Accept no substitutes

Month: April 2009

Twitterholic Confesses

I’ve been tweeting now for well over two years and have had my Tweets sent to my Facebook status and my IM status and to my blog for some time. This makes it look as if I were very active everywhere on the Net. Really it’s just me and my phone out taking notes. No big deal. Unless you are one of this year’s new Facebook user (and you know who you are) who feel like they have to read every status of every friend (I’m flattered but it’s nothing vital or I would have written you directly or started a chat session).

Thing really revved up when I started live-tweeting events. “What is with this # thing, Jones?” Well, this # thing, called hash tagging, is a way to let tweet on the same subject be read and discovered by anyone interested in that subject or event. http://hashtags.org or http://search.twitter.com let you and others follow along or catch up or read about an event you had to miss or a subject that interest you.

My live tweets of Oliver Smithies’ talk with Tony Waldrop at the Health Sciences Library was hash tagged with #uncnobel (here I used a nice service called tweetag.com).

Twitter folks liked that but Facebook friends were confused by the # and by the frequency of my tweets.

On Thursday Night, I was a judge at the UNC YouTube Tournament. Of course I tweeted that live as #yttour as the list of the videos and the results weren’t being posted til the end of the night. My tweeple were mostly appreciative (or stopped following me ;->), but Facebook friends were again confused. Several did start comment threads on the statuses though.

Today at a panel on social media for the Triangle Association of Black Journalists, we had pretty savvy crowd in the audience and on the panel. Live tweeting on the panel were @waynesutton and @communityMRG — aka Wayne Sutton and James Wong respectively — and myself. Several audience members tweeted questions and comments. All of the tweets tagged #tabj were projected behind the panel on a very large screen using TweetGrid (written by Raleigh’s own @jazzychad). This really facilitated discussion and helped keep the audience and panelists involved. Still one friend had to post “dude… your twitter is boiling over :)” Err, we were all rocking there, pal. In fact, Wayne was live streaming the event on UStreamTV too so we had our full Tweet+Video operation going.

Those who were worried that Facebook feeds would replace Twitter can relax. Twittering behavior on Facebook is not well-groked.

Monday April 6 at 3:30 – Dan Gillmor on the State of Citizen Media

Dan Gillmor
Dan Gillmor on the State of Citizen Media
We the Media Report from the Center for Citizen Media

06 April 2009
15:30 – 16:30
Freedom Forum Conference Center
Carroll Hall – UNC
Facebook Event Here

Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The project aims to help students appreciate the startup culture of risk-taking, and to foster new media products and services.

Dan is also director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enhance and expand grassroots media and its reach. The center is an affiliate of ASI and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He is author of “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People” (O’Reilly Media, 2004), a book that explains the rise of citizens’ media and why it matters.

From 1994 until early 2005 Dan was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. During 2005 he worked on media projects at Grassroots Media Inc.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont, Gillmor received a Herbert Davenport fellowship in 1982 for economics and business reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. During the 1986-87 academic year he was a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics. He has won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.

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