I just wrote a post for our company blog contest about the language of social media, and how it’s being perceived.
Okay, really I tied together a bunch of links and quotes by other bloggers because I procrastinated with great skill and toss the post together at the last minute. At least it drove me to finally post on here again.
What really struck me was a Boston Globe column by lexicographer Erin McKean.
McKean talks about twitter, and all it’s associated tw- words (tweet, tweeple, twitterhea). But what caught my attention was this:
...it's not just the twords that make Twitter interesting, it's the character limit, the implicit constraint of being interesting, witty, informative - in short, of being worthy of the limited attention of your followers. The best tweets of Twitter (some of them collected on the occasionally not-safe-for-work site Favrd.com) are more epigrammatic than newsy. Twitter demands writerliness in a way that instant messages, text-messaging, and even blogging don't.
This made me think about how I use my own twitter account. For the most part I retweet company tweets and various links and tweets that interest me. But maybe I should do more. Maybe I should be using these small chunks of text to practice my writing skills.
How much imagery can I fit into 140 characters? How much meaning? I think I may start to throw out the occasional test post, and stop worrying about how useful, or logical, it is to other people.
Cheers
