Archive for the 'Twitter' category
The accidental live-twitterer
My Storify of the live-tweets of the raid on Osama’s compound:
April 24, 140Conf top tweeters
I tweeted more than anyone else at the 140 Character Conference in NYC this past week. Not sure exactly what that says about me. 140Conf.
April 6, Facing the Fracture
I attended a fascinating conference at Columbia University, “Facing the Fracture: Media and Economic Understanding.” Besides being a great conversation about how the mainstream media covered the current economic meltdown, I was honored that the Roosevelt Institute cited my Tweets in an e-mail to all conference go-ers.
Dec. 11, #FollowFriday
I met some really incredible people this week at the WebGrrls and Social Media Club of NYC’s holiday parties. People I had great conversations with – talking about everything from Twitter to zombies and the state of the legacy media today.
I started doing a combined #FF post, but realized I met so many cool people at SMC that this post is SMC-centric. I’ll drop in some WebGrrls next week, I promise!
As usual, if you have suggestions of someone to follow, let me know in the comments below.
@tommj: Tommy Jenkins caught me as the SMC party was winding down on Wednesday. She’s the manager of business development and strategic partnerships for Girls in Tech (their Twitter is GITnyc). Soon enough, we were sitting down and talking about GenX and women in tech-related fields and were like old friends. Looking forward to seeing her at the Tech Holiday Party on the 21st.
@iamkhayyam: I was standing outside with Tommy and we were chatting with a couple of folks, so I introduced myself to them. One said, “I’m Khayyam.” To which I responded, “Are you iamkhyyam?” He asked who I was, I told him and he said, “YOU’RE Amy Vernon?” Twitter can be a small world sometimes. Anyhow, he’s in NYC for a while and we talked and talked and are gonna get to hang out at the Mashable holiday party next week. We totally accidentally hung out.
@OzSultan: Khyyam’s partner in crime was Oz Sultan, who runs Esultancy.com – an e-consultancy. I think all you REALLY need to know about him is that his Twitter bio includes the hashtag #Shenanigans. Indeed.
@HowardGr: Howard Greenstein is the man behind NYC’s SMC. I’ve only been to a couple of events so far, but they’ve been fun and very well organized. I love his Twitter bio, too: “A man of mystery and power, whose power is exceeded only by his mystery.” A fan of Men in Black – good taste in movies.
@BradleyJ07631: Brad Jobling’s Twitter moniker just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Brad works for Columbia University doing web strategy. We had a blast talking about how easily one can become overwhelmed in the social sphere and then about the films of Pedro Almodovar, one of my (and Brad’s) favorites.
All are very cool people and lots of fun to talk to – all worth a follow, too.
Dec. 4, #FollowFriday
I’ve actually done #FollowFriday posts on my pinko commie hippie friends before, but there are a couple I was holding off on because they had a big new project forthcoming and I wanted to have the chance to suggest a FollowFriday for that, as well.
Well, now I’m a little behind the times and their new project has already taken off: Simple Earth Media.
First, the men behind it:
• TwilightEarth: Adam Shake is not your typical commie tree hugger. A former military man, he worked for the Department of Homeland Security for years. He’s the founder of the site Twilight Earth, “dedicated to saving the Environment through shared News, Discussion, Advocacy and Activism.” He’s really an interesting guy to sit down and have a convo with.
• SeanDaily: Another earth-lover who’s doesn’t quite meet the stereotypes, Sean Daily is a martial artist. As well as a dad, podcaster and a bunch of other stuff. My favorite part of his Twitter bio is the first word: “Snarkasm.” That all sums him up pretty well. He brought Green Living Ideas and Blue Living Ideas into the equation, among others.
Neither of these gentlemen are vegetarians, which I can appreciate as an avowed carnivore myself. Not that I don’t like vegetarians, but it freaks me out a little bit when I meet people who don’t eat bacon, but that’s another story for another day.
You can follow the whole network at SimplEarthMedia and check out all their different properties, which include Derek Markham‘s Natural Papa (I’ve #FF’d Derek on a previous Friday). Basically, if you have any interest at all in environmental news, you’ll probably want to check them out.
I met Adam and Sean at Blog World and had a nice lunch with them and Jerry James Stone (he who floats above the grass and is vegetarian, as mentioned in a previous #FF). Frankly, it was based mostly on that and having chatted with both online from time to time since that I wanted to #FF them and help boost their new venture. They’re good people, and good people deserve good words.
As usual, please leave your suggestions for people you think I should follow in the comments!
Nov. 27, #FollowFriday
This being Thanksgiving weekend and all, I thought I’d do a Follow Friday this week on people I’m thankful to have met met solely due to Twitter.
I have to admit, I had my doubts about Twitter before I started using it regularly. I was tripped up by the “what are you doing?” prompt and couldn’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would care what I was doing. Hell, I barely cared.
But as I started following interesting people and reading what they had to say and share, I began to realize how useful – and cool – Twitter actually was. There are a few folks I’ve met through Twitter whom I otherwise never would have had the good fortune to run across. I hope I someday get to meet them all in person.
• AYoungOne: Anna Young and I spent months debating when to get an iPhone. Should we wait for the 3GS? Should we just take the plunge? What apps should we try? Despite the fact that she’s a USC Trojan (I still haven’t gotten over the 1996 Rose Bowl, sorry!), I love our chats, even if they have nothing to do with the iPhone. For the record, I waited and got the 3GS, she didn’t.
• Kcecelia: Katherine C. James has accepted my … enjoyment of bacon and run with it. She is as likely to @ me with a photo of something relating to The Other White Meat as she is to discuss her Duwamish roots (an American Indian tribe) in Seattle. Talk about a diverse Twitter stream. She’s lots of fun to talk to and just good people.
• PaulZink: I couldn’t tell you how I got to chatting with Paul Zink; I can’t rightly remember. But I do know that every time I see an @ reply from him, I know it’ll be on target, amusing or both. He has a wry sense of humor and changes his avatar with a frequency that can only be called “often.” He is basically a pinko commie, so don’t follow him if you use the #tcot hashtag a lot.
• MWTapp: Michael Tapp. He used to be @ragebotsdigg, but in a fit of sanity one day decided to change it to his name. I got to chatting with him one night when #HarryPotter was trending. We endeavored to get #HarryPotterHate trending, but apparently we were in an extreme minority. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that neither of us actually hated Harry Potter, either. We just really couldn’t give a crap about the young wizard and his misadventures. We just wanted to get it trending for the heck of it.
That’s it for my Follow Friday this week. There are some other folks I’ve met specifically through Twitter, but I’ve either already #FF’d them previously or I have other connections to them, so I thought I’d end here.
As always, please let me know in the comments section if you think there are other people I should be following. Always interested in finding new, cool people to check out.
Nov. 13, #FollowFriday
I attended an interesting conference at CUNY (that’s City University of New York) this week and got to meet some interesting folks focused on hyperlocal journalism on the web. As someone tweeted during the conference, it was nice to be around a group of journalists (old-school and new) who wanted to find solutions rather than just pointing fingers and complaining about everything.
Trust me, I worked in newsrooms for 20 years and journos LOVE to complain. The fact that there were this many journalists in a room and there were actually people discussing solutions and not just bitching about problems is no small thing.
There were a couple people there who I’ve known for quite some time online but had never met in person, as well as a former colleague and a couple of folks I met for the first time, so I thought I’d do another themed Follow Friday post, “I have met these people IRL.”
• DigiDave: I’ve followed David Cohn online for a year or more now, since around the time he won a Knight Foundation grant for his Spot.Us project – crowdfunded journalism. The project got its first piece published in the New York Times in the past week, no mean feat, and is about ready to launch its second iteration, in Los Angeles (the project started in San Francisco). Dave’s pretty active on lots of social media sites, and our commonality as journalists brought us into the same orbit now and again. He’s really on the forefront of the journalism revolution and is one to watch.
• StandupKid: I’m not sure how I stumbled across Mark Joyella. I think we had some mutual friends and I saw his tweets about the journalism industry, as it implodes around us. But we’ve followed and retweeted each other for months now and it was only a matter of time, I suppose, before we crossed paths in real life, seeing as we’re both in the NYC metro area. So when I saw him tweeting from the CUNY conference, I knew we had to meet up. He’s from the broadcast side of things and is as cynical about the broadcast side of the industry as I am about the newspaper side. He’s always sharing interesting links and observations, definitely worth a look.
• TurkeyMonkey: I still don’t completely know why this is Ted Mann’s online identity, but it definitely is memorable. Ted and I worked together for a while at The Journal News/LoHud.com, before he went off to become Digital Development Director for Gannett New Jersey. One of the few people from the print side of things who got the digital side, he’s unleashed his ideas for hyperlocal journalism on the family of Gannett newspapers in New Jersey. And I now know about SeeClickFix.com because of him.
• SeeClickFix: You know that pothole down the street from you, the one that’s almost destroyed the front axle in your car every day for the past year? If you report it on SeeClickFix, it might actually get fixed. Seriously, you report the problem, people vote on the importance of it being solved – graffiti, potholes, broken signs or traffic signals, whatever – and, apparently, the powers that be pay attention. Cool beans. Met the CEO, Ben Berkowitz, at CUNY.
Oct. 30, #FollowFriday
This week’s post is a continuation of last week’s #FollowFriday post, as I only touched the surface on the friends, new and old, whom I met in person for the first time at Blog World Expo in Vegas a couple of weeks ago.
Last week I concentrated on people I’ve known the longest but never met (with one exception). This week will be a mix of people I’ve known for a little while and brand-new folks. All are cool peeps I’m glad to know now.
@DanielHonigman: Dan Honigman is one of those people who I’ve known for what seems like forEVer. He was on Digg, he helped create Col. Tribune when he was at the Chicago Tribune, he went to my alma mater (the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University), we know lots of the same people between social media and the real world of newspaper journalism (dying a very inelegant death at the moment). We’ve talked on the phone, exchanged IMs, e-mails, discussed career choices. Never met in person until BWE. Funny story – I was live-tweeting, saw a tweet from him, so I DM’d him, asking if he was in the same room as I was. Sure enough, he was, but on the opposite end of a very large room. A couple minutes later, I notice another DM from him, asking if I was wearing a red shirt (I was, but not in the Star Trek sense). I responded affirmatively. Shortly after, another DM, “Turn around.” And there, sitting behind me, was Dan the all-around man. And there you have it.
@Jaybol: Anyone who’s been on Digg for more than five minutes know Jason Lankow, even if they don’t know they know him. Using the moniker Jaybol, Jason has racked up an impressive 1,200+ front page submissions on Digg and has a pretty freaky avatar. Turns out, that’s a Halloween costume from a couple years ago. The real Jason is not scary at all and he’s about to become a daddy! His wife just finished up her first trimester and I gleefully explained how his social life as he knows it is about to come to an end. I think I addicted him to craps for life, however. Ah, well, a few losing rounds should cure him of that.
@MadLid: What a trip to meet Lidija Davis in person. Unfortunately, our stays in Vegas didn’t overlap very long, so we didn’t have much time to hang out. She’s a tech journalist — or, as her Twitter profile says, “information nut.” She holds her own with the boys of The Drill Down very nicely (see last week’s FF for her cohorts, MrBabyMan, MSaleem and 0boy) and is ever so very Australian.
@Joshua_Ritchie: Another one of my craps buddies, I had never met Joshua online, or off, before Blog World. I had run across his work before, however, as he’s a writer for Mint.com and his firm, Column Five Media, does some wicked cool infographics. He and Jaybol stayed up for hours after we finished winning at craps, telling everyone about how much fun it is to play craps. I reminded them that there is a reason it is called a “crapshoot.” Sometimes you win, and sometimes … you don’t.
@Techspian: His username is like thespian, an actor, but has “tech” instead, so it’s like he’s a performer with tech, get it? James Tamplin is part of the team behind Envolve.com, which is a really nifty commenting tool. It’s in private beta, but he gave me and a few of my buddies the first-ever look at it, and it could be the Next Big Thing. Or, at the very least, a very healthy medium-sized thing. Seriously, though, it’s a cool way of interacting on a site. And besides that, he’s a helluva nice guy and didn’t hold it against us when he lost at craps.
@ArjunSingh: You know how every now and again you meet someone who becomes your friend right away? Arjun hung out with us at the Chicago Now party at the Hilton and laughed at all my jokes. I knew I liked him. Before long, we were chatting away as if we’d been fast friends for a long time and he joined a group of us for dinner. Sure, that’s what you’re supposed to do at networking events, I suppose, but how often do you actually WANT to? Anyhow, he’s a do-gooder and is involved in citizen journalism way up in the wilds in Kamloops, British Columbia. (Say Kamloops out loud a few times, it’ll cheer you up, I guarantee it.)
Anyhow, that’s it for this week – five more cool folk from Blog World Expo. I have a few more people I’d like to introduce you to, plus some quick mentions of other folks I’ve #FF’d before, but I got to actually meet at BWE.