Sunday, 6. September 2009, 07:50:27
I have now been on Twitter for a month - you know the microblogging vehicle for self-promotion babble talk. Apart from promoting my own stuff, I have also been listening in, and so doing learned new tricks and found my way to interesting links through the tweeted tips.
A few days ago Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous posted about “
Stuff I linked to on Twitter last week”, where he wondered if it would be worth posting a weekly summary of his tweets, a.o with his links to stories and web resources that he found interesting. I shall try to take up some of his ideas with due consideration to some of the comments to his posts.
A tweet on Twitter is limited to 140 characters. One of the remedies to keep a post short is shortened URL’s (bit.ly) - for instance
http://my.opera.com/nielsol/blog/2009/08/21/plastics-in-oceans-decompose-but-release-hazardous-chemicals may be shortened to
http://bit.ly/Xg2v1 . It looks smart enough, but this way, you cannot see where the link is taking you.
In Firefox you can use an add-on called
bit.ly Preview.
“With the bit.ly Preview Plugin for Firefox, whenever you hover over a bit.ly URL on any web page, we display a tooltip showing the Page Title, Long URL, and any Click Data we have about the page the URL links to. If you hover over another short URL, http://tinyurl.com/5qhkwo, for example, we show the Page Title and Long URL for these links as well. Plus, we check to see if anyone made a bit.ly link pointing to the same place, and, if so, we show how many clicks it has received. All this info should help you decide if a link is worth checking out or not.”
Example:
At first I used
twitterfeed to feed my blog to Twitter. Twitterfeed shortens your URL’s. I now let my .opera do the feeding, showing the original URL’s, in the hope that this is more transparent.
According to one of the comments cross linking (link love) is a great community building exercise not done enough.
Preliminary conclusion: I shall keep the box with my latest tweet on my welcome post. I know that I am not sufficiently organised to post a particular post - like “Sunday Tweets” or something like that - on a regular basis, but I might now and then post something like what you see below. I won’t promise, but I do find it a nice idea.
Seen on Twitter:
- “I believe that no one should die because they cannot afford health care, and nobody should go broke because they get sick.”
My tweeted links:
Love Links:
WIDGETIZE