iHCPL Potluck #56 To Tweet or Not To Tweet...Twitter

Exercises1) Browse a couple of different Twitter profiles (news, fashion, celebrities) and read through a few updates. Do you think this is something you would adopt for personal use? Is there a particular topic you'd like to tweet about?

When I signed up for account earlier in the month for this exercise, I started to follow NPR newscaster Scott Simon, but I gave it up because the finished product was so much better on the radio. I also thought that it would be useful to follow the library to stay up to date with what’s happening. But, at first couldn't find HCPL because I searched under "Harris County Public Library" for tweets and not "harriscountypl." Once I found harriscountypl I also found other people and institutions to follow. I now get lots of tweets from the New York Times. So far, I've found it easier to scan and pick out what I want to read than RSS feed on my aggregator. I was tempted by, but held back on following NPR, because I listen to their news every morning on the radio. I changed my background to multiple portraits of Hypatia, daughter of the mathematician Teone and wife of the philosopher Isodoro, and most importantly the librarian of Alexandria (LCSH: Hypatia, d. 415)

2) Use the search feature to find tweets about a topic that interests you. What were the results?

The results were that I found out that MorganBaden in New York was "… reading Walter Dean Myers' Arbuthnot lecture delivered last w/e, and it is rocking my world." I want to know how she got a copy "about 20 hours ago" to read! Her bio leads me to think that she might be a journalist.

3) Post your thoughts about Twitter to your blog. For help navigating through Twitter, see their support page.

While my thoughts are still, who would want to know what I'm doing all the time (except maybe my boss during the day to be sure that I was working and not twittering away my time)? I realized that I had the identical thought about starting a blog, and now I post to my blog regularly because I enjoy writing, and I don't care if it's true that "Never before have so many said so much to so few." So, I’m going to keep twittering for a few more months, before I decide to give it up or continue.