybe get a helpful response. I’ve read about this happening, at least . . .
As far as learning anything today via Twitter, I did learn one hangul, but not actually via Twitter but via a Twitter-like service called Popling that had been flagged on someone else’s tweet!
I’ve always wanted to try Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards but never have gotten around to buying them. So having them tweeted at me has been an amusing first exposure to them. I’d like to keep following the tweet and see where it leads.
That’s it for the moment . . . bottom line: I am as of yet a very unconnected node and so am not benefitting from the potential educational power of Twitter. But this is only the beginning . . .
