Thursday 12 March 2009

Word of the day

Today's word is twitterati, thank you Chris Rusbridge. The word appears in a post on 11 March by Chris to the JISC repositories list. He is the Director, Digital Curation Centre, at the University of Edinburgh.

The meaning of the word is very clear - twitterati are people who know about and presumably use the Twitter software and the term is pretty well established and widely used. In fact there is a whole world of language which derives from the twittering habits and preferences of many people - Twitter, says Twitter, is "a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

In the course of checking out twitterati, I also came across TweetMinster, "a place where real life and politics tweet." It seems to foster twittering amongst the parliamentary twitterati at Westminster. Do we want our Australian members of Parliament doing this kind of thing?

Twitter is not a term confined to people with curious tastes in communication. Go to twitternet or for that matter email the twittermaster@twitter.net and you will encounter something completely different.

Wednesday 11 March 2009

ALIA Elections - two years ago and now

Two years ago I established this blog as part of my campaign to be elected vice president of ALIA. Now, looking through the ALIA election material for the Board elections this year, and thinking back, I was struck by two things.

First, it was so much easier to vote this time, with the introduction of online voting. I don't know why we didn't do it before, and I certainly don't understand why anyone would ever not vote again. Everyone - please vote, it is so easy.

Second, the candidates, with one exception, don't really seem to have Web 2.0ed much at all. I have found three blogs for the five candidates. Richard Siegersma's engaging blog has a number of posts on a variety of issues, and even a few comments. Kate Sinclair has advoKate - great name, but it needs more than one post. And Lothar von Retzlaff has a blog entitled Lothervonretzlaff, but alas, also a single post. Neither Gill Hallam nor Stuart Ferguson has a blog that I can find, but I am happy to be corrected.

The ALIA Board has taken our elections into the Web 2.0 zone - what about the candidates?