This site is not live yet but you can get email notification. Assume the convicts won’t be tweeting directly. I’m trying to imagine how this won’t be a bit of a downer.
Tag Archives: Twitter
twitcam
Streaming live video has never been easier. Ironically, the bigger challenge is coming up with something anyone would care to watch. Which I clearly demonstrated this morning at the Coffee Zone.
In the photo above, you can see my BT-1 wireless webcam atop the Rocket Fuel storage tank. I was sitting about 25 feet away and never lost the signal.
Instead of uStream or qik (which works with mobile phones only, as far as I can tell), I used a nifty site called TwitCam. The screenshot below is really all there is to twitcam. And, yes, it’s free. For now. You just log in with your Twitter info and go. TwitCam records as it streams. No option for live stream only, as far as I could determine. I don’t see how video can get much easier than this.
As soon as I can come up with something worth the bandwidth, I’ll take this back to the state capitol.
The art of the tweet
From a thoughtful –and useful– post by Tammy Erickson (@tammyerickson) on how to make Twitter fun for your followers:
- Don’t report banal details. Unless you’re observing a true breaking news event (and note: this term does not include what you or your child ate for lunch), skip it.
- Do interpret your experiences. How do they make you feel? What do they mean to you?
- Do share the oddities you observe. Look for things that seem unusual, out-of-place, surprising.
- Do share things you love – quotes, phrases, descriptions of events that brought joy to your day.
Her conclusion:
“Slow down, enjoy. Listen to the world’s music. Share the best of your experiences, but remember, 140 characters is a unique format — more like poetry or Haiku than news reporting.”
Tweeting from the slammer
I didn’t follow the story of the arrest and conviction of Jeff Smith last year. Here’s a couple of grafs from Wikipedia:
“Jeff Smith was a Democratic member of the Missouri Senate, representing the 4th district, covering the western portion of the City of St. Louis. On August 25, 2009 he pled guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice and resigned his seat. He admitted his involvement, and attempted cover-up, in two federal election law violations committed during his 2004 campaign for Congress.
Each conspiracy count is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines. He resigned effective August 25, 2009 and was sentenced to 1 year and a day of prison. He also was fined $50,000. His lawyer requested Smith be sent to a prison camp in Marion, Illinois.”
This morning I learned from @chadlivengood that Mr. Smith (@jeffmsith7027) is on Twitter. Seems Mr. Smith emails his tweets to a friend who posts for him.
I’m a curious why he has access to email but not Twitter? Anybody help me out with that? Would love to interview someone with the federal prison system who could illucidate.
Are there lots of federal prisoners on Twitter? Is there a list somewhere? What –if anything– does this say about social networking? Do prisoners within the same facility follow each other? Would it be tacky to do @fakejeffsmith feed with humorus tweets. Yes, I’m pretty sure it would.
Monsanto Twitter silence on AP story
I just spotted (in Google Reader) an Associated Press story about Monsanto with the headline: Monsanto seed business role revealed. Here’s the first graph:
ST. LOUIS — Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.’s business practices reveal how the world’s biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.
I was curious what the twitterverse was saying about the story and found an endless stream of links and comments. No surprise there.
I’ve been following one of Monsanto’s Twitter feeds (@monsantoco) for a while and dropped into see how they were responding to the story and the Twitter buzz.
Nothing since Friday morning at 9:10. Hard to draw any conclusions without know more but with almost 3,000 followers, why wouldn’t you use Twitter to “engage in the conversation.” If not now, when? If not Twitter, how? If you’re going to use social media to tell your story, you gotta be there if/when the story gets unpleasant or be conspicuous by your absence.
Depending on the serious of the AP investigation, there are probably lots of emails and phone calls and maybe even a few meetings, to decide if/how/where to respond to the story.
If anyone on Learfield’s senior management team are reading this, take a few minutes at your next meeting to talk about how you would respond to a big, negative story about our company. I really think we could engage quickly without making our lawyers all jittery and nauseous.
Disclosure: Monsanto is an advertiser on at least one of the radio networks owned by the company I work for.
UPDATE: Monsanto did get a response up last night. And linked to it from Twitter. Probably hard for a company that large to move any faster.