Graffiti as art - and more
Turkey day done

Tweet Timesuck

A good article from Lisan Jutras in her new G&M column. This one is on how it's the links that will kill your day. Us tweeters don't all just post what we had for lunch or that there's a pretty moon out tonight - some also post links to interesting articles or videos or photos we have come across. Much of it fascinating to follow, but where - and how - does one stop. Too many people with too many sparkely things.

I do follow a much smaller group on Twitter than on Facebook. My Facebook friends are a large group I connect to mainly for links to arts and culture in Ottawa, not just status but events and issues and some messaging back and forth. And I check in there maybe daily. On Twitter, it's a smaller group, that I check with several times a day, a group that consistently comment on things that interest me. And they are ones that do that more than once a week, but not every 5 minutes. If it's that often an update, they can bury the other tweets. And, as I'd said, since that comment is limited by the 140 characters on there, usually there is also a link to elsewhere that expands on the idea, that in turn links to other articles and sites - a siren call that often sucks me into a hypnotic vortex.

This new fangled  World Wide Web and global connectivity is likely "a good thing", but our culture now suffers from an information overload. There's way more that's happening in the world, and being reported on, than we can ever hope to follow.  As a solution, in addition to using a favorite newspaper or radio commentator to aggregate and filter and collect information for us, we also rely on bloggers, and RSS feeds, and Facebook friends, and now Twitter tweets. I wrote a few months ago on how I use these various social networks and sources, but still wonder if there is a way to manage them, to aggregate the aggregators? Do I set up a system of Google Alerts and feeds and status pop-ups? Or do I just install a coin box on the side of my PC - like a British gas meter - and when it times out I walk away?

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