Recently in Tech Category

(This was originally going to be two tweets - so much for that *LOL!*)

I returned to Twitter because I wanted to recommend it to friends and family as a way to maintain a web presence and social network that was easy to use. I had an account before but got bored and deleted it. (Besides, I’m used to maintaining a web presence regardless of its ease of use.) Some folks recently approached me about setting up ‘websites’ (that means so many different things) so I thought about recommending Twitter instead. It had been a while, so I created an anonymous account to scout out the features and followed people that interested me. My plan was for it to be a temporary thing; I wasn’t trying to establish permanent connections here with people I already knew.

I liked the changes I noticed. It’s easy to control what appears in your timeline - your home page at Twitter. Any user can send you a public reply unless you block (which I don’t hesitate to do if something seems fishy) and whether or not that reply appears on your timeline is up to you. (I highly recommend reading this FAQ for more information about reply settings.) You can also send and receive private direct messages.

I tweet because it’s fun and lightweight. My vintage laptop likes it much more than other social networking sites.

I don’t tweet for numbers. People like Oprah, Ashton Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore have hundreds of thousands of ‘followers’ and follow very few people themselves. I can’t relate.

I want to read what the people I follow tweet into my timeline, so I usually look for people who share similar interests. Sometimes that makes for interesting reading, but not always. I don’t follow someone to return the favor, but if someone follows me I’ll always take a preliminary look. I’m not trying to minimize the number of connections I make, but I am trying to maximize the relevance of and the communication between each of those connections. I’ve probably thought more about my process than the designers intended, but different people tweet differently. My timeline remains interesting to me and easy to manage because of the choices I make.

People I follow tend to:

• have interesting tweets about what they’re doing (or thinking)
• share my interests
• tweet moderately and sporadically, from their phones and from the web
• have full profiles and cute avatars
• be people I know
• have usernames that resemble their names
• also correspond with other people, whether or not they’re followers and whether or not it’s me

People I don’t follow tend to:

• primarily tweet about their jobs (even if they work for themselves)
• primarily tweet to link to their blogs
• be followed much more than they follow. I get the feeling they don’t actually read their timelines.
• tweet about getting more followers
• either have too many tweets or not enough tweets
• have incomplete (or non-existent) profiles
• only reply to other tweets
• wear bikinis in their avatars

People I block tend to:

• have one tweet with a link and do much more following than they are followed
• have usernames that seem automated (ending in a 4-digit year)

Some of these are hard and fast rules, some aren’t. Sometimes I’ve even gone completely random looking for people to follow, but that doesn’t really work. I’m trying to keep it interesting and fun, but there are no guarantees. As Twitter gains popularity, I predict that keeping my timeline interesting and fun will become more difficult. Like anything else, I’ll do it until I’m bored of it.

This post was originally going to be much more detailed, but I thought twice … then thrice. It’s so easy to become nothing more than a response.

Analog

I began this year just right *wink* (and without gunshots). And I witnessed the inauguration of our new President with some friends. There were tears that probably resembled many of the pictures you’ve already seen - but none were mine. I’m not sure what to feel, but the world is changing. (I guess some of these would qualify as ‘celebratory’ … *grin*)

President Obama has a whole lot of work to do. I sure hope that the White House’s Office of Public Liaison is listening to encouragement, dissent, and everything in between. Is our economy really in the toilet? Well, unemployment is up in every state. I’m not quite sure what to make of that either, but it seems to be an opportunity if you want to work and you want to do pursue work that you really like. (Especially if you’re a blogger in the D.C. metropolitan area. Why do so many of the larger D.C.-based blogs suck? You know who you are - if not, just read your comments. Or lack thereof.)

There’s a cute meme going around in Flickr; a couple of days ago, I complied. No, I’m not the technophile I used to be, but I think I’ll always be a geek. (Which, I just realized, rhymes with ‘freak’ …) But I’ve never had a job in technology that didn’t feel like it was at risk. Not working is disheartening, but I can’t relate to keeping up appearances just to stay afloat either. Finding work is turning into something that looks like finding peace, which isn’t something that anyone else can offer. Health insurance? Well, that’s a good question.

Finally, a bit of levity that proves YouTube is digital television:

At first I was going to title this post “The End of Technology” or “Technology Kills Art” or something equally ominous, but (obviously) decided against it. We’re living during what feels like the end of something, but I can’t quite place my finger on it. So I won’t.

There are many artists from the 80’s due to release albums/CDs/(whatever you call a thematic collection of songs now) this year. I’ll probably post either a series of reviews or a birds-eye view of many of them later this year. I mention the 80’s because that’s the decade when many artists became much more comfortable with using technology to create their art - especially musicians. Just imagine Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” without its famous synth line (discovered by Dave Stewart accidentally playing it backwards) or Prince with a real drummer and without a Linn drum machine. And what would the 80’s be without the advent of the promotional music video? I’ve been watching Grace Jones’ (and Jean-Paul Goude’s) masterpiece video “A One Man Show” on YouTube (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) for the past week. (Yes, it’s been on my list of Videos That Should Be DVDs along with Prince’s “Sign ‘O’ The Times” for a while now.) You might also want to check out Miriam Kershaw’s article “Postcolonialism and Androgyny: The Performance Art of Grace Jones” for a more scholarly analysis of that period of Grace’s art.

I came across this post from Patrick Beeson and decided to give it a try. I’m really impressed; it makes a tremendous difference in how fast Movable Type runs. Too bad Dreamhost’s MT support is, well, a bit archaic - but oh well …

This might just be the thing that inspires me to get back to it …

I’m getting used to it.

It’s really an exciting time to be a technologist and an artist, particularly at a time when great technology allows many more people to create content. Many. More. People! And it sure helps that a lot of that technology is free!