Difference Engines now has a twitter @difference_engs. We’ll be posting updates on what is being posted here there. I don’t know how many of you have feed readers you use regularly. I don’t anymore. For y’all, the twitter can be a way to keep up.
To us writing here, the twitter followers will give us a sense that we’re writing to specific people, rather than some generic imagined public. Writing to a generic public was never the point. We never try to make this blog viral or famous. At the “Future of Difference Engines,” some longstanding contributors compared it to an awesome carpool where you can unload about the day, analyze something weird or interesting, and find companionship in shared critical exchange.
Writing into WordPress can feel like blogging into a void. Me. The box. The blue button. The page. There it is. Now what happens? Once in a while someone comments and a nice little conversation gets going. But at best, it takes a while for that to happen. And every so often, I meet people who tell me they read the blog, like Goede from Germany and Monika from San Diego and Vani from NYC. (Vani actually recommended the blog to me, not knowing it was me.) People are out there. But looking at hit count graphs sucks.
Recently, my friend Six started a good old fashioned email newsletter and he wrote the names of the people receiving the newsletter at the bottom. It was so lovely to read the newsletter and see the micropublic that also had asked to get the newsletter. It made it feel like I was doing more than reading Six’s words. I was reading what others were reading, and sometimes even submitting.
Can that presence be possible for Difference Engines? I hope so! I hope to see some lovely faces. “Following” isn’t the best word for community, but “Following” (as a technical verb) is what we have for now. Let’s see your lovely mugs over at our tweet nest
The twitter feed was just me, and I just gave Beth the username password too. You’re welcome to post too. The idea with the twitter feed was just to post interesting quotes from DiffEng posts with links to the articles as an invitation for people to come see — so more administrative, drawing from what’s written, rather than generating new stuff. I’m open to other uses of the twitter though… Can share the pw with you if you like, zinc
Cool! Is the tweeter a single person or a collective? We know about collective blogs – but it occurs to me I’ve never seen a consolidated-multi-person FB or twitter account.
Every time I tweet I find myself thinking of Difference Engines as a self-identical entity that “would” or “would not” put something in one way or another. Or whose mouth I do not want to put words into, lest I write a check that nobody wants to cash. It’s keeping me pretty mild, I think, though I found myself tweeting a conversation with myself last night.