“la parole exportée”

That’s it. I’m not allowing Twitter to hog this front page anymore, I’m moving all my tweets to a separate page in the sidebar.

Why am I doing this?

1. In the interest of design and esthetics: I like the clean look of the initial posting page. I quite like a white page too! Because I’m using the default WordPress theme, I’m frustrated by the untidy look of bullets, but I’m not changing the theme until I’ve had time to explore other ones, i.e. until the Summer.

2. In the interest of clarity of content: I want to reserve the posting page for more content- or opinion-oriented stuff. Things that I’m sharing with readers, with at least a semblance of logic. By their very nature, tweets are a collection of often disjointed statements.

3. For ease of publication: Twitter updates are fed automatically around midnight (local time here), and I usually find them the next morning only. I edit them (deleting those which I consider as outside the realm of this blog). Now I will simply move them en bloc over to the new page, where they will be free to go to sleep forever in their actual state.

4. To reduce the pressure: Looking at a list of untidy tweets gives me a bad conscience when I’m not updating the blog. As if I had taken the lazy option of throwing at my readers a list of haphazard (although sincere and genuine) statements as a stop gap. Not good for my morale, not good for my readers too.

Do I need to continue with Twitter at all?

In the beginning, I quickly became bored with the ‘push’ nature of Twitter, and frustrated over its lack of interactivity. Over the weeks, though, I’ve come to realize its very specific benefit, namely the building of a core community of professionals around the theme of language(s) and small business.

For instance:

@zjjtrans, @EHegenberger, @matthewbennett, @spokk, @pikorua etc. are translators and we have conversations/opinions around products, projects, and so on. I value this immensely, and it’s much more responsive than comments to a blog post.

@amypalko, @joannayoung are my guardian Angels of the English language. I value their opinions on the importance of words and they help keep me on my toes with English.

@judithstephens, @kreschke, @thetimediva, @karensmith, @drsallywitt, @marismith, @LindaZimmer are just a few of my business women ’support group.’ I should include @jlturn here, except that he’s a man, but he is very supportive. @GoodAdvice is also a good friend from the Facebook universe.

I follow many more people, but unfortunately I can’t list everyone, so I hope I’m not offending anyone. If you feel that you have been unfairly overlooked, please let me know, and I’ll add you! If you don’t fit one of the above categories, I can always add another one. I also follow tweets from Le Monde, The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN and, yes, even 10 Downing Street!

Are you on Twitter too?

I’m http://twitter.com/NadineTouzet. See you there?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Social Networking, Translation, blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.