There is a whole lot of noise about Twitter.

The keynote w/ Twitter screen sounds to me like an inappropriate use of 
an otherwise useful tool... like using a screw driver to stab 
watermelons. I think part of it comes about from there being a tool 
suddenly available that nobody has a very good idea as yet what best to 
do with it. To limit oneself to the idea that Twitter is only useful to 
convey messages about our mundane lives is to focus on people who have 
no more value-added than to talk about their sexcapades and not-nearly 
esoteric bm's. It is not necessarily the tool that is the problem, it is 
the vacuity and lack of imagination of the users.

Think on this... tools in the past were designed to satisfy a need, and 
now we have tools that are created that are looking for a need. A need 
that will be sorted out and defined by the users of the tool.

My bet is that the Twitterers at the conference keynote had no clue what 
to do... and at least it reveals to me what it is like to sit in an 
audience and wonder what everyone else is thinking of the weird keynote 
speaker. Is this possibly a sign that keynote speakers will go the way 
of the newspapers, I mean, now that it is revealed that nobody is really 
paying attention to the keynote?

Listservs (BP is a listserv): the most highly subscribed listservs DO 
NOT allow for two-way (multi-way) communications but are the ones where 
a single moderator sends out a discrete, targeted, and carefully 
composed message on an anticipated cyclical basis. This is not what BP 
does, here we opened the floor to everyone who wanted to participate, 
whenever they want to speak up, and in doing that we had lots of talk 
about signal:noise ratio, and we had a lot of people unsubscribe due to 
what they perceived purely as noise of a mob of unruly people with no 
core thematic structure to the message (a message to always include 
histo presto content please... and what did that request for content 
mean?) but we also built a sense of belonging within a small group, a 
virtual community that extends itself into a community on the streets... 
in our face-to-face encounters.

I have so often been chastised for writing 2-page e-mails and here comes 
along a media that only allows 2-lines at most... that often no more 
than POINTS at something else somewhere else that the curious can go 
browse, or ignore totally.

As a writer without affiliation these tools provide me an opportunity to 
troll for an audience, as only those who want to be in the audience 
respond to my Twitter. And when I Twitter it is conveniently seeded 
across platforms. Just recently my blogging on 'transparency' was 
scattered across several audiences, presented in multiple-contexts, and 
the spreading started w/ my Twitter pointer. It has been interesting to 
me the responses that I have received from the various audiences. An MBA 
accounting student, a structural engineer, a retired contractor in 
Arizona who writes really long stories, a writer and friend hawking his 
fourth novel, a writer in SF who makes a living as an actress-for-hire 
on the phone for corporate clients, and a writer in the Cleveland area 
that I may have confused terribly with my multiple references to the 
word 'screw.'

Here was my Twitter:

blogging on transparency, closet building vs. poetics, list making and 
selection of screws http://tinyurl.com/dm6es4

Derek calls for letterpress... what I would like to do is begin a 
publication in slabs of stone with very short messages.

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