things I love – Page 2

Tomorrow marks my five-year anniversary as a tweeter. It is, as the Twitter-anniversary-tracking tool @TwBirthday reminded me this morning, the eve of my TwBirthday.

I suppose I should get all retrospective, talk about how few of us there were back then, how it was a nice, close-knit community, blah blah blah. But frankly, I wasn’t even thinking about the personal historic significance of this day from the perspective of my social media use. I rolled out of bed with thoughts of GSD on my mind this Friday. Hell, I didn’t even have a Friday Five in mind.

But then the twitterverse and Domagoj Pavlesic, who developed the TwBirthday tool, handed me this gift. So, on the eve of my five-year anniversary on Twitter, I offer you my five favorite posts on this blog about Twitter.

Twitter: My go-to learning network. This post really captures why I enjoy Twitter so much, and why it’s my social network of choice, far and above all others. And this post isn’t even original. I borrow heavily from the ideas articulated in a post by Nigel Cameron, who puts it much better than I can.
Best Twitter guide ever — another recycled (read: stolen) post, one that lent itself nicely to a Friday Five.
TwitterVerse (for World Poetry Day) — in which I offer this bit of doggerel: Social media’d be less sweet/Were it not for @jack‘s first tweet
Fun with Twitter StreamGraphs. Remember StreamGraphs? I haven’t played with StreamGraphs since, well, probably since soon after posting this entry.
Your tweet was over 140 characters. You’ll have to be more clever. This is the blog post I wish I’d written, by the pretty damned clever Todd Sanders (@tsand).

It was one of those mornings. A lot of interruptions, “urgent” calls for assistance, endless email loops, petty irritations, administrivia — all the stuff that sucks the productivity out of the day. You know those kind of days, right?

So I did what any passive-aggressive, digitally connected marketer would do. I vented my frustration to the twitterverse:

And the twitterverse, in the form of @smith_ron_e, responded:

@smith_ron_e is the Twitter handle of Ron Smith, the training officer for Rolla Fire and Rescue. Ron is also an avid social media fan and, like any good firefighter, always on the alert.

I didn’t think any more about Ron’s tweet. But that afternoon, he showed up at my office with several “junior firefighter” helmets for me and others on our staff.

And that’s how I became a junior firefighter.

Thank you, Ron. You (and Twitter) brought some joy into an otherwise frustrating day. And you also reminded me that the figurative “fires” I deal with from time to time are no match for the life-threatening conflagrations you and your fellow firefighters have to respond to. I tip my junior firefighter’s hat to you.

(Photo by B.A. Rupert.)