Thing 31 -- More Twitter

I personalized my Twitter page by adding my real photo, putting in a personal vacation photo as part of my background, and giving a sense of who I am in my description. I have done mostly observational tweets, with a few urls tossed in. I even got to explain what MToaS was when I abbreviated it. I also am experimenting with using it to get people to read my poetry at las4poems.wordpress.com in a bit of what the car talk guys call “shameless self-promotion.”


I have added a bunch of tweeple who focus on books and technology to follow. I am at best lukewarm about all of the social media sites. I don’t honestly have time to spend looking at all of this stuff. I am happiest getting material in my Reader feeds and judging for myself whether or not the material is interesting or useful. On the other hand, I do feel like if I had a pressing question that needed a quick answer, Twitter would be a great place to go. Right now I am still trying assess what if anything I will use it for. I also added my Senator’s office and the Dalai Lama, because I can.


I usually use the TwitterGadget for iGoogle to view and post to Twitter, because I use iGoogle for my homepage at work. When I am at home, or if I want to do something more extensive, I just go to the Twitter site on my computer. I’m not big on downloading a ton of stuff at work or home, so this seemed like the best choice. Because I already had added a Twitter Feed on my 23 things blog, I added a Twitstamp badge to my poetry blog, just to see if I could. And again, I discovered how much less intuitive Wordpress is than Blogger for adding gadgets. I managed to figure it out, but it took much longer.


I added the Tweet Value rating and Twitter Grading rating to this blog. I will probably remove the value one after a while, because it seems pretty silly to me. For the Grading, I opted for the number of followers, because that seemed a reasonable statistic. I also went to the status generator site, which is amusing, although I didn’t actually post any of its suggestions. Here is a screenshot of my favorite one.






I added my name in two places to the Tweeter directory—both as a librarian and as a writer. I found more useful people to follow in the blog post of freetech4teachers.com which included people posting about technology tools in education.


I’m trying Twilert for looking for school library information and middle school language arts materials. I’ll see how it works for a while and post when I have a better sense.


According to the Next Web definitions, I am somewhere around a 3 or 4. I find the quantity of stuff people are posting amazing. I can’t figure out how they get any other work done. And I still don’t love being this linked to a machine. Ok, now I was complaining when the DSL at work went out and we were without computers for most of a day. I couldn’t process books, I couldn’t help teachers find lesson materials, etc. But I did get books shelved, library lessons planned out for the next 5 weeks, and a whole lot of reading of professional materials read. But I do occasionally like to feel fresh air on my face too. And no, I wouldn’t twitter on a cell phone either when walking.


Twitter can be an amazing, real-time tool, but one that often gets overwhelmed by goofiness. One of my friends said that it was just like Facebook status lines, but shared with the whole world. And for most people that is what it is. As seen in Doonesbury comics lately…