A blog of my responses and reflections on web 2.0 applications and how they relate to my work in public libraries. Should be fun.

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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Twittering about Twitter

I must remember #nswlearning2.1...I must remember #nswlearning2.1...I must remember #nswlearning2.1...


I've tried...I really have.  I've had the account for a few months and besides the creative mind puzzle of trying to fit what I want to say elloquently  into 140 characters I haven't had use for it personally.

And I suspect that lots of people feel the same.

Having looked at a few tweets I'm seeing a general pattern of simple tweeted and added value tweets.  Let me explain

  Simple tweets are just a statement just thrown out into space to be accepted by the cosmos as it sees fit, for example:


Ground breaking stuff.  In the library world this would be equilivant example:

BCLIS:  Summer Reading Club starts Monday 16 November. 

Useful and dull.  It doesn't tell you what Summer Reading Club is or contain a link to where to find the branches participating.

On the whole, most organisational tweets I read are more your value added than those above.  The tweet you have when the 140 character just aren't enough:


This tweet includes a link to another site which provides more information.  Which means that this group have found the can not communicate as they would have liked  in Twitter so they need to put what they want to say somewhere else and link to Twitter.  Twitter ceases to be communication itself, but a link from your readers to your communication.
It's just not enough
And that's the problem for me with Twitter, it's just not enough.  I can only express myself in a tiny space (all of which I can do on my macro-blog site if I so wish) and requires me to be fluent in game-speak to make any real sense of others' communications. I can't just write a simple tag into a Labels box to help find my post, I have to add # marks after my statement and make it look...messy.

I'd love to think that people will follow their library Twitter and find the tweets interesting and useful.  I'd love to think I can catch people in the nick of time to let them know about an event that's starting, or closing or that I think could be really popular.  Prove me wrong.
And just as I'm about to publish this post I read this tweet:

wilw:   One of my neighbors is having a pine tree cut down. The whole street smells like Christmas.

Maybe it's not so bad.



2 comments:

pls@slnsw said...

I think different web 2.0 tools suit different people - and obviously twitter is not for you. That is one of the many things which makes web 2.0 so much fun - there are tools for different people and we will all have our unique mix of what we use and enjoy. Libraries have to work out their solution to this diversity as well.

Ellen (PLS)

miztres said...

Absolutely true.
Actually the comments above are only from my personal experience and not from any professional exposure. Though my comment that most organisations use Twitter to lead people to their homepages and macroblogs, maybe that's okay...maybe more than okay.
We're just starting to look at blogging and social networking as a corporation and Twitter is one of many questions we're asking.

So...why am I here?