Our minds on media.

Musings on the effects of media on cognition.

Experiment Complete, Cleaning Up

Well, I tried a new experiment with my favorite online tool, twitter. I thought it might be fun to compose them into digests and post them daily here. As far as experiments go, it was quite a successful one since it proved three things to me. One, it’s a stupid idea and made a mess of the blog. Two, one is largely due to the fact that I twitter way more than I blog right now. I’ve discovered a whole great gaggle of pithy writers on favrd.com who are nothing like the ego massaging masses of twitterers who write compelling cliffhangers like “I’ve got a headache” or “I’m going to bed.” Anyway, if you poke around on Favrd for long enough, you’ll find most of them. I enjoy competing for favorite stars. Someday someone will learn how to spam Favrd and that will be a sad day, but I don’t sense this trend coming to an end for at least another 6 months. It reminds me of the early days of the blogosphere, those rough-tough ragged days when you could stake a claim just about anywhere on the world wide web and set yourself up a nice little blog. People argued back then that blogs seemed trivial and useless—little more than diaries made public. Oh, how wrong you were naysayers. And twitter seems to be causing a similar hubabaloo. So, I think there’s good uses for twitter, aside from adding another awkward verb to the English:

I wish I lived in the heyday of ham radio. Because I would call it Hamming. Everyone would be like, “Huh?” And I’d be like, “Just wait.”

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

The second thing that I learned from this experiment was that what I like to write on Twitter has nothing to do with what I like to write on Banapana. Admittedly, I’ve been loosening up on the syntax here on Banapana—makes it easier to write more—but I’m still writing about particular subject matters, not stuff like this:

The evidence is mounting, and scientists agree, global idiocy is an increasing concern–possibly doubling by the year 2010

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

That there’s a legitimate place to put a thought like that on the Internet?—now that’s just fun! So, it looks like Twitter is just entertainment! Who knew that enforcing a 140 character limit would make email fun? So, at any rate, I am for the moment considering posting a twitter digest of my best from the week here, but no more daily updates. It makes a mess.

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