This is a picture of Mars’ moons, taken from the surface of Mars by the curiosity rover. Stunning.
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Category: Culture
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I haven’t tweeted in a week
July 11, 2013 is the day I realized Twitter was turning me into a bad internet person.
I watched my Twitter stream flow by all day that day and I couldn’t think of a nice, polite, constructive response to any single one of the tweets flowing by. It’s not that the people I follow are terrible human beings who post mindless drivel. In fact, I’ve recently trimmed my followers down to a short list of quality tweeters.
I realized that I was becoming a snarky asshole. Every moment I spent looking at Twitter was a moment I spent forcing myself not to be a jerk in public.
In my previous post I wrote that I use Twitter as a “real news” source. But to be honest over the past week, I haven’t felt like I’m missing anything.
I doubt I’ll write another 13,367 tweets.
The larger question here is whether this is truly a “me problem” or a Twitter problem.
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Blog First, Tweet Later
WordCamp Winnipeg was absolutely amazing! I’ve literally been waiting my career to see this calibre of event in Winnipeg.
David Pensato gave a really great talk about the future of social blogging. He made the keen observation that, with Facebook, Twitter and the like we are all blogging all the time.
As an experiment, I am going to challenge myself to write a blog post instead of a Facebook status update, or tweet. I’m already seeing some potential issues with this idea, more on that later.
Oh yeah, Peter Chester‘s talk on measuring WordPress performance was one of the best tech talks I’ve seen, ever! Slides are here.
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Twitter Conversation Observation
I started listening to podcasts right around the same time twitter was starting to gain a following among über -nerds. I can’t remember which came first. Doesn’t matter.
At the time, it was not uncommon for an every nerd podcast to be dominated by twitter talk, for weeks on end.
With twitter’s recent “new guideline” announcement, every single nerd podcast I subscribe to is once again dominated by twitter talk.
They’re doing something right.
I’ve been re-watching The X-Files on Netflix. 1997’s season 5 has an abnormally high number of good monster of the week episodes.
Today I watched Episode 11, “Kill Switch,” a story in which rouge AI has sexy-time with Mulder. I was pleasantly surprised (then not surprised at all in hindsight) to find out that the episode was written by William Gibson (and Tom Maddox). Directed by Rob Bowman, director of some of my favourite Star Trek: TNG episodes (like the on where Wesley Crusher falls in love with a girl who turns into a giant monster, literally).
Anyways, check it out if you have the Netflix.
PS. This is what email on TV looked like in 1997. Not sure exactly why they felt the need to make it look worse than reality.