connecting*the*dots

(shot by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

So the world has woken up and discovered Twitter.

I’m not gonna front, I’ve only been Twittering for a few months now. I sat on the sidelines for the last year or so and watched Tara and Chris pimp it, but I just couldn’t figure out how it fit into my world.

Well, I think I’ve finally got it… and then some.

While a bunch of people out west have large numbers of close friends that use Twitter incessantly, I don’t. Most of my peeps from the NYC and Greensboro area don’t view communicative technology through quite the same lens as left coasters (we’re all a step or two behind on that front). So my friend list — while filled with people I consider to be friends — aren’t folk that I know extremely well or interact with on a daily basis.

So I’m now getting a chance to familiarize myself with colleagues from both across the country and the other side of the world.

That’s actually quite cool.

Sure, sometimes their Twitters are as dumb as mine, but that just gives me more insight into their varied personalities. Those Twitts about eating PB&J or screaming at a cabbie only confirms that we’re more alike than different. And when they do drop science and briefly enlighten the world as to what they’re working on, well, that’s the gold mine of Twitter.

Chris Messina stuck that nugget of a thought in my head the last time we hung out at Citizen Summit. He implored me to use Twitter and keep him (and anyone else following me) in the know with what I was doing with The People, Yes.

The conversation got even deeper once we all started discussing ways to bridge the digital divide locally, and before I knew it, I was thinking about Twitter implementation within the TPY interface.

So check this out:

That’s a John Ford special for you.

He took Alex King’s Twitter Tools beta plug-in, tweaked the partially functional plug-in code to post Twitters to my Wordpress blog with an appended category and styled the category with a CSS class.

So now every time I SMS to 40404, not only do I add to the stream of consciousness on Twitter, I’m documenting those fleeting thoughts straight to my blog.

The term “live blogging” just evolved big time overnight, as did “citizen journalism” (and if they’re smart, so will the “mainstream media“).

Now imagine how this could impact folk on the other side of the digital divide — people without moment to moment access to laptops or desktop computers, but armed to the teeth with cell phones.

Did I mention that John Ford is the man?

Tonight @ 7pm in Congdon Hall, Room 138 at High Point University (Directions), John Ford and myself will be rapping about this little activity called blogging.

If you’ve heard about it before, but don’t know how blogging can assist you as a small business owner, an activist, a writer, etc., come on down and get both the back-story and the 411 on how to publish to the internet.

And if you’re already a blogger, well, come on down and live-blog our presentation!

(that’s not John)

John Ford — founder of the local software development firm Aldenta and former kidnapper of my The Inmates Are Running The Asylum book — is running tomorrow night’s free Web Design Meetup to help us hacks with our HTML and CSS techniques.

And I gotta tell you folks, after looking at some of the templates of the blogsboro community, I’d say that we all could use some help (disclosure — John has tweaked the presentation of this blog, as well as the Greensboro’s Child theme).

From John:

A number of our meetup members have requested a more detailed look at HTML and CSS. I’ve decided to do a multipart series on HTML & CSS to help everyone get a better grasp.

People who will benefit:

• Those totally new to HTML/CSS
• Someone using Dreamweaver, GoLive or other web page design tools who want a better understanding of the website code that is being created
• Current developers wanting a better understanding of proper web page creation and coding standards (these concepts are helpful for search engine optimization)
• Bloggers wanting to learn how to tweak their site template code
• Anyone wanting to brush up on their HTML and CSS skills

When:
Thursday, June 8, 2006, 7:00 PM (sharp)

Where:
The Scene on South Elm
604 South Elm St
Greensboro , NC 27406
336 510 1472

RSVP & Questions:
info@aldenta.com
336 547 9004

Hope to see you there!

John has topped himself with this shot. Check out the entire set.

I met John Ford at the Greensboro Web Design Meetup he was running last month. Over the following week, we traded emails and eventually decided to share portfolio and application ideas over a six-pack in my home office. After going through some work and chatting up each of our killer app ideas, we ended up discussing how we make software, going back and forth between Getting Real and Cooper’s Goal Directed methodology.

As John was about to go on a month long trip to Asia and Australia, I gave him my copy of The Inmates are Running the Asylum to enjoy on the trip, but under one condition: he had to take a few pictures of it at various exotic locals on his trip.

C’mon John, one more!