Getting All My Input in 140-Character Bursts

At the moment, except for email I mostly just use Twitter for librarianly input, wandering off to the links people post, or to the posters' blogs, or the other links and blogs they point to. When I came back from Europe last week I sat here in a jet-lagged fog, gratefully re-submerging in the cheerful conversation almost always running somewhere out there among librarians. The 80-odd people whose posts come to my timeline feel near-enough like a community as they respond to each other, and to me, and to other people whose posts I never see. 'I missed you like crazy,' I posted when I got home.

One of the weekend's fun finds: a Web Trends 2007 map, which its makers tell us is built on a map of the Tokyo subway system. (Twitter is on the blue Social Networks line, and on the dotted Insiders line.) Lo-Fi Librarian posted it to Twitter, and to her blog, along with a bunch of other very interesting topics. Today's fun (somewhat librarianly): Grand March of the Librarians, a video made at last month's ALA convention. I found it by wandering from from one of DesertLibrarian's twitter posts to her blog, Random Musings from the Desert; thence to Hedgehog Librarian's blog. She'd found the video on Michael Stephens' Tame the Web. Do you see how it goes, reading around and following links?

Several people attending the Techsource Gaming, Libraries and Learning Symposium this weekend were sending tweets via text throughout some of the sessions, giving quotes and links and getting excited about what they were hearing. Gaming in libraries? Yikes, My Former Place of Work certainly knows zilch about the world of gamers... Two different twitterers passed on the remark of a teen panelist, "my teachers tell me to use official sites that end in .gov but who are u going to trust? The government or the people?" And people tweeted many quotes from Eli Neuburger as he presented, two simultaneously giving us "there are more gamers than recreational readers at your library".

I could sit here all day, wandering from topic to topic, librarian blog to librarian blog, and throwing the links and webpages into del.icio.us as I go so I'll remember to get back to them. There's a human computation project called Galaxy Zoo "the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer can ever be" which Neil Stewart blogged about in the context of social media. The project hopes to use crowds of internet volunteers to visually classify a million galaxies. Or, did you know there are libraries in Second Life? And onward... If I were still blogging for the library, there could be a whole array of topics and trains of thought which have floated by from emails and twitter postings, what KGS calls "Link Love"; I miss the happy pretense that of course the library's readers are interested in whatever I'm thinking about.