Tackling Twitter

I am very excited about the prospect of having a learning network, and finding ways to stay current in my field. At this point, learning to navigate Twitter still feels very overwhelming to me. To be honest, the  only reason that I had a Twitter account is because a couple of years ago my 12 year old son walked out of his room and said "Mom, the Blumenthal is following me on Twitter." He has been training to work in the entertainment industry since he was 5, and got on Twitter as a professional resource. I joined Twitter to follow him, and have never really done any more with it.

When I first started looking for blogs to follow, it was a little bit of a struggle. There seemed to be too much information (always a problem on the Internet). I started by clicking on a few of the resources from the blog tutorials, which led me to other links that were a possibility. Finally I ended up looking at the people/organizations that I followed were following to round out my 20. This is a screenshot showing some of the people that I ended up following:

My plan now is to check twitter a couple of times a day and see how the tweets are looking. If someone that I am following seems to have mostly relevant tweets, then I will continue to follow them, and may look to see who else they are following. If the tweets don't seem relevant, then I will unfollow and look elsewhere.

I came across a couple of sites that appealed to me because they let you put your twitter feed into more of a newspaper format. This very much appeals to me. I use my Zite app on my ipad all of the time, and this would let me access my tweets in a similar fashion.  The first site was The Tweeted Times. Below is a screenshot of my first Twitter "newspaper" generated by this site. The fact that I can access it on the go with my ipad is especially appealing.

The other site was called Paper.li. You can list Twitter Accounts and other websites that you want to follow and it compiles a newspaper for you. Although it pulls from Twitter, it is not directly tied to twitter. This feels like it will be a very useful source, and I am definitely adding it to my tool box as a way of finding more tech information. Below is a picture of the first paper that I generated. It is another site that I am sure I will tweak as I go along.