Social Media Notes

The blogosphere and new media are another war zone, we have to be relevant there.

-- head of the IDF Press Team, via

This ain't no disco! The Air Force has "Rules of Engagement" for blogging. The mind boggles. It looks as if they copied these from somewhere else, the block on dealing with "Unhappy Customers" is a bit off. They also have a Twitter feed.

Speaking of Twitter, I'm playing with it more lately thanks to a plethora of different intefaces, including TweetDeck, an Emacs interface!, Twitterrific on the iPhone. Nothing like being able to do something useless four different ways! I set up TweetDeck to collect all tweets containing "gaza", which seem to be about 10 a minute or so. Also "supervolcano", so I will be notified quickly if the world comes to an end. Plus I'm following Al Jazeera's Gaza feed and one put out by the Israelis. I still don't see the point. 140 character utterances can't help but be either grunts or at best fingerpointing via a URL to something interesting. People are actually arguing over Gaza in this format, which seems purpose-built to ensure that such conversations are going to be even more unproductive than they usually are.

I've gated this blog onto Twitter via TwitterFeed. This makes me feel peculiar in terms of identity management; the twitter version of mtraven has more connections to my real-world identity than this blog. Oh well, we'll see how it goes.

Of all the Social Media foo stuff I've seen, FriendFeed seems the most interesting and contentful. It brings in actual content items from just past the edge of your own network (ie, stuff friends of friends have posted).

Meanwhile, David Gelertner has proposals for using technology to create "parent-chosen, cloud-resident learning tracks" sounds just right to me, I've been talking about stuff like this for awhile, mostly to myself, but maybe it will happen.