andrew.pilsch.com

In addition to restarting this blog, I’ve also started using Twitter again. As others have reported Twitter has a really high turnover when it comes to reporting the news. Presumably, if you are following the right people on Twitter, you could know everything as soon as it happens. That’s all well and good,
but as I restart a lot of my own web presence again, I’m wondering how hard it must be to filter through this information.

I follow around 12 twitter feeds. Most of them are my friends, but I also get the BBC news, BoingBoing, and ESPN News. I have my Twitter account piped to my Jabber account, which means I get “tweets” as they happen. Consequently, I am now afraid of “missing something” if I’m away from the computer for more than a few minutes. The same thing happens with my Google Reader account: I find myself a prisoner of my information.

This seems like a common critique of Web2.0 and that’s not really my point here. While I get technology news piped directly to me in a number of places, a lot of tweets are things like getting groceries or going to the bathroom Similarly, I follow laughingsquid and interspersed with interesting tidbits about the Internet and what not, I get accounts of him buying coffee.

I think the thing I learned from my previous Twitter experience (last summer) and previous experience on this blog is that it isn’t enough to write about what you’re doing: I’m not going to follow a Twitter feed of someone I know that features accounts of them cooking or going to the
movies. Twitter seems to demand, as a price, that I listen to mundane details of the lives people whom I don’t know in order to be on the absolute bleeding edge of information.

Moreover, for me, I find that blogging (micro or otherwise) about the mundane details of my life is singularly unsatisfying: why should anyone care what I’m doing? Why do I even think enough of myself to write it down? I suppose that the simple explanation for reports of the trip to
the Kwik-E-Mart (or whatever) lie in the fact that because the technology allows us to publicly document the mundanity of our lives, we must.

At the same time, I’ve been noticing lately that I’d like an easy way to index my thinking about various informational / social trends. I keep losing information with regard to the shape of my dissertation and I’m finding that wiki isn’t a solution: I can’t edit it everywhere and, even if I could, it’s something I have to think about.

As I’ve said, I have Twitter hooked up to a Jabber account, and I’ve noticed that I’m more inclined to post whatever pops into my head (ideas and what not) now that I can just send an IM to Twitter whenever (and wherever) I want. Noticing this made me think that such an “anywhere, anytime” approach would give a better document of my thoughts and ideas about things at a given time.

As such I’m going to treat this blog as a way to document thoughts that won’t fit into a 140 character Twitter “tweet” (I really find it hard to seriously consider the implications of something called a “tweet”).

Happy Hunting.

Image Credit: Ode to Twitter: words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe by Thomas Hawk