Getting ready to chirp

Along with firing up this blog over the last couple of weeks, I also signed on with twitter (I’ve had an account in the past but never made much use of it) once it became fairly clear that was one of the ways to ‘get your message out’ as it were.

However, the more I’ve been using it the more confusing things seem to have become. There’s the retweet thing and the reply thing and then you’ve got tweet deck and some site called justretweet that seems to be geared towards driving traffic. All neat and good, but it’s a pretty confusing bunch of stuff for an internet idea that began with such simplicity (and brevity, more about that here).

To anyone who’s been following me or will be doing so (I invite you to please do, I’d be happy to hear from you, the link is just to the right of this post at the moment though I’m still tweaking the blog setup as well so your milage may vary), I must apologize if I’ve committed any faux pas or missed the point or anything else as far as twitter etiquette (twitiquette?) is concerned. I promise I’m a fast learner, I hope that being able to give shout outs in brief form will prove to benefit this blog and my readers, and I will attempt to get the hang of it as quickly as I can.

The focus of this blog has been morphing, somewhat organically which I’m rather pleased with, as I get a feel for what kind of content might be valuable here online, and I’ll be talking a lot in the coming week about that revelation along with several other life and internet related topics. Suffice to say my original title idea, “On Writing and Music”, doesn’t quite express the fullness of what I’d like to delve into here. I’ll get more into it and I hope you’ll subscribe and come on back to read about it, because in any case I’ll be broadening my overall tone while at the same time hopefully bringing my niche into focus by including my observations on life in today’s crazy fast, twitter focused internet world and some ways in which I’ve found to navigate through it, or in some cases just sit back and smile at my own reactions to it. Until then, hope you’re having a great weekend!

The more I delve into this whole online presence thing the more I realize that my niche on these internets is right in front of my face, staring me down with tiny tweets and fast paced confusion.

I am, middle-aged.

Whew. That was harder to write than I thought it would be.

Well, I don’t consider myself old, to be fair. I grew up with a remote control in hand and all the latest star wars toys like everyone else.

What’s Star Wars, you ask? Okay, leave.

Seriously, just go.

This blog is not for you.

This blog is for the pre-facebook,pre-twitter, oh-so-relaxing pace of the good old 1980′s, when Moscow nukes scared us a lot more than fanatics plotting from caves ever could, and when the price of a CD (yeah, like I said, I ain’t that old lol) meant you got the whole album WITH cool cover art and something to read along with it.

My name’s Dave, I grew up with computers but no internet (and certainly no twitter), and I speak for all us over 35ers who are still, we hope, relevant in this crazy super-fast world of ours.

Regarding our wacky crazy internets and how frustrating the lightening, twitter fast pace and constantly changing trends can be for the rest of us non-teenagers that didn’t grow up with it all. But in a way we did grow up with it, or a primitive version of it anyway, at least mostly. I’ll explain further on down, but it has to do with remote controls, the Brady Bunch (the show, not the movie), and The Force sans midichlorians. Here’s part one if you missed it or would care to refresh your memory or either found this page via hyperlink (yup, new to me too!), or else just don’t feel like scrolling (are you that lazy?).

So I’ve been thinking a lot about what this website is going to be all about, what my angle will be, that sort of thing. The more I’ve discovered just over the past couple of weeks the more I realize that my niche on these internets is right in front of my face, staring me down with tiny tweets and fast paced hecticism (yup, made it up. if it’s good enough for politicians it’s good enough for me, and doesn’t that word just sum it up perfectly anyway?).

Oh, and by the way, I do like twitter. I don’t ‘get it’ yet, but I like it. It’s neat, and you can connect with a lot of peeps all at once, and the fast pace can be entertaining, exciting even. I actually just learned about a new feature, the buffer I think it’s called, from a reader and I tried it out and it was pretty cool. But I think I’ll stick with Tweetdeck for now, it’s pretty simple and the graphics are like something out of STNG (if you don’t get that reference, you get a pass because you have to be a real Trekkie to get it and it’s a pretty old show at this point lol).

So anyway, give me a shout out on Twitter or, if you don’t bother with that stuff, feel free to leave a comment here. And do subscribe, because I’ll be updating this blog a lot and I hope to bring new and interesting commentary (and a few rants like this one) and would love to hear form you about what you’re interested in reading. Thanks!