Twitter Groups is Twitter application #37,941.  We’re trying it out right now, and have created a “Vancouver” Twitter group.  This, for now, is the home page.  The group’s page at Twitter Groups is here.

In my reflections on this process, I see we are in a phase where on the phone I am disembodied, while in video on the web I am located in a type of body, or a place/image which I identify as “me”.

This is fun stuff and (yet another) revolution.

When the time came a few years ago to find an Inuktitut term for the word “Internet,” Nunavut’s former Official Languages Commissioner, Eva Aariak, chose ikiaqqivik, or “traveling through layers”. The word comes from the concept describing what a shaman does when asked to find out about living or deceased relatives or where animals have disappeared to: travel across time and space to find answers. According to the elders, shamans used to travel all over the world: to the bottom of the ocean, to the stratosphere, and even to the moon. In fact, the 1969 moon landing did not impress Inuit elders. They simply said, “We’ve already been there!” (Minogue, 2005, n.p.). The word is also an example of how Inuit are mapping traditional concepts, values, and metaphors to make sense of contemporary realities and technologies. – Katarina Soukup in The Canadian Journal of Communication

Mind you, that’s just my way of doing it. For some people, keeping the different aspects of their lives separate is important, works well, and is even enjoyable. There are all kinds of people who, for example, get a lot out of anonymous blogging; and I’m not talking about blog scrapers, trolls and porn bloggers here – just people who have chosen to stay anonymous, like Waiter Rant, Patient Anonymous or Going Private.

(Sidebar: Even whether one decides be highly transparent and integrated or private and compartmentalized, is a decision that’s influenced – maybe even determined – by one’s personal background, experience and personality type. Which explains why one does not have to be an extrovert to be transparent, or an introvert to be more private; such decisions come informed by many of the mind’s strands).

Carol, in her last post, was talking about integrating one’s online persona. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a way that really works for me. In terms of pulling all the information together, of the ones I use, MyBlogLog and Facebook are probably the most comprehensive. But I really, really don’t like their layout; if I use such a social media tool it needs to look and feel comfortable; it needs to be a bit of a living room. Both Facebook and MyBlogLog have a bit of a mall feeling and I guess I’m of a generation and persuasion that doesn’t find malls particularly inviting.

I know there are many more such tools out there but I feel very unmotivated to try them out because so far, all of them have me disappointed (with a possible, very lukewarm exception of FriendFeed). Ideally, I’d like to see something that is

• comprehensive in terms of pulling together all my online presences (and actually does it; Tumblr, for example, promises to pull in my Twitter feed but doesn’t)
• easy to use
• responsive
• relatively hacker-safe
• fast (how much of a time delay would i put up with? 5 minutes maybe?)

and has

• clean layout that I can easily change
• tagging ability
• the ability to post extra material, ideally all the way from text to video (a la Tumblr, which, by the way, I kind of like – but see above)
• an FAQ that talks about more than just the very obvious
• easy, friendly and time-sensitive help (please NONE of that farmed-out help, for example like the one on Twitter; I really like the model that Dreamhost uses for support)
• ideally, the sort of follower-sorting that TweetDeck has
• public/private settings
• favouriting
• whatever back-end structure that’s needed to keep the thing working a good 90%+ of the time

Is there something like that out there? And would I/you want to pay for it? How much? Would it be okay to have advertising on it?

Or, here’s an idea. I was just wondering what the “meatspace” equivalence of such an online space would be. A sort of plaza, perhaps, or a park. It’s infrastructure.

What if governments started building such sorts of infrastructure?

Or should it be more like Wikipedia?

Enough questions for now?

Image by mike (el madrileño)

Here are all the colours, but I went for the black – only because it was all they had, and I wanted it Now Now Now.

Watch this space for some of the Flip experiments. Yes I know they aren’t 16:9, but it’s so much fun to use I just don’t care. And compared with lugging around my old big Sony…. well, there’s no comparison. Especially when it comes to price. What a great toy!

As you can see, these days I’m intrigued by the whole multilingual theme. So I thought I’d finally do something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while – write a bilingual blog post.

This was inspired by the German blog Blogschrott who asks bloggers who twitter to explain why they use Twitter. As you can tell from my last post, I’ve been reading more and more German Twitters – I get the impression that Twitter is just now becoming quite the interesting tool over in Germany.

So this is what I’ll do. First I’ll answer the questions in English, and then in German. (They won’t be exactly the same – I’m not applying for a translator’s job here Here we go

Why do you use twitter, where do you find meaning in it?

One of my prime motivators is fun, or a sense of pleasure and excitement. Every time I open my twitter page (I only use it in a browser), I’m happy. I like the visual appeal of both my site and of seeing all these neat avatars. I like the wittiness, intelligence and social consciousness of my Twitter friends. So the meaning is mostly pleasure – intellectual pleasure, sense-pleasure, and the pleasure of making and nurturing connections.

What do you tweet? Personal stuff, internet news, or a mix?

Anything and everything. It’s pretty impulsive (one of the other reasons I like it) I’d say 60% of the time I ask myself, is that of any interest to my friends? I do more and more retweeting, that is, passing on info that one of my Twitter contacts tweeted about – for example, a reminder to schedule cancer check-ups. There’s also little Twitter conversations. Lately, I’ve been posting a “global earth” motto every day, and a reflection on it, inspired by a list of things to do to become more globally and earth conscious that a friend had sent me a propos Earth Day. Once or twice a week I might mention one of my posts. Oh, and I also enjoy writing Twitter haiku, which I call twaiku – like this one here.

How do you use Twitter? Do you use a plugin, etc.?

As I said, I only use it via browser. I don’t even have the little Twitter widget on my blog anymore. I already spend way too much time on the computer, if I start using more than one medium to access something as addictive as Twitter, I’d never sleep!

Now for the German version:

Warum nutzt Du Twitter, wo liegt für Dich der Sinn?

Was mich motiviert is Spass, oder sagen wir mal Freude, oder ein gewisser Sinnesgenuss, eine gewisse Reizung. Jedesmal wenn ich meine Twitterseite oeffne (ich benutze es nur in einem Browser), freue ich mich. Ich freue mich darueber, wie meine Seite aussieht, und ueber all diese coolen Avatars. Ich freue mich ueber den Humor, die Intelligenz und das Sozialbewusstsein meiner Twitter-Freunde. Der Sinn liegt also in Freude – in intellektueller und sinnlicher Freude, und der Freude daran, neue Verbindungen zu machen and zu unterhalten.

Was twitterst Du? Eher private Sachen, News aus dem Web, oder ein Mix aus beidem?

So ziemlich alles. Es ist recht impulsiv (ein weiterer Grund, weshalb mir Twitter gefaellt). Ich wuerde sagen, 60% der Zeit frage ich mich, ob mein Tweet meine Kontakte interessieren wuerde. Ich “retweete” mehr und mehr, das heisst, ich gebe Information von meinen Kontakten weiter, z.B. hier, eine Erinnerung fuer Krebsvorsorgeuntersuchungen. Dann sind da auch kleine Twitter-Unterhaltungen. Neuerdings twittere ich auch taeglich ein Global Earth-Motto, und einen kurzen Gedanken darueber, inspiriert durch eine Liste, die uns hilft, mehr global und umweltfreundlich zu denken, die mir von einer Freundin fuer Earth Day geschickt hatte. Ein oder zweimal die Woche erwaehne ich einen meiner Blog-Artikel. Oh, und ich habe auch Spass daran, Haiku zu schrieben, die ich Twaiku nenne, hier zum Beispiel.

Wie nutzt Du Twitter? Über Twitter.com direkt, oder über ein Plugin? Wenn ja, wo liegen die Vorteile des jeweiligen Tools?

Wie gesagt, ich benutze nur die Webseite. Ich habe noch nicht mal mehr das kleine Twitter-Widget auf meinem Blog. Ich verbrauche schon viel zu viel Zeit mit dem Computer. Wenn ich mit einem weiteren Tool anfinge oder auch meinen Handy benutzen wuerde fuer sowas verfuehrerisches wie Twitter, wuerde ich nie wieder schlafen!

Image by smitty

Sprachspielerin (“language player”, of the female sort, with her blog here) says

He who sows tweets shall reap a thunderstorm.
As you shout into the twittersphere, so shall it echo back.
There is no tweet unless you tweet it.
I tweet that I tweet nothing [leaning on Socrates]
You cannot step twice into the same tweet. Or: Everything twitters.
The tweet is the goal.

Lotree, a “reader and information broker” with his blog here)

More truculent than a tweet are often a tweet’s followers.

Werkstatt (“workshop” – a social science guy from my hometown Munich whose blog is called knowledge workshop)

And why Twitter and not, rather, Nothing? That is the question. [leaning on German philosopher Heidegger]
Whereof you cannot tweet you must keep silent.
Everything you can say you can say as a tweet. [leaning on German philosopher Wittgenstein]
Nothing is twittered as hot as it is cooked.
Where there is a tweet there is a way.
The next tweet is always the hardest.

rrho who lives in Berlin and has a blog here

Where there is one tweet there is more.

textundblog (“text and blog”) from Hamburg, a Spanish translator, among other things. His blog is here.

Speech is silver. Tweet is gold.

PickiHH Tina Pickhardt from Hamburg, who’s into CRM, with her Blog Themenriff

A hashtag does not a tweet make.

bosch who waxes intelligently at Boschblog:

Before the tweet is after the tweet.
And of course after the tweet is also before the tweet and vice versa.

jati – Jan Tissler, a journalist from Berlin who blogs here

The really interesting things happen bewteen the tweets.

Iranerin, an Iranian feminist in Hamburg, who has been blogging since 2004. Read it if your Farsi is good!

A life without twitting is a life without pleasure!

(Amusing little sidenote: I was just about to publish this when I realized that I had gotten my languages mixed up and capitalized the word “blog” throughout – for a momen I was confused … how do you write that in English again?)

I recently interviewed Social Media Evangelist/Consultant and woman-about-town Monica Hamburg about one of her areas of expertise: Crowdsourcing. Check it out here in the YouTube version:

One thing this video doesn’t convey is Monica’s terrific sense of humour. You can find out more about that side of her through her blogsite(s). Contact Monica here.

Bridging Media: Addressing the Challenges - this Saturday, March 29, 2008, 9:45 am – 3pm

Aimed to provide a bridge between the two communities of film/television and interactive/social media, I think this event comes just at the right time. The expertise we have here in Vancouver is remarkable, and the panelists assembled for this event have a lot to share in the short time they have available, so it looks like the whole day will be power-packed.

The tools are here and easier to use than ever, and the panelists are articulate and experienced in the slippery ever-shifting world of web/mobile/social media. Its free, its informative and it can change what you think you might know about social media, and more. Plus there is a door prize: a free pass to nextMEDIA, just before the Banff Television Festival.

Want to know who’ll be there? Go to the registration site and take a peek.

And did I mention that lunch is sponsored? Yes it is a free lunch!

Brainchild of Megan Cole and Erica Hargreave, the event now has a terrific team putting this together, with good will and sharp skills:  Cinci Csere, Monique Trottier and Monica Hamburg. I’m really glad to help out with this event and be in their company!