Sticking hands with Twitter

Sticking hands is an esoteric concept from Wing Chun kung fu, often performed blindfolded, where two partners play an intuitive game and seek through soft pressure to find their way through their partner's defences.

In this way I have slapped my way into Twitter, reappraised, and redrawn my profile there.

The reason I made my twitter profile, freely linked from (and to) this site, purely a dad streak, was to see if it had value as a local networker. By having my general region and parenthood explicitly in the title I thought this might lead rapidly to bonding with other parentals in my area, on top of a more general theme of soppy haiku-like mementos of parenthood. But I've observed a few things.

Twitter's great value is in the moment, the instant, and the ubiquity. In context, you can make a comment quicker than you can on a blog and have that instantly publish, not just to people with you on their feedreader, but to the entire rapidly expanding Twitter world. It gets lost in moments in a busy topic, such as earthquakes or fires, however people then read down into the variety of comments on a given topic. They can also feed off one idea and keep this going.

It also nicely complements the blog in its sheer ease, allowing time-poor plebians like moiself to make passing comment when we don't have the time to analyse and properly parse the issues.

I've now glued the dovetail fit and two are one. Or to take my original metaphor, my hand reached Twitter's chest, for a moment, and I've retaken its measure.

Life goes on dear reader, unaffected as you are. Just wanted to explain...