One reason I like having the new Twitter widget on my blog is that it’s a quick way of sharing with y’all cool stuff that I run across elsewhere — stuff that I probably wouldn’t get around to writing an actual, separate blog post about, but which you might enjoy anyway.
Stuff that an explanation or elaboration would ruin. Stuff like this surreal bit in The New Yorker, which as you can see in my Twitter widget at right, I reTweeted. Excerpts:
If I were built, I’d avert the fiscal cliff. I’d avert the fiscal cliff with my muscles. “Listen up, pansies,” I’d say to Boehner and Obama. And they’d take one look at my torso and know I meant business…
If I were built, our Congresspeople would more truly represent our interests, rather than the interests of corporate America. There’d be more jobs, less crime, and the tax code would be simplified. If I were built, income tax would be based on physique. It’d be easy: you pay your body fat percentage. Rush Limbaugh would lose his house and go bankrupt. And Nancy Pelosi? She would be my wife, if I were built. Congresswoman Pelosi knows a real man when she sees one. And C.B.O. wouldn’t stand for Congressional Budget Office, it’d stand for chest, buttocks, and obliques. And there’d be no more gerrymandering or filibustering or pork. If I were built, the only pork you’d see in Congress would be the spare ribs Paul Ryan and I sometimes shared post-workout.
If I were built, I wouldn’t know what gerrymandering was. I wouldn’t really understand the issues if I were built. But it wouldn’t matter, because my muscles would understand the issues. And my wife, Nancy Pelosi. She’d understand the issues, too…
The world is full of fun stuff like that, as well as interesting and even important things that I might have time for a quick comment about, but not a full blog post.
And if you follow me, who knows? You could end up being my 2,000th follower. I’m at 1,961 and counting…
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All right, now, before some of you people who don’t know how to have fun say “that’s exactly the kind of junk that makes me never want to go near Twitter,” note that within minutes of that item, I also retweeted:
Record number of people signed petition to classify Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group: http://tinyurl.com/c9x5j9d …
Putin to sign bill banning Americans from adopting Russian kids http://wapo.st/12IyGre
US likely to head over fiscal cliff, Senate majority leader Harry Reid concedes http://gu.com/p/3cmbp/tw
… from, let’s see — Celeste Hedley, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.
So it’s not all just stuff that appeals to my sense of humor…
All ground breaking stuff that we need to know “right now”.
But yes, I intend to fix that “Follow Brad” thing that some of y’all say gets in the way of you seeing what you’re typing.
I asked a couple of ADCO colleagues to check it on their iPhones at lunch, and they actually had the opposite problem — the window would pop up, but then disappear before they could do anything with it…
yes that what it does for me too. i couldnt hit the follow button if i wanted to. it doesnt stay long enough.
I can deal with missing all this, um, stuff. The window is now below everything. Yay.
Well, I can’t. Or at least, don’t want to.
I guess for me it’s a substitute for all those wire feeds I had coming into my computer for all those years — only a much more diverse, comprehensive set of wires, including a lot more fun stuff as well as serious news.
Rather than having three or four wire services the way it used to be (AP, KRT, LAT/WP and NYT), I follow 593 feeds. And while some are friends, or just fun people I’ve run across, others are major, serious news sources — including all of the above, and many, many others both domestic and foreign, plus all sorts of primary sources, such as politicians and advocacy groups.
There is ALWAYS something interesting near the top of my feed. In any 10 Tweets, there is usually at least one I would blog about if I had time. At least with my Twitter widget, I can bring it to y’all’s attention. And you can read whatever interests you.
But anyone who says there is nothing on Twitter to interest them hasn’t given it any sort of a real chance. It is an amazingly rich stream of fresh news and ideas, richer than anything I’ve ever encountered — richer than anything that was ever even possible until quite recently…
Isn’t re-Twittering just another name for gossip? “OMG, did you hear…”? Like a bunch of little old ladies.
If that’s what you’re looking for, Steven, you can find that. It’s an incredibly diverse forum — really, thousands if not millions of interconnected webs that cover pretty much any area of human interest.
And for that reason, those of us who are looking for timely, reliable news can find it more readily there than anywhere. And those of us who are looking for an array of thoughtful observations on the news of the day can find that as well.
That’s because all sorts of journals use Twitter the way I do — to throw out headlines, and bring people to their sites, where they can find depth. It is much, much more than just the 140 characters.
In fact, Twitter is so much more than I thought it was before I gave it a chance.
It started purely as another way to promote the blog. I had no idea how much more useful it would be than that.
Does Brad’s blog’s comment window get skinnier for everyone else as replies are stacking up? Pretty soon it’ll be like one character wide.
Test to see how narrow a thread can become, this response looks like it’s going to be 19 characters wide. Any replies will be narrower… eventually to a one character per line response.
How’s that working with your ADD?
Was getting too small. Anyways..
“Rather than having three or four wire services the way it used to be (AP, KRT, LAT/WP and NYT), I follow 593 feeds. And while some are friends, or just fun people I’ve run across, others are major, serious news sources — including all of the above, and many, many others both domestic and foreign, plus all sorts of primary sources, such as politicians and advocacy groups.”
You can also follow hashtags like #SCTweets. This has the latest news stories that people are putting out. Even if you aren’t following them you can see it if the tag it.
I thought it was lame as well and pretty much only got into twitter to try to draw some attention for my blog. To me its my primary way of finding information/ social networking and you don’t have to worry about some of the icky stuff that facebook brings.