A Little Bird Told Me

At some point today, likely promoting this very post, I will tweet my 100^th tweet! Embarking on yet another platform, or more accurately adding another tool to my toolbox, was not something I thought I would be able to juggle easily, but I was wrong. And I'm having fun with it, too!

I embarked upon this new venture in late mid-January, timidly re-tweeting before experimenting with my own creations. My earliest re-tweet on 19 January, my first own creation the next day. Things really got moving for me, though, on 4 February.

This is the day that, in a lighthearted move, I wrote a post speculating about what Cansel Elçin, a Turkish actor I had "liked" on Facebook following a Facebook friend in France's "liking" of him, was communicating in a post to his official Facebook page. You see, his post was in Turkish and the "translate" button under his words didn't end up working very well.

What followed bowled me over. To date, well over 200 people have clicked on the link in my tweet. Most of the readers were actually from Turkey, with a healthy number from Egypt and from most of the countries of the Middle East and environs. I got my first blog comments from Azerbaijan, even helpfully mobilizing to offer me links to his English or French subtitled work as I requested. I found out that his fans are passionate about him not only because of how attractive and what a good actor he is, but also because of his kindness and attention to his fans. In fact, he even responded to my tweet!

I was sold on Twitter.

My next really fun experience was a twitter action that took place in reaction to our federal government's introduction of a bill that would allow police to access internet usage and e-mail records without a warrant (their Protecting Children From Internet Predators Act). No, not the @Vikileaks30 account, subsequently traced to a Liberal Party operative, that was sharing details of the minister's bitter divorce. The fun one was the next day, when the topic #TellVicEverything hit the Twittersphere. The premise? If Vic Toews (the minister) wanted to know about us, we should tell him EVERYTHING, drowning him in information, swamping his own Twitter account with useless messages.

My two favourites were (and I paraphrase, for sure):

@ToewsVic I accidentally erased my browser history.
Can you send me your copy? #TellVicEverything

@ToewsVic I'm thinking of a number between
1 and 10. It's 7. #TellVicEverything

At a point in the afternoon of 16 February the #TellVicEverything topic was the second most frequent in the world ("trending second worldwide") and the messages were coming in in the dozens per 5 seconds. Twitter sale now complete!

So here I start integrating. I have been tweeting to promote my writing here and on PositiveLite.com, and trying to be creative with the medium. If I tweet three times at different times of the day to promote the same post, one of these is now a haiku. I also expect to try a multi-part tweeted sonnet at some point in the near future. I'm just striving to be the interesting tweeter that you would want to follow to see what I might do next.

To help with that, I will incorporate a Twitter feed onto the blog. Having a number of choices of widgets to do this, and not knowing which might work best, this might change over the next couple of weeks as I try different options.

But I'm pretty sure this is here to stay: I'm having too much fun with it to let it go.