Flashes of Panic

Three things pushed me into microblogging.

Before I was pushed, my thinking was (and, to some degree, still is,) “OK, lots of people are using this, but I have a lot of distractions already, and I don’t see what I gain to balance that downside.” So I stayed out. (You’ll remember I did this once before.)

(Also notice that I’m using the phrase “microblogging” rather than “Twitter.” I’ll get there, I promise.)

The three things that pushed me over, roughly in chronological order, are these:

• The “blog” that I’ve done for iaaf.org for three major events now is going to be more like a microblog this year; if some of the features they’ve discussed actually happen, I’ll be getting comments and questions directly through their CMS, and possibly also on a bridge to Twitter or another microblogging service like identi.ca. So I’m headed there anyway.

• Our office network link went down, and my co-workers were tracking the scale of the outage and restoration of service using #verizonfail.

• A said to me, “You know, you should try this…”

So, with reservations, I signed up.

To avoid this becoming too long, I have two more posts coming, which hopefully I will finish before Labor Day: what my reservations are (I still have them) and the technical system I’m in the process of setting up.