Twitterjitters, hashtags and "floggers"

How would you picture the inventor of Twitter? In fact, like famous college dropout Bill Gates, the inventor of Twitter, Evan Williams, also dropped out of college (so much for going into massive debt for an Ivy-League education!) and grew up on a farm in...Nebraska: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/jobs/08bosses.html?_r=2. What he has created has already morphed beyond his wildest dreams. All it takes is one marketable idea...This illustrates how little we can predict about the evolution of our students' lives and careers.

Not being a "Twitterer" myself, I was amused to read a half-page article from the weekend Wall Street Journal (March 14 - 15, 2009) by columnist Julia Angwin re her demanding Twitterer "followers" (who knew?) and the "performance anxiety" that Twittering on a mass scale can engender: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123638550095558381.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. Don't people have better things to do? Where does this endless search for narcissistic instant gratification end?

Well, at least I am expanding my vocabulary: I did learn that "hashtags" are the "#" marks that people use to identify keywords in their tweets, "supposedly making their tweets more searchable." PS Media Specialists--How do you properly acknowledge a "tweet" in a bibliography?

Enter the Floggers. Argentina is now home to a "flogging" sensation named "Cumbio" who is a youth icon of the moment: 36 million visits to her fotolog site this past year. (Ironic that the original sense of the word "flogging" had to do with public humiliation). But I digress. Floggers take photos of themselves and post them on photo blogs, users comment on each others' photos, and organize the current equivalent of flash mobs (how quickly fads change!). Fotolog.com http://www.fotolog.com/ claims to have more than 5.5 million users in Argentina and almost as many in Chile. To see the full story: http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/13/america/profile.php. Tweet tweet, snap snap!