Busy Doing Nothing

"I am so busy doing nothing that the idea of doing anything -- which as you know always leads to something -- cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything." Jerry Seinfeld


Week 4: Twitter

And then, after you tweet about doing nothing, you check your email, your Facebook page, your blog for reader comments, your RSS Feed, and then tweet again. I'll sit down in the recliner at home with the laptop to just check in "for a minute" and find that much more time has gone by than I thought! I think all of these Web 2.0 sites/tools are lots of fun, but they can also be incredibly deep holes that suck you down into wasting huge amounts of time.

Everyone's tweeting. It's been all over the news this week -- anyone else notice this? We wondered over here at my current branch if it was just us being aware of it, or actually true. Even Congress is on Twitter, as you can learn about in the following entertaining video clip:

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Claire McCaskill's Twittering

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Political Humor

Rap Battle
NASA Name Contest

It is important to keep in mind whenever you post anything to the internet (1.0 or 2.0), it leaves a record. Claire McCaskill learned this the embarrassing way, by providing Stephen Colbert with proof that she really was tweeting further into Obama's speech than she wanted to admit.

Our HCPL Silly Widget blog also has a great clip about Twitter from The Daily Show. Jon Stewart and Samantha Bee make the excellent point that it's a bit difficult to pay attention and fully participate in what you are doing, if you're constantly commenting on it on Twitter or on your blog. Oh, and it's just a bit rude, too.

I joined Twitter, and I think I'll give it the recommended 30 days to see how I like it. So far I've signed up to follow NPR, a couple of favorite authors, SOLINET, and some real people. I haven't gotten far on my profile -- just my picture. Over the weekend I learned that Dave White (author of the most excellent Jackson Donne PI series) enjoyed the UNC /Florida State game, J. D. Rhoades had absolutely nothing to say Saturday morning but had a new blog post on Sunday, it was very busy at the library, and there must not have been any news, as NPR didn't send me anything. Or maybe they only tweet on weekdays?

I don't have a moblie communication device on which to tweet, but many of our library patrons do, I'm sure. I think the library should be using Twitter as another method of getting our message out to users. If everyone's doing it, we should too!