Oy - You couldn't list the URL?

When seeing advertisements in papers, magazines, and elsewhere, a seemingly common convention is to include a Twitter, Facebook, and perhaps another one or two logos. This is nice for the marketing folks to let us know that they have a social media presence, but how do we get there? Granted, if you have a laptop or desktop, it's not too hard to search around, but it's kind of annoying and a lot of tapping to search around to find the advertised on Twitter. Even if you don't have the space to include a QR code or Microsoft Tag to link to your social media pages, please at least include the name - such as including the Twitter handle next to the Twitter logo.
As far as I know, there may already be other postings on this very same topic, but I wanted to add to the voices pushing for more than just little icons indicating your social media existence....

Hillel & Twitter Follow-Up

Apropos of my post on Jewlicious last week regarding Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life not operating a solid Twitter account, I asked around and about why Hillel's Twitter account was so lacking. The answer I basically got from having discussed it was that the resources just aren't there, as opposed to Hillel:FJCL just not recognizing either the significance of social media or understanding how Twitter can factor into their PR. In better times, the department that handled these matters had a few more staffers, but, as with the rest of the economy and many other non-profits, staffers are on the short side of the budget (especially for social media). So, even though I got many people agreeing with my online as well as at the conference, but it doesn't seem like this will change Hillel's social media strategy on account of the economy (unless a donor out there decides that it's important (c'mon, you know you're out there - Hillel is a 501(c)3...)).
As an aside, during the last night of the conference (held at the awesomest museum), there was a presentation held in recognition of some of the Hillel professionals for having served for such a long time. For a visual, they put up a screen behind the speakers with a Twitter feed for Hillel Institute. But here's what's peculiar, although there exists a Twitter feed for HI, it only includes one post. Which means, instead of actually inputting and actually tweeting, they created a computer simulation of the HI account tweeting about such and such person (pictured above).
I don't know whether that indicates that they get Twitter, in that they are using it in a presentation, or the opposite: that they get that it's hip, but don't know how to use it. Either way, it was still strange and I think that they haven't realized how they can harness Twitter to work for them yet.
While talking this over with someone afterwards, I realized they should incorporate what they are doing, much like what goes on in some classrooms and at other conferences: which is to put up a screen with a live feed of a certain Twitter hashtag that is germane to the discussion. This allows not only a fuller conversation to take place (because there are more people contributing to the conversation than simply the people speaking in the room), but the speaker(s) can reference some discussion points taking place in the Twitter hashtag feed. Moreover, not only does the conversation in the room become more robust, but also people not in the room can participate or at least be aware of the discussion underway.
Hopefully, Hillel will catch up soon....

JTwitterverse Coming of Age

With this morning's unveiling of JTA's top 100 Most Influential Jewish Twitterers (props to Adam Soclof for putting it together), it seems like the Jewish presence in the Twitterverse is not only here, but also properly getting recognition. To me, it seems that there is more going on Jewishly in the Twitterverse than a couple of months ago when Jane Herman posted about Jewish Twitterers. As such, it's about time that we properly affix the appellation "JTwitterverse" (unless people would rather the less cumbersome "Jwitterverse"), much similar to Steven I. Weiss' neologistic success, the "JBlogosphere".
On another Twitter note [related to the Jwitterverse], the specific genre of Torah Twitterers must also be acknowledged (to some degree, apropos of the recent CrossCurrents posting (primarily: "There is one aspect of Jewish singularity about which all agree. The Torah belongs to the Jewish people. No other people has ever viewed its multitude of commandments as binding on them.")). Although I had posted over a month ago about Torah on Twitter, there have been some developments in this matter. Foremost interestingly amongst them is the twagregator, TorahTweets.org, which collects all tweets with #Torah in it. The other advancement is simply the matter of more people joining Twitter (generally, but also Jewishly) and, amongst them, tweeting about Torah (may they increase).
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Seperately on the topic of Twittering Torah (and following up my "Trying to Twitter Torah" post), my Twittering Torah in my Birkas HaHamah series only went for a few days before it got derailed (by busyness with schoolwork and having my first child born). It was interesting and I would like to attempt it again at the right time - it just takes time to look stuff up.
The one interesting development that emerged from that attempt occurred unexpectedly: I came up with a hashtag. Yup, my very first hashtag I not only created, but also got to catch on a little. I created #BhH (acronym for Birkas haHamah) for my series, but I realized that other people would be interested in all Birkas HaHamah tweets be able to be easily located, thus #BhH was created.

Just So You Know As Soon As Possible When Simchas Happen: OnlySimchas on Twitter

While checking for myself on Addictomatic, I noticed that the most recent tweet on Twitter about me was by OnlySimchas. I hadn't even known OnlySimchas was on Twitter (according to When Did You Join Twitter?, it joined on 5 June 2008). Alas, it is. Apparently, the first tweet was on 15 March and started announcing simchas on 24 March. So, for those interested, you can follow OnlySimchas via Twitter. I'm not - I'm sticking with following its RSS feed (btw, for those on FutureSimchas, they do have separate feeds for men's profiles and for women's profiles).

Twitter Teshuvot

(My Torah on Twitter post was included in this week's Haveil Havalim (#210).)

There are several websites already online that feature ask a rabbi feature (Ask Moses, Chabad, Aish's Ask The Rabbi, Beit-El Yeshiva Center, and even Reform Judaism are just some sites that have this feature).
The step beyond this is for SMS ask-the-rabbi, which Rabbi Shlomo Aviner has taken up, with his ongoing Shut SMS series (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10a, #10b, #11a, #11b, #12), about which Rabbi Adam Mintz discussed a similar thing of Rav Aviner's couple of years ago (although not SMS Shut, per se) in his teshuvot series of lectures.
Over this past weekend, Dani Klein and I were talking about the opening there is on Twitter for an ask the rabbi account (he actually mentioned this online on Wednesday) and although I'm not sure I would be up for such an idea, myself, I do think it's a good idea. In fact, I'm surprised Chabad is not already on to this yet (although there is @ChabadOrgNews and @Lubavitch, but they are not doing question and answers). Anyways, this is an as of yet unexplored niche and it will be interesting to see what will become of it.

Trying to Twitter Torah

Apropos of my recent posting on Torah on Twitter, I figured I will give it a go for a limited time, especially since there are various reasons to do so. I figured also that it would be a good experience for me to try my hand at brief Torah thoughts (no rabbi is good at this).
While I am still thinking about how best to do this task, I am planning on doing one tweet per day on the topic of ברכת החמה (the blessing over the sun (not the sun) (more info)) - if it goes well, great; if not, also fine. Either way, it's a specific short amount of time.
While I am on the topic, there was a posting today entitled "A Preliminary Bibliography of the Recent Works on Birkat ha-Chamah" (give it kavod here (like I did)), which makes for an interesting juxtaposition - the posting there speaks of many books written on this blessing said every 28 years, some of which are hundreds of pages long. On the other hand, Twitter limits messages to 140 characters long. Some of those books were way over 140 pages! Anyways, shabbat shalom and I look forward to embarking on this new opportunity next week.

Torah on Twitter

On Monday, Rabbi Irwin Kula came to speak at our school and brought up the issue of tweeting Torah, suggesting that it will likely elicit in people one of two responses: either one of nauseousness or of opportunity (mine was the latter). (Granted, not many of my fellow YCTers are on Twitter, and, after passing around Rabbi Kula's tweet about it, there was some backlash against Twitter (not too different from this amusing video), although Twitter has not been a rabbi magnet [yet], so it's not confined to my school.) My first thought was that although there is some Torah on Twitter, most, if not all of it, is simply a providing of links to Torah elsewhere. For instance, @RabbiGreenberg tweets self-containted Torah Tweets, as well as, to some extent, @TorahTweets and @TorahToday. However, most of the Torah Twittering is not self-contained, such as @WebYeshiva, @YUTorah, @JewLearn, @JewishTweets, and @JewItYourself. While this is, to some degree, helpful, it is not confined to Twitter. For me, who gets a lot of tweets to my phone with URLs, if I'm actually interested in checking out the content of the referred link, I can forward that tweet to my email, where I can check it later (unless I am using my computer at that moment, then I can just open up the Twitter page and go from there (meta-comment: looking back in a few years, how outdated/obsolete will this aforementioned be?)). However, what I believe Rabbi Kula was suggesting was a challenge for more divrei Torah (or, what I'm thinking is more manageable, divrei halakhah) on Twitter, itself (without reference for external links). With divrei halakhah, for instance, a very manageable possibility is to do a daily devar halakhah, perhaps for people to stick with a given topic for awhile or to topically do more consistently.
Oh well, we'll see if this is taken up at all. (I held off the entire post about rabbis struggling to limit themselves time-wise, even to 140 seconds, let alone 140 characters, phew.)

"Twouble with Twitters" [video]

This following video is HILARIOUS! (Yes, I just dugg it.) It's about Twitter (of which I am a member):

Apparently, I'm Not the only One not Blogging as Much - Aargh, Twitter

Esther recently linked, via a tweet, a blog posting of hers to an article posted earlier this week that says blogging's no longer what it once was. Well, yes. For me, getting married definitely has diminished my blogging, although I've tried to still do it. However, Paul Boutin, who wrote the aforementioned article, mentions that Twitter has had an adverse affect on blogging. Before I had read the article, I have also noticed that my blogging has not been as much since I started using Twitter. Somehow, this came up in the course of conversation over the holiday with Susanne, who mentioned that her blogging has also been lessened on account of her using Twitter. We agreed that you can easily tweet various ideas you have instead of blogging about them and lo and behold, they're on the Internet. Moreover, one need not sit down at a computer and type out one's thoughts in an organized and lengthy fashion when one can, while waiting for the train or just walking, type out a tweet.
Of course, I've been hearing at various yom tov and shabbat meals curious people inquiring about Twitter and I generally say that it's micro-blogging or SMS blogging. Either way, it's similar but kind of different from blogging. While most people still don't particularly get it, that's probably fine - it's probably not for everybody (part of this is that, according to recent findings that "people who regularly upload material to the internet are just attention seekers" - so some people are and some people aren't (and the others read that material)). My wife, for one, is not particularly into it. Also, a week ago, Shira checked my Twittering out and was not a fan:

I honestly don't care if you just went to the gym/dropped your kids off at school/are headed for Starbucks/whatever. Do we really need to know what our friends and relatives are doing every minute of every day?

She then adds that Twitter

strikes me as the functional equivalent of submitting to a personal GPS tracking system, and is way too reminiscent of "Big Brother Is Watching You" for my taste. Why on earth would anyone do this voluntarily?
I just don't get it.

Back last month in the New York Times, Clive Thompson wrote in a lengthy article ("Brave New World of Digital Intimacy") that

For many people — particularly anyone over the age of 30 — the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world. Twitter, in particular, has been the subject of nearly relentless scorn since it went online. “Who really cares what I am doing, every hour of the day?” wondered Alex Beam, a Boston Globe columnist, in an essay about Twitter last month. “Even I don’t care.”

He then writes that "Indeed, many of the people I interviewed, who are among the most avid users of these 'awareness' tools, admit that at first they couldn’t figure out why anybody would want to do this." He goes on to write that

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

I certainly found Thompson's writing very interesting and hopefully helpful to those who want to understand the whole Twitter thing.
Anyways, back to the original article ("Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004") written by Mr. Boutin. In it, he writes that

Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. ... It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Granted, a lot of this is true - I've certainly had my share of hecklers on the comments threads here, but that's mostly gone down. He's also right about the Twitter part (as mentioned previously in this posting) and Facebook (I'm not quite sure how Flickr figures into it, aside from sharing pictures). However, I've found blogging to have its uses and I don't mind that it's not "the bright idea" it used to be. Similarly, he writes that "text-based Web sites aren't where the buzz is anymore", although I don't need to be that cool to be a part of the buzz. Boutin goes on to point an interesting point out:

The reason blogs took off is that they made publishing easy for non-techies. Part of that simplicity was a lack of support for pictures, audio, and videoclips. At the time, multimedia content was too hard to upload, too unlikely to play back, and too hungry for bandwidth.
Social multimedia sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook have since made publishing pics and video as easy as typing text.

To this point, this may work well in the larger context, although not necessarily for me. (By the way, for those interested, the State of the Blogosphere 2008 report came out last month.)
However, on this topic, a year or so ago, one person who followed/follows the Jblogosphere said that it had "jumped the shark" at some point. What point that was is unclear, although it was definitely a year or two ago. Oh well, there are still Jbloggers out there, albeit not with the same interest there once was.
So, those are some of my thoughts on blogging nowadays and Twitter.