Ways I use Twitter #1

This morning I am in a cafe where I will begin to work after reading the paper (the physical paper paper that I picked up by the dirty dishes bin) and browsing my Twitter feed for stories that interest me.

Here's the harvest of about five minutes of scrolling back in my Timeline, in the order  I clicked on links to open these stories up to read later, after I've been good and brought my Inbox to zero. The mix is both trivial and serious.

I read Alan Sepinwall's reviews of TV shows because he is a big Community fan, and a good TV writer; he is reviewing a new show called Bent. Should I watch it?.

One of my favorite dancers, Harry Shum Jr, is on the cover of Bello magazine (he's also on Glee, but I like him for his work with the online series, Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. He's too young for me, but my high-school self would have been madly in love with his fine self.

DanceSpirit magazine has an article on Bob Fosse's choreography:
"It’s crucial that you develop an ability to control your movement while still maintaining a strong sense of intention." LOL at these captions on his "Mexican Breakfast", the dance that inspired Beyonce's choreo for "Single Ladies." She has always acknowledged this influence, by the way.
Fosse dancing with Gwen Verdon:

RuPaul's Drag Race is one of our new favorite shows! we watched Season 2 on Netflix, and are breathlessly awaiting an explanation of WHY Willam was unexpectedly kick off the show this week for "breaking the rules." DRAMS! Our S2 favorite Pandora Boxx is doing show recaps, yay!

For more serious visual culture blogging, I usual find something interesting on The Sociological Cinema blog: today it's a story on the gender policing of young boys.

I want to watch this documentary on indigneous people in Argentina, Runa Kuti. The filmmakers have generously made it available to watch online, and I'm going to order a copy for our library.

The President of the University of Minnesota drew my attention to the existence of SERU, the Student Experience at the Research University survey, which he is promoting on Twitter (and of course through other means) to get of all undergraduate students to provide insights for both administrators and reseachers. I had never heard of it before; now I plan to check out some of the data from past surveys.

PBS announces its line-up of documentaries in its POV series. There are quite a few of interest from or about Latin America, that might end up in my teaching portfolio. I've already seen the mGraniagnificent film Nostalgia por la luz, and I'm excited to see Granito, a film I missed in a recent film festival, about bringing the Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt to justice.

In Digital Humanities news, the WSJ has story about how the Folger Shakespeare Library is becoming a model of how to combined the traditional archive with digital access and outreach in an article about "Shakespeare in the digital Age.

Why has the Pentagon tried to scrub the web of information about the man accused of massacring Afghan civilians in their beds? His family has had to be relocated for their protection. They are also his victims.

Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates digs deeper into how the Florida "Stand Your Ground law," already a bad idea in and of itself,  has been further perverted in its application by the courts  to mean "the last man standing is right:"Your side is irrelevant if you are dead." Following up, opponents of the law predicted how it could be used to justify racially-motivated killings like that of Trayvon Martin when it was passed.

OK, to work!

Dan Sinker aka "@MayorEmanuel"

pdf2011 on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Dan Sinker, the author/creator of @MayorEmanuel (the fake Twitter account of then-mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel), talks about his experience, which started as a way to entertain friends and later became a Twitter novella.
He was one of the speakers at the Personal Democracy Forum, where many other fascinating talks were delivered. I appreciate their availability online to those of us who can't attend.

Don't spit on the twit!

I haven't watched the new Conan O'Brian show yet, but this bit on Twitter had me laughing hard, thinking of a blog buddy who recently went off on Twitter as inane and annoying. This is for you, ProfaZero!

How Twitter helps me filter and connect

I like this picture of the Ebro River rising in Zaragoza this winter, near the Basílica del Pilar.
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There is so much information to manage: what's the best way to do it? as usual, the answer is a question of individual needs and style. I found that Facebook overloaded me with information updates I didn't want, so I deleted my account, but other friends are delighted with how it helps them keep in touch with people.

For following blogs or news outlets, I have experimented with using RSS feeds in a number of ways: as part of the My Blogs Lists over on the right of this sight, on my iGoogle page, through Bloglines, on my browser toolbar. But I often feel as if I'm drowning in numbers if I look at a feed agregator; it triggers the somewhat obsessive-compulsive reader in me in a way that feels unpleasant.

I am finding that Twitter is working well for me as a kind of feed + filter, and so has enhanced my ability to pick up on stories that interest me. I'm following some really funny and generous people, who post tweets with links to stories, songs, images, or websites that entertain or teach me something new. I'm also trying to limit the number of tweeters I'm following so I'm not overdoing it. A tweet can be an end in itself, but also a door opening up on a blog post or a news story that leads me in unexpected and rewarding directions.

Here's a sampling of what I found today through tweets from people I'm following. I'm leaving out the personal greetings, jokes and academic musings, which deserve a separate post. I could have found some of these through an RSS feed to each of the relevant blogs, but the Twitter feed allows me to respond directly as well as leave comments on the news stories (which I do) or the posts.

via @VisitLakeStreet, a neighborhood news feed, I discovered the brand new "Living Green Twin Cities" website went live this week-looks great, and connects me to local events and writers about sustainability.

via @blogdiva and @nezalicious (aka Liza Sabater of Culture Kitchen and Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican) Nancy Pelosi decides to use her powers for good, as reported in the SF Chronicle: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined hundreds of families Saturday evening at a church in San Francisco's Mission District demanding an end to the immigration raids and deportations that separate parents from children across the United States." As usual, I'll be following the extended stories on immigration politics at Nezua's site The Unapologetic Mexican. boohoo, blogdiva's server is down, but I'll keep looking for her tweets.

via @kottkedotorg and @sashafrerejones, my favorite mashup of the week: kutiman has taken tracks from YouTube videos and created some Thru-You jukebox that is awesome, whether you watch it or just listen to it in the backround, as I'm doing now.

by way of @torresburiel in Zaragoza, I found a post on International Women's day, which is today, March 8, on a blog called marilink: "ninguna lista de chicas geek". Although he highlighted the part of her post that seemed to suggest that we don't need special days (she says she reads people for the quality of what they say, not because of gender), she also points out why we still need to think about women's place in the world and why we still need an International Women's Day. A link at her post (to an article posted at the Women's Media Center) pointed out that women are now half of all bloggers, but that the media still doesn't make this visible.

@UMN News links to a profile of a colleague in Anthropology whose book on the ethnography of Wall Street trades has just been published. I've heard her talk about her research, and I'm going to buy her book, because it's the inside scoop on the culture of the traders that has been a major contributing factor to this iteration of the boom/bust cycle. I have noticed that I get much more news about the U through my Twitter account than through other sources, and I work there. I went to the U's Media pages and discovered that they do not have a link or widget allowing readers to know they are using Twitter, so I wrote and suggested that they add that feature. Let's see if they respond.

@jojeda --Julio Ojeda-Zapata is a reporter for the Pioneer Press who covers all kinds of tech stuff at YourTechWeblog. He has a round-up of the PiPress coverage of Amazon's new ebook reader Kindle. I was interested in checking out this new device, an he does an excellent pro/con story. Then I started following his links to other bloggers and got pleasantly distracted. I love serendipity!

Update: edited for spelling because I'm sloppy.

Bitter Tweeter

This video was (accidentally?) sent out by the U of MN Twitter in a tweet announcing something about stem cell research.
Heh heh.

Lizard People FTW!

The recount for the Minnesota Senate seat is underway. MPR posted some images of the ballots about which decisions are to be made, and readers got to weigh in with their opinions. A popular image is of the ballot marked "Lizard People." Instead of filling in the bubble, as you can see here, some people drew circles, made checks, underlined, or...just did something else like write "Lizard People" wherever you could enter a write-in candidate. Because Minnesota law decrees that it is the duty of the recounters to submit all ambiguous (or challenged) ballots to the scrutiny of the Canvasing Board for final determination, someone will have to decide if this ballot from Beltrami county should be counted for Al Franken, or "Lizard People." So far (as of Friday Nov 21 at 4:24 PM) the "MPR voters" have indicated their desire that this vote should count for Franken, but 9% (a total of 9392 our of 110098) this this ballot should go to "Lizard People."

And thus, says Paul Schmelzer, a new internet meme is born!

There is now a Twitter account for fakelizardpeople. If, after the recount is over, the votes are tied, the race will be decided by a coin toss.



Just for fun, here is the cutest lizard video I've seen, recently posted at Cute Overload