twitter and wikis

I've been a persistent twitterer for some time and my view is that it's a perfect technology for opinionated academics and others. Since signing up in April I have dropped many pearls of wisdom in front of my 44 followers (most of whom are real people, only a few are pornographic spammers) and there is precisely zero evidence that anyone at all has read my postings, let alone improved their minds as a result. Very similar to lecturing a class hahaha!

Wikipedia on the other hand is a different story. As a marketer I love it - people actually go there seeking information, thus driving further development of the content. And because it is well known that there is minimal paid gatekeeping, readers treat the content with caution. (At least, they should.) I find it a brilliant source of references, ideas to check out. An electronic substitute for one of the things I value the most about my job, the availability of intelligent, informed colleagues who help to guide my thinking. And for students it is a superb introduction to intelligent use of the internet; great ideas, to be checked out further and treated with caution.

So twitter is a means for the self-indulgent and self-important to publish their views and think they are making a difference, but actually just pleasing themselves - analogous to public transport systems which focus on timetables not passenger satisfaction, or suffering incontinence while wearing a brown suit. Wikipedia and wikis generally are the ultimate in information democracy.

I like this post. I think it's my best so far.

The power of Twitter

Interesting story here. Essentially UK newspapers were unable to report a story ebcause of legal action which seems rather heavy-handed, the editor Tweeted his frustration and, because teh legal system has not caught up with the 21st century (some might say teh 20th!) others who knew what the story was about but were not subject to the legal injunction were able to publicise teh story. (Which is now known to more people than it would have been if not injuncted in teh first place.)

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/a-simple-twitter-brings-down-the-mighty-cone-of-silence-20091015-gz2m.html

and here is the story behind it - an oil company being naughty apparently

http://bit.ly/AITWU

I'm not sure about all this

So this morning I reluctantly started to subscribe to an RSS feed, as required by "23 things". Reluctantly, because I already get far too much electronic communication and actually need to reduce, not increase the amount of time I spend dealing with it. I also don't understand how this is better than other means of communication, and get grumpy at the technologist's sales spiel "try it, you'll like it, lots of other people do". This seems to work OK for drug dealers but I normally need a better value proposition to invest my scarce time. Wikipedia is not helpful, it just contains pages and pages of coding and technical talk, nothing on how this technology can actually be useful to me.

And then when I clicked to start the subscribe process (to brandchannel) this comprehensively froze my computer, and it took me nearly 10 minutes to get it going again. Frankly I get more than enough clumsy, computer-freezing technology of dubious value from the university's ITS department and don't need to add to it. Can anyone tell me what value RSS is when I can get updates from businesses I'm interested in on Twitter, a much simpler technology which I can access easily when I want to? What regularly changing web content is of such professional use to someone like me that I need to know about it instantly, interrupting my other work?