I now call this meeting to order (slams gavel on desk oops sorry Scooby didn't mean to wake ya up!).
For those who haven't been following our travails up til now, you can find all of our diaries by doing a Daily Kos search for "bwiubs".
What started at Netroots Nation as good conversation between new friends is now growing into a legitimate force to be reckoned with and it is time to build our organization and get to work. Membership is voluntary and important- we can't do this without you! And membership schwag is being created as we type!
But you can't claim membership and get the schwag unless you do a few things:
1- Join Facebook and then join our Facebook group.
2- Join us every Sunday night at 9 pm EST for our weekly Union Hall Diary meeting! Starting next week these diaries will be posted from our new Blog Workers Industrial Union Daily Kos account!! Bring your pooties, your ideas and YOUR FRIENDS! The more the merrier....we have a lot of plans in the works but we need numbers to make them effective!
3- Follow us on Twitter! Which brings me to tonight's topic: Twitter for my fellow Twitter Beginners. If you are already an avid Twitter user, please skip to the pooties and share your insight and wisdom in the comments. But first, go to your twitter account and follow me (Spedwybabs), Stranded Wind, and most importantly the Blog Workers Industrial Union. If you are new to Twitter...keep reading, I'm going to share my experiences thus far and try to convince you that Twitter is just as awesome as Daily Kos AND Facebook.
So for those of you who don't know, Twitter is an online platform that can be accessed from your computer OR mobile phone and allows for instant one way communication to all those following you. The secret is that whatever you say HAS to be said in 140 characters (including spaces!) or less. Trust me, this is NOT as easy as it seems- even my cell phone allows me 160 characters for a text. It differs from a blog because it's so much more succint. It's different from Facebook as it's a little less interactive. But it's an effective way to learn about what's going on out there and when harnassed at full power it can have tremendous power- witness the reactions after the election in Iran not long ago.
When you first go to Twitter to sign up it will ask you for very basic information: an email address and a password. Do it, and now you're set to go. First, see item #3 in the membership to do list and start following all 3 of us. We'll follow you back and you'll be off and running.
Now tweet something! A tweet is similar to a status update on Facebook (anyone need a how to Facebook tutorial?). My first tweet was really pretty pathetic- one of the first people I started to follow was DK's own Plutonium Page and she tweeted at me that I needed to tweet something so I did: "ok page says i need to tweet something so tweet :)".
Then I started to explore as you should. I started looking for people to follow. I wanted to follow people who were relevant to my life: people from Daily Kos, political figures who were saying things I wanted to hear (or didn't want to hear but should) and real life friends. I found people like Markos, Jane Hamsher from Firedoglake, and the ever relevant Hunter.
I found people to follow by going thru the lists of people I knew and seeing who THEY follow. I entered random names into the people finder and found cool people to follow that way. Friends who learned I had entered the world of Twitter started emailing me and saying "hey I'm on Twitter...follow me".
Then this week I logged on and lo and behold the John Birch Society (no linky provided- too icky for this diary!) was following me! Whoa...scary. I mentioned this to a friend and his response was "Yer toast". Sure enough over the next few days, as I tweeted more and more political things and retweets, I was being followed by more and more strange people from that other part of our world. A few I allowed, many I blocked because I just wasn't interested in filling my tweet wall with their blubberings.
Then I discovered Retweets. A retweet is when you copy and paste someone else's tweet, giving them credit and then tweet it to your friends. For example a few days ago, Marcos tweeted something and then Kagro retweeted it and then I retweeted THAT- so it looked like this:
LOLRT@KagroXRT@markos:Saw Michael Moore's new movie.Looking for a pitchfork & torch|Settle for a spork&a match?How abt a SternlyWordedLetter"
When you retweet something you just copy and paste it into your tweet and precede it with an
RT@(insert person's name here) and their tweet
This retweeting concept is one the union plans to latch onto and use to amplify our messages. Stranded Wind touched on this idea a bit in last week's Union Hall diary and this is something that will be further explained in upcoming Union Hall diaries and Facebook discussions and Tweets.
The last part of twitter that I've learned about and think every newbie should understand is hashtags. Often at the end of tweets you will see things that look like this #dailykos. That's a hashtag and it is a system on Twitter that allows you to find tweets about certain subjects. For example, #dailykos brings up a page that lists tweets by a wide variety of people about daily kos- diaries being posted, discussions, and yes some right wingers use it to tweak our noses a bit just as we often tweet things with hashtags like #tcot to tweak theirs. This is something I just learned about yesterday and when I pimp my diaries on twitter I will be sure to include the dailykos hashtag to try and have my tweets reach more eyes.
So...what can you teach ME about twitter? There's much I don't yet know and I'm eager to learn!
Of course...it wouldn't be a Blog Workers Industrial Union Diary if I didn't include the voices of a few of our 4 legged friends...
See you in the comments...on facebook and on twitter!! Floors open for discussion :::uploads fresh coffee and scoops of ice cream:::