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Enter Keynote Tweet, a simple open-source script that provides the capacity to participate in the backchannel by combining Twitter with Apple Keynote. All you have to do is add text wrapped in [twitter] and [/twitter] tags in the presenter notes section of a slide. When that slide comes up in the presentation the script grabs that text and sends it to Twitter on your behalf.

snow mashup on twitter

"a public service in the UK that makes it easier to connect the public with politics using Twitter. TweetMinster allows to track UK politics in real time, and to find and follow Members of Parliament (or invite them to use Twitter if they’re not already doing so) and Prospective Parliamentary Candidates."

Yet another consideration about the (personal) use of the blog medium. I was chatting yesterday with Gian about his perception that most bloggers in our entourage stopped or heavily reduced their blogging habit. Me first. First response I gave was that yest, I reduced blogging while increasing participation in other social media, mainly twitter, but also facebook, tumblr, friendfeed (not very active there, but keeping an eye on it) and a few others. Notable exception is Flickr, that I still consume quite a lot but haven’t been producing on for the last 18 months or so (this is hopefully about to change). Similarly, I guess that other early adopters (that form the best part of our aforementioned entourage) are experiencing a similar situation, where they spend more time exploring new frontiers rather than patrol the growing population of the blogosphere. I guess this is especially true, in this phase, for those who liked to use blogs as social journals. I belong to this category. Those who like to write fiction, to talk about their cat, to comment politics or to play pundit probably will keep on investing their attention in writing and reading more blog posts. After that conversation, I went and had a look back (with no anger) at my journals, blogs and other media archives. I found one interesting fact: for my way of using social media, microblogging (twitter) and photo sharing (flickr) are the best tools out there. The Blog is indeed still invaluable for many purposes, like to explain the result of a long process or chain of thoughts or a research (like what I’m doing now) that needs a proper body, maybe references, links and so on. However, the archives of the early years of my blogs (as well as physical diaries), when I had just them as tools to keep track of my inner and outer contexts, are full of miserable gibberish and automatic nonsense. Twitter, on the other hand, forces me to concentrate my message in a short sentence, that turns out to be a sort of haiku. And the time effort required to do this is small enough to keep this practice lazy-proof. That said, don’t expect my twitterstream to be nonsense-free.