A powerful tool is the ability to follow and participate in the current online conversation about a topic. The topic I'm exploring is the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and how the themes therein are relevant to today's digital society in order to expand upon what I discussed in my last post. So I've been searching and researching by way of Google's blog search to see what people are saying. It's a bit challenging to find exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for, but I've been able to find blogs of people that are thinking about similar things, and make some comments. I also started a topic about Borges on a messageboard. Hopefully these things will facilitate some conversation.
But I wanted to get more current and see how rapid and even how close to realtime the conversation can get. So I decided to tap into the "tweet-stream" and even went ahead and made my own twitter account. I'm still not exactly sure how best to utilize this power. I'm not sure if i used hashtags correctly, but I made a "tweet" about #Borges. Obviously it would be good to acquire followers, and to find particularly worthwhile people to follow. I searched for Borges using hashtags.org, which looks to be like a very useful tool. I would recommend it to anyone considering using twitter for research purposes. Apparently, quite a few tweets have mentioned Borges in the past 24 hours, although, not surprisingly, some of them are in Spanish, and some of them aren't referring to Jorge Luis. So now the question is, what does it take to create some buzz or at least provoke some twittering about a topic?
Chris! Great picture, it's cute! Here's a blog I found about what makes a good tweeter:
ReplyDeletehttp://firemybosses.blogspot.com/2009/03/are-you-good-tweeter.html
he has some interesting ideas as well as some good links.
Also, here's a link to the top 500 tweeters, maybe your could look them up and see what they're tweeting and what makes it so interesting to their followers?
http://twittruth.com/
Chris, I just did a twitter search using search.twitter.com and typed in "louis borges" and found one person with a tweet. Here is the link: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=louis+borges
ReplyDeleteIt was posted two days ago but maybe you could have some tweets with this Borges reader.
Thanks for your comment and question earlier...Here's a stab at a response:
ReplyDeletehttp://j1t.blogspot.com/2010/06/man-who-was-google.html