Steve Benson, editorial cartoonist for the Arizona Republic, offered concise commentary this morning on the value of social networking in the Iranian freedom conflict.
Technorati Tags: Freedom, Twitter, SocialMedia, Iran
Poor Dilbert. Will he ever find real happiness in an increasingly virtual world?
As geeky and shy as I was during my dating years (I actually walked around with a slide rule on my belt), I still preferred to talk to young women face to face, rather than on the phone. I doubt I would have been very adept at virtual dating.
Technorati Tags: Humor, Dilbert, SocialMedia
To what sources do you look for truth? Could it be that we put a wee too much credence in what we read (or re-tweet) on Twitter? Thanks to Geek & Poke for the wry analysis.
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Blog, SocialMedia, Truth
Crazy things happen because of social media. Thanks to Tom Limanek, a new Sun blogger, for sharing the following video of a pillow fight in downtown Burlington, Vermont. The pillow-wielding flash mob formed because of viral communication on Facebook.
Apparently the organizer was arrested by local police, which seems a bit extreme for the clean fun he spawned.
Technorati Tags: SocialMedia, Facebook, Vermont, PillowFight
The comic strips are full of commentary on the Twitter phenomenon these days. I thought this Zits strip was most insightful.
I had to chuckle at the perceptive commentary in today’s Pickles comic:
Technorati Tags: Pickles, Twitter, SocialMedia
As I return from a substantial respite from active blogging, may I ask a question about this insightful little cartoon from Geek & Poke? Is it more incredible that millions of people tweet about what they eat for breakfast, or that millions of other people are actually interested?
Technorati Tags: Geek&Poke, Twitter
In response to my post yesterday about clouds of followers at Twittersheep, Mark Kolb (@outwitme) sent me a link to his site, OuTWITMe, that has, among other fun and games, a cool three-dimensional cloud of major words found in the most recent tweets of a user you specify or Twitterverse at large. Poking around the swirling cloud and following the train of consciousness it engenders is a stimulating experience. The two-dimensional snapshot posted on this blog doesn’t do justice to what Mark has provided.
Elsewhere on the site are some fascinating Twitter-based word games that appear to have the potential to be absolutely addicting to a word geek like me:
"Outwit Me is your home for a variety of unique Twitter games that have been specially crafted with artificial intelligence. You are here to be challenged, entertained, stimulated. We are here to engage your mind and of course to outwit you."
With names like Tweet Quiz, Tweet Words and TWord Chains, these games all played through Twitter and appear to not be trivial. It appears that some really intellectual activity is happening north of the border, where the governing philosophy is "to present intelligent challenges for tweeters with some time on their hands."
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Tag Cloud, games, words
If you follow me on Twitter (@mgd), a few times a day you will receive a tweet from me of the form "Dixon Delicious: Why IBM Wants Sun – BusinessWeek http://ow.ly/154F". I do this to share web sites I visit that may have relevance to others. Such links, which I first post to Delicious, are automatically posted to Twitter by an RSS-to-Twitter service named HootSuite.
A few days ago, a person who follows me on Twitter suggested that "sending your delicious links to twitter in a batch is sort of poor form, if you don’t mind me saying so." After a polite exchange of direct messages, he also offered, "worked out what bothers me about dixon delicious. it comes through in a single burst…. usually three in a row."
To help illustrate how these messages are generated, I created the little diagram below to show how my updates automatically wind up on Twitter.
It appears that the HootSuite RSS-to-Twitter mechanism is quite "bursty." It doesn’t necessarily post the Delicious links immmediately when I post them, but may post a batch of links at once.
So, what do you think? Is this too automated? Is it in poor taste to provide this method to put content onto Twitter?
I’d appreciate your feedback.
Thanks!
Technorati Tags: Blog, Twitter, Delicious, Scribefire, Firefox, HootSuite
I have had a love/hate relationship with Twitter since I first signed up in May 2007. I found it at times to be intriguing but worthless, captivating but time consuming, fascinating but maddening. I jumped around to different Twitter clients, including Twitbin, Twhirl and Flock. I would completely go offline for awhile and then tweet like mad at other times.
One of my biggest complaints was the inability to follow a few friends or relevant subjects among the masses of tweets being exchanged in Twitterspace. As the number of fellow Twitters I followed rose, the more difficult it became to keep track of anybody or anything.
Well, I am recently back on the Twitter bandwagon, thanks in a large part to TweetDeck, a Twitter client that allows me to specify a few groups of people to follow and a few searches that I might be interested in at a particular time. For me, it brings order out of chaos and rachets the Twitter experience upward a few notches.
Plus, Iain Dodsworth, the TweetDeck author, uses a really cool feedback forum to gather suggestions from the field.
Thanks Iain!
Technorati Tags: Twitter, TweetDeck
