Showing posts with label microblogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label microblogging. Show all posts

31 August 2011

Welcome to Moody's Microblog Daily Digest

I joined Twitter on 1st January 2010 as an experiment. I wanted to see whether this trendy thing had any real merit, or was simply the latest fad that would come and go. I was was soon disabused of my prejudices about it being just for posting about what you had eaten for breakfast. Indeed, I discovered that the presence or absence of such culinary info was a very quick way of deciding whether someone should be unfollowed or not.

I was particularly impressed at the many different ways that people used Twitter. For some, it was truly an online diary, recording what they did, often in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail. For others, it was a way of passing on news far faster than traditional outlets. And for some it was evidently a real microblog – a way of publishing extremely short piece of information with optional comments.

This turned out to be the way that I felt Twitter was most useful, and my own use soon conformed to this model. I realised that it solved a problem with blogging that I had been wrestling with for a while. I frequently came across stories that warranted passing on, but which looked decidedly thin when posted to one of my blogs. What I wanted was a quick way of saying: “hey, take a look at this – it's good/bad/stupid/funny/horrible” without needing to come up with anything more detailed in terms of analysis. What I wanted, it turned out, was Twitter.

As my followers there (and later on identi.ca and Google+) will know, I soon lost control completely, and started posting dozens of microblog posts a day. Indeed, I have had several people unfollow me because they say I post too many interesting links, which stops them working....

But for all that I feel my microblogs work well on their own terms, there is one huge problem. I have apparently posted some 43,000 of them in the last 20 months (really? How posts fly by when you're having fun...). Quite a few of them have useful information that I like to refer to. But it is a truth universally acknowledged that Twitter's search function is pretty useless. Even though I have supplemented this with bit.ly, which has its own search feature, it frequently happens that I can't find that super important link I posted a few months ago.

This is not just frustrating, it is becoming a serious problem. It means that the not inconsiderable effort that I put into choosing my links and commenting on them is effectively going down the digital drain.

So, in an attempt to preserve at least some of the more interesting posts, I have set up a new blog called, with stunning originality, “Moody's Microblog Daily Digest.” As its name suggests, each day this will provide a digest of those microblog posts that I think are worth keeping. These will be posted in an entirely minimal format, simply a paste of the microblog content – don't look for any prettiness here.

This will, I hope, have two advantages.

First, it will allow Google's not inconsiderable search engine capabilities to index stuff on the new site. That means any post should be retrievable by me and anyone who feels the need. Secondly, it offers an alternative way to deal with the Moody flood: not only will it be a pared-down list of microblog posts, but it will be one-per-day (I aim to update it during the day, and then close it at the end, although I'm not sure if that will mean multiple appearances in RSS readers...) This might help those who find that you can have too much of a good thing....

Obviously, I'll be reviewing how things go, and would appreciate any comments along the way as this latest experiment progresses.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

27 May 2009

Is it Possible for the Chinese *Truly* to Twitter?

Here's something that has always struck me about Twittering in Chinese:

a Chinese tweet can have three times the volume of an English tweet, thanks to the high information intensity of the Chinese language. 140 Chinese characters can make up all the full elements of a news piece with the "5 Ws" (Who, What, Where, When and HoW).

So that's as if those writing in alphabetic languages had 420 characters instead of Twitter's usual 140 - a very different kettle of fish.

So, is that still a genuine tweet, given that it's no longer so constrained by its format? Is it better or worse to have more space for your thoughts? Which would you prefer: traditional micro-blogging, or Chinese-style *miniblogging*?

05 March 2009

Open Microblogging for Open Source Professionals

I like Twitter, but I feel rather guilty about using it, since it's hardly open source. Of course, there's Laconi.ca, which is not only open source, but allows all kinds of other services to be built upon it. Here's a good example:

FLOSS.PRO is a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software Laconica tool.

FLOSS.PRO is there for people involved in FLOSS, join the groups or create the ones you need. It's built so that FLOSS Professionals can get help and to help.


As you can see, FLOSS.PRO is not only open source, but devoted to the world of open source. Gaining critical mass is the central issue for these services, which is why I still use Twitter, to my shame.... (Via Tectonic.)

26 January 2009

Of Blogs and Microblogging

The eagle-eyed among you (everyone, surely), will have noticed the sudden excrudescence of a widget to the right. Since this represents the rude irruption of that upstart Twitter among the peaceful glades of Blogger, I feel some explanation is in order.

I've only been using Twitter for about a month, but I've found a what seems to me a fairly natural use for it alongside Open... and my Open Enterprise blog: posting stuff that doesn't really merit a full-on blog post, but is worthy of a quick mention.

So the idea of including a few tweets on this blog is to offer a few quick links or ideas that might be of interest to readers of this blog, without them needing to subscribe to Twitter or even leave this page.

It's meant to add, not take away, and nothing else will be changing in terms of what I blog about (except that I probably won't be posting anything really short, since that is likely to end up on Twitter.)

I intend running this page in its present form for a while to see how people like it. Please feel free to let me know whether you love or loathe it. I may also tweak some of its parameters - number of tweets etc. - so thoughts on that, too, would be welcome.

19 January 2009

Open Source Microblogging and the Enterprise

One of the easy predictions for 2009 is that it will be the year that Twitter breaks through into the mainstream (for some suitable definition of mainstream.) The good news is that Twitter uses lots of open source and plans to use even more....

On Open Enterprise blog.