twitter

Judy is off on vacation for a couple of weeks, so I'm going to take over her blog and post videos of Michael Jackson here.  (Just kidding.  We've all seen enough of that on Twitter and Facebook.  Pam Kapoor wrote an interesting article about that here, in fact.)

What I really want to blog about is social media, which Judy also talks about in her book, in chapter 8.  I just went to a fantastic conference a couple of weeks ago - Social Tech Training 2009.  In a nutshell, the conference was for people who want to learn and share ideas about how to use social media to organize, promote, and create social change.  Instead of taking notes, I tweeted them out on twitter as a way of staying in touch with Judy about what I was learning (since I was there for both of us), and you can find my play-by-play and other participants' notes from the conference under the hashtags #stt09 and #ncwk.  So I won't rehash (ha, get it?) that here.

Instead, I'll talk about my own journey with social media, and I invite you to share yours in the comments here if you feel so inclined.

Today in Tehran from #iranelection on twitter

Sunday evening I spent almost an entire train ride from Ottawa to Toronto glued to Twitter following the posts from #iranelections, which is a way to get all the posts about the elections in Iran and following a twitterer with the handle Change for Iran who was posting from his roof top every few minutes and then going down to join the protests and coming back.  It was an amazing experience to directly follow what was happening on the streets of Tehran as it was happening.  More important, though, Twitter became a major source of information for those opposed to Ahmadinejad's government and protesting what they consider to be fraudelant election results.