The last day or two, you may have noticed, things were slower than usual here on the blog. That’s because I was travelling back and forth, back and forth to Charleston.
And blogging on my iPhone is a tad awkward.
However… I keep commenting on breaking news on Twitter. It’s just that some of y’all miss it because you don’t follow me there. And you should. Follow me there, I mean. Not miss it.
Here’s the place to go to sign up for my feed. Of course, if you’re not on Twitter yet, you should try it. Increasingly, it is one of the main ways I keep up with what’s happening in the world. And it’s a great place to have immediate — if somewhat choppy — discussions about said happenings.
Here’s my feed — including reTweets and replies — from today (most recent at top, oldest at bottom):
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
@SCHotline Yeah, but what about “Tales of Brave Ulysses?”
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
@SCHotline You mean that in a good way or bad way?
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
Lindsey Graham fighting good fight again, this time to preserve essential foreign aid… j.mp/rVRYyV
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
Listening to one of my all-time faves — Tales of Brave Ulysses — on Pandora… bit.ly/qyRnwH #pandora
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
@BozMartin Did I just hear somebody playing “Spoofful”? Or was it, “Born Under a Bad Spoof”? Or “Spoofs of Brave Ulysses?” I’ll stop now…
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
@TylerMJones I just blogged about it… bradwarthen.com/?p=12961
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
SC Dem spoof of bizarre Herman Cain advert… j.mp/smTU3O
PCFCU_SC Palmetto Citizens CU
by BradWarthen
Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth at the @SCStateFair& congrats to our $250 winner, Stephanie L!
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
@Kingofcardz Hope it goes well. I’m sure Starbucks will miss you…
washingtonpost The Washington Post
by BradWarthen
The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debatewapo.st/ttzMPF
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
ROTFL… “@lprill: LOL… oh wait. RT @chrisbrogan: Not sure I’d take business advice from someone who types “lol” a lot. You?”
mattduss Matt Duss
by BradWarthen
Wow RT @blakehounshell: Peace-process farce deepens as Mahmoud Abbas adds new condition for returning to talksbit.ly/w3GLWI
benpolitico Ben Smith
by BradWarthen
“Let’s see your grades and your birth certificate” RT@thinkprogress: VIDEO: Perry explains why he went birther:thkpr.gs/t2sgjo”
occupyoakland Occupy Oakland
by BradWarthen
#occupyoakland attacked by 500 cops in suprise assault. tear gas, rubber bullets, shotguns, flash bang grenades. Many injured.
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
So THAT’S why he’s running! Explains much… “@PoliticalTicker: Perry on Obama: ‘It’s fun to poke at him’ bit.ly/rS3sRL”
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
Pool starts now on how long before he gets dug up… “@guardian: Latest: #Gaddafi buried in secret desert location bit.ly/rp8uNz”
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
@coffeepartyusa I’m disappointed that the Coffee Party seems so entranced by Occupy Wall Street…
BradWarthen Brad Warthen
@yesevamoore @tidevine @freetimessc @thestate I wonder what she’s mad about. Because, in a public official, that’s usually what that means.
A bit slower than my usual pace, but it’s something.
By the way, to minimize confusion — the replies will seem cryptic unless you click on the link that says “in reply to….” That will take you to the Tweet I’m replying to…
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As I don’t have adult ADHD, I find it difficult to be a Twitter follower.
@mark
Agreed. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the stream of consciousness above. Who was saying what when and why?
I suppose we will have gone full circle when people end up tweeting in Morse code.
.. -.. — .. (LOL!)
Or smoke signals.
Mark, I felt the same way you did about it. Well, not the SAME way, but I did see it as pointless and having too much in common, as a form of communication, with bumper stickers. I thought the form invited dangerous oversimplification of thought.
Then one day Tim Kelly — of “Crack the Bell” and “Indigo Journal” — said something to me one day that convinced me to try it: “You can use it to promote your blog.” How, I asked. He said just post the blog headlines, with the links, on Twitter (and, automatically, no Facebook as well).
I tried it, and today I have four-to-five times the traffic I had before on the blog.
Of course, that’s not a selling point for you. But this may be: I found that I loved it. First, I loved the literary challenge of working within the 140-character limit. It was a fun sort of discipline, which I likened at first to writing haiku. But that’s not quite right. I liked it because it played to a personal strength I’ve had since I started doing it professionally 36 years ago: writing headlines. It was good to flex those muscles again.
Next, and this will more pertinent to you, it’s not as facile and shallow as you may think. Not if it links to more substantial material. And it does, sometimes to MUCH more substantial material, fascinating stuff you would not find otherwise find.
Yes, there are people who Tweet out nothings, or tease you with links that lead to something no more substantial than the Tweet. But you learn not to follow those people. You follow substantial news and commentary feeds, from The New York Times, the BBC, the New Yorker, The New Republic, and on and on.
You find fascinating people with interesting things to say, people you’d never heard of before. The intellectual banquet can be substantial, and you will have a breadth of familiarity with what is happening out in the world, and what is being said about it, than you can possibly get from any other medium.
I urge you to try it, and give it a real chance. You’ll find it’s not what you expected.
And Doug — I accept service on the typography. It’s much clearer if you simply follow the link to my timeline. By quoting, I was trying to entice y’all to come over and look, but I guess I did it in a lame way.
I can’t seem to copy and paste Tweets over to my blog without it losing the layout that makes them easy to follow. The avatars help. So does the spacing. So do other symbols and devices that provide clarity, but which do not copy over.
I have in the past posted Tweets and forced them to look more or less as they should, but that takes a certain amount of fiddling with each and every one of them, and I just can’t devote that kind of time.
If I could just find a good, really good, Twitter feed that would work in the rail of my blog — one that would look like Twitter itself — that would help a lot. But I haven’t managed that yet. The last time I had such a feature in my sidebar, it was as ugly and hard to follow as the above, and it was about 12 hours behind — which was pointless.
And when I discovered software that would integrate Twitter with my comment threads — I was really excited about that one, because it would have greatly increased participation and interactivity here — it crashed my blog, as the versions were incompatible.
I’ll continue to search for a better way, because to me, the Twitter feed and the blog are part of the same thing. Twitter is continuing to blog by other means when I’m not in a position to sit down with the laptop. I want to get them to work together seamlessly.
3.2.1 or an earlier version?
I’m with Mark and Doug. If I wanted to read your Tweets, I’d figure out my Twitter password.
I wonder if Twitter isn’t exacerbating your alleged ADHD.
Did you say something? I wasn’t paying attention…
But seriously, those of us who are ADD (not ADHD) do get a bit of a rush out of that kind of stimulation — jumping from topic to topic to topic. And to an observer, it can look like a flat stone skimming over water. But again I say, the real pleasure comes from plunging under, down deep, into something you would NOT have found if you hadn’t been skimming over a vast field of topics, looking for that likely topic to get into deeply.
It’s quite satisfying on a number of levels.
And I find that on the days I’m paying attention to Twitter, I’m more up on the news — a broad range of news — than I’ve been since I used to be in charge of deciding what went onto the front page and in the rest of the news pages of the paper. I did that at three different papers.
But back then, it was a matter of keeping up with the local news budget — which was usually drawn up once during the cycle, then was a matter of being updated by several editors as things changed in their respective areas, and keeping up with basically four wire feeds — state, national, world and political.
With Twitter, I’m constantly being updated by whichever of 619 feeds has posted most recently. It’s the proverbial information fire hose, only it’s forced to give me one item at a time, every few seconds.
True, a lot of those are people I follow for fun, or people just repeating and batting back and forth the talking points of the day, but I’m also getting the feeds of every legitimate, serious news source in the world that I might ever be interested in following.
It’s a very rich flow, and not to be missed. Don’t be Luddites, friends. Give it a chance…
Maybe because I read pretty quickly I don’t have a problem with reading a couple paragraphs instead of “@Somebody Hey you should read this http://ww.sjdhd.$353mj,.”
I bounce around from the Yahoo front page to Andrew Sullivan to Salon to Slate to BardWarthen to FitsNews to The State (once a day) and I get more than my fill of what is going on.
Luddite’s would abhor blogging.
Would they abhor it, or eschew it?
Doug, thanks for reminding me. I wasn’t following Andrew Sullivan on Twitter.
Make that 620. That I’m following, I mean. (Meanwhile, 1,460 are following me.)
And that’s a much richer pool of information than the handful of sources you’re citing.
ADD brains process things differently from the norm. I understand ADD people actually function better in a noisy, distracting environment–with, say, music playing and so on. So Twitter is made for you.
I, who seem to have Attention Surplus Disorder, find it like cocktail party chatter when people have had a few–lots of disjointed one-liners declaimed to the masses, rather than genuine listening and thoughtful commentary, such as many of the commenters here provide.
That’s interesting, but I don’t know that it’s correct. I can ENJOY an environment where a lot is going on, but if you want me to get work done, I need to shut it all out — precisely because I am very easily fascinated, and thus distracted.
I suffered for years in a newsroom environment. Finally, in editorial, I achieved what I had needed to concentrate — a really isolated office at the end of a long hall well separated from the rest of the building, with very few distractions.
Unfortunately… by this time, we were using PCs, and we were connected to the Internet…
Have you been formally diagnosed?