www.notaphoto.com now with added Twitter

Twitter

I have set up a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/jxe520

To be honest I still don’t really get Twitter or consider it that useful in most situations. Whilst I can see some benefits for very established bloggers or very famous people whose exciting lives could probably cope with 140 character regular updates, I think, as with other such Web 2.0 applications, there are a number of obvious flaws:

  1. The practice of micro-blogging uses a model of quantity over quality in order to maintain fresh content;
  2. it’s the Web 2.0 equivalent of sending SMSs to people you don’t know;
  3. If you’ve got something worthwhile to say it probably needs more than 140 characters to say it;
  4. Having read a few people’s Twitter feed it generally seems to be of the “eating a sandwich” or “watching a film” ilk;
  5. When new ways of communicating through the internet are released there is a process of early adopting tech bloggers writing about the merits of the new system and their “followers” quickly adopting, making it a self-fulfilling path to the application eventually being picked up by the mainstream; and
  6. Having reached mainstream it just becomes a method for spamming, as seen by the likes of Myspace these days, where I seem to be spending more and more time deleting spam and porn from my inbox.

So, having said all that why am I bothering with Twitter? I’m still looking at live or as near as live blogging for my weekend at Splendour In The Grass in August. However, although the timetable doesn’t come out until about a week for the festival I’m not sure how much free time I would have available during the day to download and process photos, upload them to Flickr, and then write the words for the related blog and add in the links and photos. Although I expect there to be some free time during the day, with three stages on the go I’m not expecting there to be long enough gaps during the day to live blog. Plus, given the choice between blogging or photographing, my time is probably best spent photographing as much as I can fit into the day and doing the blogging after the bands have finished for the day and early the following day.

However, by having Twitter it gives me an option to micro-blog 140 character reviews of the bands and the day in general as I run between stages, which can then act as notes for the more in depth blogging that I prefer to do.

So feel free to “follow” me for all the latest news and reviews from the site, with more in depth thoughts and pictures following later in the day. At some point soon I’ll be modifying this site to publish my Twitter feed directly here.

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