Asymptomatic

I've been subscribed to @sfshorts on Twitter, which is not about short pants worn in San Fransisco. No, it's a micro-fiction publication run by my friend ElizabethN and her friend (and someone I know online) preinheimer, wherein they publish a full science fiction story within the space of 1 or 2 tweets -- that's a full sci-fi story within 280 characters.

Micro-fiction seems like a great medium for people that aren't as invested in the whole effort of writing, but it offers some challenges of its own. Stylistically, one of the rules seems to be no txt-speak; You can't abbreviate every little thing to make your stories longer. And still, it has to make sense.

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Technically Philly recently cross-posted a piece to Philadelphia Magazine concerning the most influential Twitter users in Philadelphia. Twitter - along with general social bookmarking sites - have always intrigued me in terms of influence; how emerging topics in the social networks can indicate trends in the real world. This localized aspect of Twitter is also very interesting to me. I can think of a specific example from my recent vacation.

How Influence Matters

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I've been reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I'm not actually that far into the book yet, so there's time for him to come back around, but as yet, I'm finding a lot in the book to disagree with.

Yesterday's discovery of Dooce's clotheswasher issues have added to my dismay. I'm taking a completely different angle than the readers she complains about. Really, I'm not complaining about her at all -- I'm glad she got her washer issues sorted out. But in a similar way to what irritates me about Here Comes Everybody, she makes a point to say that the power of Twitter that we should all use is one that empowers the common man to make changes for the good.

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I've gotten a flood of new people following me on Twitter over the past couple days. If you had done this a week ago, you would already know all about how hectic my work has been this week, how I missed my train into the city to meet up with that work this morning, and how I plowed into the back of a BMW on 202 as a result of missing my train.

If you had signed up a month or two ago, you would have been able to follow my Habari tour from Philly down to BlogOrlando up to Columbus and back. In fact, I told Berta- Don't expect me to call, you will be more informed about what I'm up to if you look at my Twitter page.

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I've complained about this before, but maybe I'll do it again and someone will listen this time.

I need a little tray gadget that notifies me of RSS updates. It shouldn't be a full reader. It should just display a pretty little popup box when a new entry is added to one of the feeds I read. It should display the content of the entry as text, nothing fancy, and a link to the actual post.

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