The Iranian government (or its supporters) are starting to use Twitter to spread disinformation. ABC News reports on a Twitter user who is retweeting items from their correspondent that he didn’t write. Marc Ambinder’s suggestion that people think like a CIA analyst is worth remembering.
As I’m sure you already know, I’ve created the rc3dotorg Twitter account so that I can let people on Twitter know when I’ve published something. One unfortunate side effect has been that it has complicated my workflow when I write new posts.
Normally I just compose the post in MarsEdit and hit the publish button. I’m sure the process could be greatly simplified, but for two things that complicate the process. The first is that I like to use short URLs that I furnish myself, and the second is that I like to compose the tweets by hand.
I publish this blog using WordPress, and I use the le petite url plugin to create short links. Most of the time I publish updates to Twitter using Tweetie.
So here’s my workflow these days:
The main inconvenience is opening WordPress in the browser once I’ve already gone to the trouble to write the post somewhere else. What I need is a tool that will allow me to access the internally generated short URL and compose a Tweet from MarsEdit that can be published whenever the blog post itself is published.
It’s looking like I’m going to need to write my own WordPress plugin to do exactly what I want. There are a ton of Twitter plugins, I think I’ll just have to find the right one and adapt it to my needs.
More later.
Over the past few months, we’ve seen a stamped of big media figures making their way onto Twitter. During the campaign we had folks like Ana Marie Cox and Slate’s John Dickerson. These days, we have everybody.
I wanted to call out the reporter who I think does the best job of anyone using when it comes to using Twitter — Mark Knoller, the White House correspondent for CBS Radio. If you ever wanted to know what life is like for a White House correspondent, or you want to keep up with what the President is up to on a daily basis, Mark Knoller is your guy.
His Tweets are well written, often funny, and almost universally informative. If you’re interested in politics at all, you should start following him immediately. When people protest that they don’t see the value in Twitter, Knoller should be part of the explanation of why they’re wrong.
Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill on why she tweets:
Second, as his bar graph showed, I tweet an average of 4 to 5 times a day. This has become a welcome discipline for me in Washington. As I am walking to a hearing, or riding the tram over for a vote, I think of what I want to tell the folks at home about my work or life. This, I believe, is a fairly decent way to stay connected. After all, I’m in Washington to work for them and this process reminds me of it several times a day.
The anti-Twitter backlash is stupid, but at least it has given people who enjoy or find value in Twitter a good reason to write smart things about why it’s stupid.
Alex Payne on online technical debate:
In practice, the conversations that are most widely heard in the tech community are full of inaccuracies, manufactured drama, ignorance, and unbridled opinion. In discussing these Internet-spanning debates with non-technical friends, comparisons to Hollywood tabloids come first to mind. It’s a time sink for an industry that should be a shining example of how to use the newest of media for constructive debate.
Tim Bray weighs in citing Sturgeon’s Law — 90% of everything is crap, which works both ways. Yeah, most everything is crap, but a bigger pie leads to more crap, but more non-crap too. A rising tide lifts all boats.
The “Dalai Lama” (aka @ohhdl) on Twitter was a fake. The account has been suspended.
A few links from the past few days.
I linked to Tim Bray’s argument that Twitter is not a safe place to keep your words. Here’s the other side: James Governor says Twitter is the new London. I find myself agreeing with both arguments.
Tim Bray asks whether publishing on Twitter is a good long term strategy. The network effect of writing on Twitter is incredibly powerful, you toss your words out there for a bunch of people to read, and the responses they provide are incredibly valuable. I love being involved in a running conversation with a bunch of interesting people all day every day. At the same time, my Twitter posts would in some way constitute a journal of what I’m up to on a day to day basis. I’d sure like to feel confident that they’re not going anywhere. I’m not terribly concerned about it right now, but it bears watching.
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Tweetbacks installed
I’ve installed the Tweetbacks plugin to try to capture tweets about blog posts as comments. We’ll see how it works out.