I have long wondered what on earth Twitter IS. (It has confounded me a little like the mystifying "Head-On" ad campaign of a few years ago. ) I signed up for a Twitter account and decided to follow sites as varied as 60 Minutes, Scott Brown, Barack Obama, ...OK, not very varied. This is far short of the 150 people that Richardson seems to have no trouble following--combining "professional and personal" links into "such a cool tool." (86) REALLY--150 collaborators is a PERSONAL network? I can hear Amy Poehler's incredulous tone repeating this at the newsdesk of SNL.
Once again--this must be a generational definition of personal. I kind of doubt the extent of the true "professionalism" of all members as well.
Crankiness aside, I was surprised to learn that Twitter can be more than quick and dirty "Haiku conversation." Anyway, I was surprised to learn that the 140 characters --(not even letters?) is really often just the first line of a longer-actually informative resource. The Twitter feed for many of the organizations I signed up to follow led to more traditional press releases--in blog form of course. The Obama twitter feeds were not, as I had expected, updates on whether Bo poohed, or whether Malia has a new-- BFF. Twitter me to longer policy statements on the economy, environment, energy, foreign policy etc. --All of which I had no time to read and just bookmarked for later.
Unfortunately, just as with RSS feeds, since opening the Twitter account a week ago, I had not "followed" my 5 new "friends" much--OK--not at all. Heck, I don't even pick up when my brother calls sometimes and I actually find him amusing and informative. So I went in and checked to see if maybe I could be a matacognitive collaborator with Chad Ochocinco. I read in the artifact of an earlier age, The Boston Globe, that Ochocinco's jillianth Twitter follower and will win around a million dollars for becoming that PARTICULAR close friend. When I checked to see if it was time to retire in comfort, I did find some very useful stories had run on 60 Minutes and these could be sent to students with Diigo accounts if I had kids doing that. Maybe in a few years.
I also checked on my Top Tweets feed and found that Justin Bieber is hogs an obscene amount of space at the Twitter summit. If our students wrote this much some would surpass the number of characters they currently use in the MCAS long comp.
I am still LOL-ing at your "cranky" Twitter post. When did you even have time to sign on to follow your several folks at Twitter? No, Richardson can't really be serious, can he? If he is, and if he believes he is, that makes him even funnier. Or sadder, or something. Well, I'll say this, if everyone is as realsitic as you are and as informative as you are, then this post-a-comment-"thing" will remain a kick. Also, yours was a very interesting observation about the first 140 characters of a longer press release; I'll have to remember that if I ever return to Public Relations... Also, I could use some good PR myself, as most(?) people think I write too much. Perhaps my first few words can be tweets, and that's all those folks will have to endure of me.
ReplyDeleteYour post was terrific. If your comments on Richardson are going to be this good, I might even learn to appreciate him for something... Keep "cranking" these out!
Oh I never noticed both your portraits before and after. Funny, I cannot see either ear in your before pciture!
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