Damming Twitter

No typo in the headline. I meant damming as you would a river. Or in this case a stream.

I love Twitter. As of today, I've been using it for exactly three years. It's now my primary source of both interesting new links and people. As a matter of fact, I've met more Second Lifers through Twitter than I have inside Second Life.  But although tweeps stick around, tweets are extremely ephemeral. Even the coolest threads get lost downstream within an hour or two. Twitter is designed that way.

I've played around with some practices to reel some of my favorite tweets back in. I decided to list a few of them here in celebration of my 3rd Twitter Anniversary:

• Micro-rants: I sometimes think of Twitter as a performance venue. And one of my favorite forms is the micro-rant, which consists of a series of tweets on a particular topic. Here's one from last month on creativity:
• A creative project, like a marriage, only gets real depth after the honeymoon is over. #creativity
• Be all embracing in brainstorming and ruthless in editing. #creativity
• Any in-progress work of mine that gets cranky is sent to bed for a nap. #creativity
• Most machinima I've seen would have been better off at half the length. Cool ideas are often spoiled by self-indulgence. #creativity
• Be easily amused, but hard to please. #creativity
• To truly worship the Muse, transcribe her every whisper. To be clear, that's "transcribe", NOT "share". #creativity
• An ounce of context is worth a pound of isolated facts. #creativity

• Transforming tweets into blog posts:  Expanding tweets from a micro-rant into a blog post has been a great way to carry them over the typical tweet event horizon. Although I schedule them to be posted over a number of hours, Micro-rant tweets are usually written in the first fifteen minutes after waking, so they're fresh from the subconscious and often full of juicy potential.

• Deep Tweets: This is my newest experiment. I take a tweet, match it up with some New Age music and atmospheric video from a virtual world, and create a 30 second parody of the Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy parody. Here's the latest: