I now start each and every day with three essentials: a pot of Harrod’s Indian tea, internet research into world events, and…twittering. If you haven’t heard of Twitter, the real-time, micro-blogging service, it probably means you are over 35 and not a geek. If you are over 35 and a geek, you are probably Twittering already.
My interest in social media has been slow to grow, mostly because I’m a late babyboomer and value the hard-printed word (I have a huge personal library) and in-person human contact. But with my recent relocation to Borneo and away from friends I’ve been drawn to explore the blogging phenomena more closely. I love to write, and yet put absurdly high standards on myself that result in a low level of actual published output. It was only at the enthusiastic urging of my terrific website and SEO expert Brad Spencer, (a millennial, of course) who emailed me to say, “Dean, You should totally Twitter!”, that I took the jump into a new world.
After only a few weeks Twitter has begun to change how I think of writing, and of publishing. I now see that my resistance to publication has been due to an insecure babyboomer thought-form: publish, and hope not to perish. But, because Twitter is in real-time (you blog about what you are doing right now, or what you are finding interesting, or you state an opinion) and is short (you get about two sentences, including an URL address) it encourages… well, courage. And spontaneity. Just get it out there. Write it, and just like releasing a bird into the wild your twitter is gone, lame pun intended.
I also find enjoyment in reading over other people’s twitter postings and their links to what catches their interest. In the space of an hour this morning I had scanned the micro-blogging of a WordPress expert in Belgrade, a web designer in Brisbane, and an engineer in Pune, India. All very interesting people, the kind you’d like meet up with in Starbucks, and ask about what is on their minds. My main purpose in searching through Twitter this morning was information on web site optimization, but along the way I found great links to interesting YouTube videos and web articles unrelated to my quest. My new “friends”, blissfully unaware of my existence, generously share their insights and post links to stuff which could be valuable to me.
So, this will be my first blog posting in Twitter-Time, rather than in Babyboomer-Classic mode. I wrote this blog posting in about an hour, and after editing it for poor punctuation and silly typos I’m going to immediately post it on my blog, with no fear. Twitter-Style.
[...] sit idle, could it? I encouraged Dean to get over to twitter and start tweeting away. And he has. Dean’s site is an excellent example of how putting your personality into and showcasing [...]
…this is the straw that broke the camel’s back; i am going to investigate, finally, what this “twitter” thing is that I keep hearing about (yes, I am over 35 and evidently not enough of a geek.) btw, Dean, you are an excellent writer. I’ve known you for a long time, but never realized this about you until I read some of your blog posts tonight… good stuff. and inspires me to attend to my own poor, neglected website!