Tweet, to who?

To tweet, or not to tweet - that is the question.

Love it or hate it, there is no ignoring Twitter. Launched in 2006, it passed the 100 million user mark earlier this year and is growing at an estimated rate of 300,000 new users a month.

I signed up for a Twitter account in March 2009 but after a couple of timid posts I left it alone and only began to play around with it from April of this year. And you really do need to play with it, to shape it to your personality and interests.You need to find people to follow and slowly, amazingly, you'll find that people will start to follow you.  You also need to come to grips with Twitter's terminology, including timelines, hashtags, retweets and mentions.

I'll admit to being a bit overwhelmed at the start. It's rather like arriving at a party that's in full swing. The place is packed with lots of people talking loudly, laughing and it looks like it's a lot of fun.  Your first few tweets feel like whispering into the void: no-one hears them. Gradually, though, your tweets get louder and a few people might turn their heads to hear what you've got to say. At this point you have to inch your way across the threshold and into the room in the hope that people will start to take notice and (gulp) speak to you.

After six months of being active on Twitter, I now follow 93 people and 27 people follow me. I've not quite crossed the threshold but I can clearly see the Twitterati all standing in the kitchen hogging the booze.

Why am I bothering? Social media is becoming an essential part of the marketing and communications mix for businesses. Companies are scrambling to find ways of harnessing the power of Twitter to promote brands, raise awareness, sell products and even recruit staff. Social media, it is said, allows people and companies to create a 'conversation' and 'communities' of shared interests. As an individual I'm also curious to see if Twitter was more than just finding out what celebrities are having for breakfast.

And it is so much more than that. Barack Obama used Twitter during the US Presidential election and famously tweeted his thanks when he knew he had won. When a passerby in New York tweeted that a plane had crash-landed on the Hudson last year, it was obvious that here was a powerful new way of communicating breaking news stories.

After the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately, Twitter outrage forced Jan Moir of The Daily Mail to apologise after describing his as 'sleazy'.  And the gagging order that prevented The Guardian from reporting on the Trafigura case involving the dumping of toxic waste in Africa was lifted following an explosion of tweets that drove the story into the public domain.

Of course it's not all campaigning and crusading - there's a lot of time-wasting dross out there too. The trick is to be focused and picky about who you follow so most of the irrelevant or uninteresting stuff is filtered out. Twitter provides tools to help you organise your account. You don't have to follow everyone who decides to follow you. And you can quickly 'unfollow' or even 'block' people. You can also create lists, which enable you to group incoming tweets into separate categories.

With only a few 'real' friends to follow on Twitter, I began by searching for interesting people such as comedians (Bill Bailey, Simon Pegg, Marcus Brigstock, Tim Minchen) and writers (Armando Ianucci, Will Self, Charlie Brooker, Mark Gatiss). I also follow Number 10 and just one politician - John Prescott (who is a very active tweeter). The list is growing.

You can also search by topic. I'm interested in words and language and I've discovered a universe of linguists, copy-editors, and other grammar nerds to follow - such as @WriteAdvantage, @HangingNoodles, @wordlust, @Lynneguist, @MightyRedPen, amongst others. One great find I can recommend is @DrSamuelJohnson, who tweets in the language of the great lexicographer (a book of his collected tweets was published last month).


As well as being amused by things people tweet, I love the links that are often included (shrunk, of course, to fit in the 140 character limit). The only trouble I have right now is organising all the bookmarks I've made for all the fascinating blogs, websites and articles that Twitter has put me onto. I've also got to find the time to read them.

I'm still a newbie (a twatchling?) but I'm enjoying the experience. Only one of my tweets has been 'retweeted' so far (forwarded by someone else to their followers) but it's a start.

Come and join me - @suewalder.

Sarah Palin - the portmanteau queen?

The former Governor of Alaska and wannabe Republican president Sarah Palin caused a stir recently when she seemed to coin a new word - refudiate - in an interview on Fox News. The story concerned plans to build a mosque in New York, close to where the twin towers of the World Trade Centre once stood.

 
Refudiate is what is known as a blend or portmanteau word. In this case, a blend of refute (to prove wrong) and repudiate (to deny or reject). 

She used the word again in a tweet a few days later:

Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.

The US media had a lot of fun with this and Palin only poured oil on the fire when her original tweet was removed and then followed-up with another:

"Refudiate," "misunderestimate," "wee-wee'd up." English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it! 

This implies she not only puts herself in the same league as George W Bush (misunderestimate) and Barack Obama (wee-wee'd up) but also Shakespeare.

We all know that George W Bush tended to mangle the English language but it comes as a surprise to hear President Obama coin the phrase 'wee-wee'd up', as he did last year:

I sort of understand what Obama was implying with this odd phrase. He was referring to people getting worked up and agitated. I don't classify this as 'mangling' the language. This is genuinely inventive.

However, by comparing herself to Shakespeare, Palin merely gave the twitterverse a subject to really get its collective beak into. As the Huffington Post reported, the hashtag #ShakesPalin quickly became a trending topic. Even better - it led to some clever tweets such as these:

@normative - To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous liberals, or to quit halfterm, and by opposing, rake in speaking fees.

@djsmk - Neither a thinker nor a reader be / for thought oft loses both itself and friend /and reading dulls the edge of Fox TV.

But why are words like refudiate called portmanteaus? It refers to the old type of large travelling case or trunk which had two halves, hinged together. Lewis Carroll seems to have coined the phrase in Through the Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There, with Humpty explaining the meaning of Jabberwocky to Alice:

"Well, slithy means 'lithe and slimy'... You see it's like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word."

Portmanteau words are not a new phenomenon. If they're genuinely useful they'll gain currency and will eventually enter into mainstream dictionaries. We're all familiar with brunch (breakfast and lunch, coined in 1896), smog (smoke and fog, coined around 1900), and motel (motor and hotel, coined 1925).

Modern examples include blog, camcorder, chillax, fanzine, chugger, advertorial, Brangelina and even wikipedia. I recently came across the word 'civilogue' on a website to describe the type of comments they would accept - a blend of civil and dialogue.  

Palinspeak, as Palin's eccentric use of the language is often called, will no doubt throw us more to muse on in the coming years. Am I going to get wee-wee'd up about it? No. It's impossible to misunderestimate her and she's already refudiated her use of the word refudiate.

Raoul Moat: what's in a name?

Raoul Thomas Moat. It's been almost impossible this week to avoid hearing or reading about the improbably named Geordie gunman currently on the run in Northumberland after shooting three people and killing one of them.

It's a serious situation. Yet we have the capacity to find the humour in it - a way of coping with tragedy that all humans share.

And the main thing we find amusing about it all? Mr Moat's name. It's an odd one and in an idle moment earlier this week I found myself attempting to make an anagram of it. The best I could come up with was: oath, trauma looms. Not knowing what to do with it, I posted it on my facebook page. Then, yesterday I included it in a twitter post.

Of course I did. Social media has been an element of the story itself as Mr Moat allegedly made threats via facebook before penning a 49-page handwritten letter to the police. The internet is the place to go for up-to-the-second gossip.

Right now, the internet is awash with comment on what's being said via the media and lots and lots of jokes. Search for 'Raoul Moat jokes' on google and you'll get more than 6,500,000 results. Lots of people want to talk about Raoul Moat; most of them just passing on what they've heard or read.

The story is a trending topic on twitter and among the top tweets (those tweets that have been re-tweeted by others more than 100 times) are:

Manchester City have officially bid £45m for Raoul Moat. They've no idea who he is, but they've heard everyone's after him.

If Raoul Moat wore a stripy jumper and thick glasses he'd be a lot more fun to try and find.

NORTHUMBRIA Police, if u haven't found Raoul Moat By Sat, double the reward from 10k to 20k & call it a Raoul-over.

There is also:

I don't find any of these jokes raoul moatly funny.

I just checked on facebook and more than 17,000 people apparently 'like' the facebook group "Raoul Thomas Moat" Needs To Be Found Before He Kills Again!.

This is all pretty harmless but the problem with all this stuff floating out there in cyberspace is that it's getting harder and harder to filter out all the rubbish from the good stuff and the lies from the truth. This is where you have to exercise the more rational side of your brain. And it's not just individuals who seem to have lost the power of critical thinking.

This week an American news website aolnews.com swallowed a spoof Raoul Moat story whole from the News Grind, a website that produces nothing but spoof news. A 'revised' story now states:

...the situation is far different than what we reported in an earlier version of this post, which relied on false information from what turned out to be a satirical news site.

The original report has since been removed from the News Grind site but a blog on journalism.co.uk has a great piece on it.

By the way, as I write this, the latest Raoul Moat 'news' from News Grind, Stupid fat people in hiding after Moat warning', is a response to the warning by police that Mr Moat was now "targetting the wider public".

This story doesn't just have legs, it's got wheels - until they fall off.