Tweet me a river

May 18, 2008 in Uncategorized

I am being dragged kicking, screaming, and drowning into the mid-19th century.

First a blog. Then a Facebook page. Then Twitter. Then MySpace. Then FriendFeed. Shelfari and things I’ve signed up for and have no idea what they do. More usernames and passwords than I have excuses to eat Ginger Chews.

Whew. Podcasts are on the horizon if I can figure out how to get voice from point A to point B. I can just feel it coming, some intuitive flash where it All Suddenly Makes Sense. Then videos for YouTube (a book trailer is in the works!) and who knows what else. Teleconferences? Teleporting myself in Second Life?

Or perhaps a retreat into Writing Land once more. Likely.

But for the moment, that’s all to say this: there are a lot of things I read in the course of the day that don’t blossom into full essays on 37days–and likely never will–so rather than lose them forever in this fire hydrant rush of water we call information (note: information one step beyond data, but it is not knowledge, much less wisdom), I’m now going to post them on Twitter. If you’d like to follow along, I’m here on Twitter. Or here on Facebook. Or here on MySpace, which I just created and don’t have a clue what to do with, and on which I have one, count ’em, one friend and that’s Tom the moderator who I’ve come to realize appears on every new MySpace page. Isn’t that sad? Imagine my disappointment. So, come, let’s discuss together the epistemelogical blah-blah-blah of sumpin-sumpin. Or not.

Speaking of technology, I’m looking to hire a fantastic, easy-going, funny, smart, intuitive, accessible, design-friendly web person to help me fix, create, link, all these online things–website, blog (my kingdom for someone who can create widgets for me). If you know of anyone I might contact, let me know before you go to sleep tonight. Or tomorrow. Tomorrow is fine, too. But soon, you know? Before I pull out what little hair I have left now that my hairdresser has decided I should look just like Judi Dench.

[image from here]

About Patti Digh

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.

8 comments to " Tweet me a river "


Becky

May 18, 2008 AT 6:27PM

I’m excited to see you at these other places as well. Keep ’em coming!

Rick

May 18, 2008 AT 7:41PM

You know, Patti, there is something to be said for being an early assimilatee. After all, if you resemble Dame Judi today, you completely leap over that entire angst-ridden time of “do I look my age, or even a couple of years younger (or ten??)?” and nestle comfortably into the artist and her art, no mention needing to be made of age, as age and art aren’t part of the same conversation, right?

And, you can accept as compliments those folks who point out how much more invigorated you appear than your twin, the great actress.

Look, I’m doing my best, here! Work with me, Patti…

Shelley

May 18, 2008 AT 9:11PM

Patti, it’s fabulous to have you tweeting… hope you find a way to let the “noise” just roll over you while you pan for the little nuggets.

Some cool do-it-yourself widgetification is over here: http://www.dbachrach.com/showyourself/

I think Myspace is still primarily best for sharing music… I’ve found that for me, it’s often too visually horrible to spend more than a few seconds there! :-D

Facebook is also a little noisy for me… I like LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/butwait) better for the “I want to not have to work too hard at not losing people” thing.

But we all have our own style, and you’ll figure it all out. We can all help each other.

(My twitter FAQ is here: http://butwait.pbwiki.com/Twitter-Newbies-FAQ

… not so much for Patti as for any reader who might be feeling shy-ish about asking Twitter questions…)

Dharmamama

May 18, 2008 AT 10:33PM

Ginger Chews make me wanna kiss somebody.

That’s the one thing in your post I really know anything about.

Debbie

May 19, 2008 AT 8:46PM

Ack! I don’t even know what a ginger chew is but I do love ginger snaps fresh out of the oven! I also am not sure what happened to the comment I just wrote – it disappeared on me – and now is floating in cyperspace. Reading this post made me laugh. I spent two hours last night trying to get an RSS feed on my blog – do I know what it is or its purpose – not really. But everyone else has one ! Of course, I can’t even remove the RSS feed thing because I have no clue how to do that. Then there is my shelfari – why are only two books showing? I hit edit, delete, cancel, ESCAPE but I am stuck with my skimpy bookshelf. What a world we live in – people twittering, ‘my’space reduced to the size of a computer monitor, and I am pretty sure that podcasts were on Star Trek and they were very scary ;0 RSS, HTML, URL .coms – all too much for this ADHD, OCD female who just joined AARP!

Jan

May 20, 2008 AT 2:25AM

This post made me laugh because a Newsweek article about ‘web-blogs’ left me feeling totally at sea and OLD several years ago. And here I am now, lamenting the nanoseconds allotted me for reading my favorite blogs (plus a good sampling of the comments; Dressaday can have upwards of 50) and having very mixed feelings about finding any NEW must-reads: like this one!

All this makes it kind of hard to stay on track with figuring out what I really want to do right now: I know one part of that is write for myself, just to stay sane and save myself by writing, if that makes any sense… And sewing is another, for the same reasons, as you might guess from the Dressaday reference.

I clicked over to Twitter and it made no sense to me at all–whew! I won’t be spending time on that very soon!

Thanks for the giggle! And good luck!

cc

May 23, 2008 AT 3:40AM

All these new-fangled technologies confuse me and I know what’s worse, that I don’t know how to cancel most of the things that I’ve been convinced into signing up for or that I’ll probably sign up for more.

jylene

May 26, 2008 AT 9:24AM

oh my! the comments are even funnier than the essay! i’m very sorry that i won’t be able to join you in any of these ‘places’ as i have no idea what to do when i get to them. i am so far behind on learning to use new technology that i fear i will never catch up to where some people were 10 years ago! but good luck and have a good time!