3 Arcane Twitter Concepts

Posted by Laura Bergells

August 10, 2007

I am ten days into my August Twitter Challenge. Arcane Twitter Concepts

Here are three arcane and unrelated concepts I’m learning through Twittering:

1. Blog stands for “Better Listings on Google.” Blogging about my Twitter experience is yielding site visits from Google. How’s that? Today, when you search at Google, my blogs are in the top three positions for the term “Twitter Challenge”. This has thus far yielded 7 visits (none from yrs truly.) True, the term “Twitter Challenge” isn’t the most popular search term in the world, but it’s astounding that Google indexes over a million competing pages for this made-up term. And that blogging about Twitter has put this little site to the top of the heap (For the moment. Things change.)

2. The @ sign signals a response. Most of my posts respond to the broad question “What are you doing right now?” But at times, my tweet is in response to another Twitterers tweet. If so, I use the “@” +username to let everyone who is reading know that I’m responding to that specific Twitterer. It’s a Twitter culture thing you learn by doing. There’s more about the @username convention at Twitter…but I didn’t find it until after I used the @ sign. Instructions at Twitter are cryptic. One learns more by doing…
3. Twitter is microblogging. I cannot remember where I read the term “microblogging” — but Twitter is definitely it. There is no room to expound in Twitter, so a typical Twitter use is to point to an area where there IS more content, more depth. That’s the publicity value of Twitter. There’s no room for high-minded corporate speak, so it’s “be compelling, get to the point — or go away.” This can encourage some awfully engaging headline writing!

I’m ten days into Twittering. I have 9 followers. I’m following 11. I have 59 updates. 30 people have come to my blogs directly from my Twitter posts or home page. (I was one of them, so that’s really only 29.)
246 people have viewed my post “Take the Twitter Challenge.” They have arrived from various feed aggregators and search engines. (I’m about 5 of these, so let’s round down to 240).
I’ve spent about an hour with the Twitter Challenge this month (not including these blog posts) — in 5 minute increments or less.

I remain teach-able. I will continue the challenge. I will persevere.