weird twitter things and when job meets online stuff....

Training day yesterday including an hour with me banging on about the new website, the forthcoming Learning Platform, developments in the network and a lot about the future direction of school ICT and how we have to keep up with the emerging technology that our children treat as standard.

Hence a chat about social networking in all it's forms. I had planned to include a little 5 minutes on Twitter. Except it appears our school internet provider has blocked it over the holidays. Damn.

However, the few mentions I made of it prompted the inevitable comments of: "what's the point of it?" to which I did the usual reply and talked about how useful it is when you start to use it but looking it from the outside it does look quite silly.

Well, someone was listening to the training at least. And later that night I got a follow email telling me that the boss has joined and is following. Well that was unexpected. Paranoia follows. Checked blog for work mentions - completely clear of direct references. But still the question of what to say at work about the twitter thing. In the end we had a joke about it and boss has reassured they have no interest in snooping, they were just enjoying doing new ict stuff.

But it's a strange feeling when you realise people you know actually know what you do online. It happened before when I started the blog and Nostalgia & Comics folks and friends were suddenly emailing and talking to me about the stuff I was writing. Ended up taking me a few weeks to stop deliberately censoring myself on the blog and write naturally again without thinking about what people would be thinking about what I was writing. It's happening again slightly. Twitter use has reduced, swearing a lot on twitter stopped and mentions of gin reduced severely.

It's a strange online world it seems.

Alan Moore on QI, well there's an idea.....

PJ Holden suggested it first on twitter, but it's a great idea; Alan Moore On QI.

Everyone send their #alanmooreonQI tweet to Stephen Fry.

Twitter for the masses

Twitter is suddenly everywhere. I can always tell when something has made it overground because the teachers start talking about it. And this week I've had two of them asking about this Twitter thing. But they're not the only ones it seems. I can barely turn on the TV or the radio without some mention of it. There was the recent Jonathan Ross / Stephen Fry chat on his show. Russell Brand's on now. So, I hear, is Chris Moyles. And today 5 live was awash with it. Mayo and Kermode's (Wittertainment) film reviews were all over it. And once the BBC attaches to it, everyone does. But what seems like Twitter's very own jump the shark moment came when Phillip Schofield joined in.

It's all that Stephen Fry's fault of course! If he wasn't so wonderfully nice and beloved by everyone, we maybe wouldn't have had this explosion of celeb twittering. But it's too late to go back now!

Oh, and if you're interested: Twitter me.