Greetings! I've been taking a break from posting for awhile. Is it just me, or do all interesting, thought-provoking, and blog-post-worthy ideas ONLY EVER occur during work hours, when I am at the office and feel like blogging is probably not good for billable hours? Sometimes I write things down on sticky-notes, to remind myself later on of my epic ideas. But by the time I get home, I no longer care enough to drag myself out of my tired stupor to actually post anything. Also, the sticky-notes usually say really cryptic things like "BOOKS" or "Atwood Twilight".
In any case, I've been more of an internet lurker lately than a participant. But I am proud to say that I have finally made my first official contribution to my friend Shetu's online mag, Doll Magazine. The mag started after we finished journalism school and started looking around for something real to do with our lives, and I have to say that Shetu - like so many of my other illustrious and successful former classmates - has done something very real and impressive.
Under the Blog section, Doll has started a weekly feature of Twitter picks, wherein contributors who are also Twitter users pick their top five followees and explain what's so rad about them. Doll being what it is - a publication aimed at young liberal-minded women - and me being what I am, it wasn't hard to find contenders on my Twitter feed whose ethos would resonate well with readers. In fact, the hardest part was narrowing them down to five. But I did. And you can see my picks, and justifications, in last week's post.
It turned into a weirdly interesting experiment for me. I ended up re-evaluating half of the people I follow, especially those I started following soon after creating my Twitter account and had no idea what I was looking to get from the experience. I also noticed that I have surprisingly few news-based feeds, most likely because I already have a complex RSS system set up in my capacity as media-monitoring guru at work, so I've already seen the major outlets' stories.
But mostly, I realized what I'm mainly looking for from Twitter is amusement: the feeds I am most drawn to are those which are clever enough to say something distinct in 140 characters or less, without resorting to inane abbreviations or web-lingo. I guess it's my language-junkie side peeking through again, but there are people who can do amazing things with a Tweet. The other factor here is that I don't have a smartphone, therefore I don't check Twitter obsessively like every Crackberry-head I see wandering around the city. So it wouldn't be a practical way for me to actually follow online news and pop culture's daily obsessions. And as a friend of mine said the other day, it's just one more thing you have to update regularly, on top of Facebook and the rest of it.
Speaking of regular updates, I'm toying with the idea of live-blogging the Emmy awards this Sunday night, after being told that my Oscars live-blog was entertaining. The jury's still out on this one.
3 comments:
liveblogs of award events can be hilarious! I might not watch and read at the same time, but I'd read later!!
I don't usually read other liveblogs while watching something either... it's too distracting. But they're great to read later on, especially if you couldn't catch the live show.
do it! NPH is hosting and this will be LEGEN--wait for it--dary!!!
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