Tuesday June 10, 2008 13:06 |
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I love the Boston Globe’s new photo blog called The Big Picture. The photos are of amazing quality and tell stories that words alone can’t describe. Definitely recommended.
Wednesday June 11, 2008 23:21 |
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Like many, when I first heard of the concept of Twitter, I was skeptical about the merits of the service. Ok, ok it’s more on the side of violently opposed than skeptical. I mean, we could already read the details of people’s lives on blogs, did we need more intimate up-to-the-minute updates in between blog posts? Is our attention span so diminished that we can only take the time to read information in 140 character chunks?
I could just imagine the monotonous minutiae that people would be “tweeting” about. I could literally imagine someone becoming a Twitter Shitter.
Then something happened that would change my mind completely. I started attending geek/tech social events in and around Portland and I met a ton of cool people most of which use Twitter in some fashion or another. After a while I observed that the community and the conversation that was held in person would continue and/or morph into a conversation in the Twitter-verse. So I created an account and started following people that I was getting to know at these meet-ups.
Ever since then Twitter has become increasingly useful. I think that I found it most useful at the wonderful WebVisions conference in Portland. Beyond the usefulness at conferences (where it first gained an absurd amount of popularity), I’ve discovered new TV shows via Twitter, learned about new local events, and I’ve even reduced my digg reading by a measurable amount. No reason to drink from the fire hose of news when your friends tweet about the stuff that you care about. It’s like a built in news filter.
It’s easy to get carried away with Twitter and follow thousands of people that you’ll never meet and you’ll never have a connection with (not that there is anything wrong with that). Honestly I’m not sure how one would keep up with all of the updates if that’s the route that you chose. For me, I’m starting small. Just following a select number of people here and there and increase when I feel like I have an attention surplus.
For those of you that are so inclined you can read my updates and follow me at http://twitter.com/eddorre.
