This is how twitter works

It is extremely hard to describe twitter to anyone who has not actually tried it. I was reading over the tweets this evening and there was a shout out to Steve Sokoloski's post. He has written a beautiful description of his experience with twitter and lurking. It is very close to my experience, too. Thank you Steve for getting the words to come together.

Going from reading blogs to actively participating in Twitter is like going from the garden hose to the firehose. In reading blogs I could pick up an idea here, and idea there. With Twitter, it is a constant flow, in real time. Really smart people, talking in real time to other really smart people and posting links about what they are checking out. The pace of new ideas has grown exponentially.
Twitter has provided a view into other professional’s lives. They all do not do exactly the same job as me but as others have tweeted I have found that lots of other tech educators are like me. They have their computers on beyond work hours. They work hard at their jobs in the hours beyond work. They try to balance family and technology. I am not nuts to do what I do. There are people like me out there. Lots of folks are puzzled, confused and trying to make sense of all of this stuff, and working hard outside of school to try new things and work it all out. They are thoughtful, wise, kind, and funny.

Steve Sokoloski

Giant Global Graph

Tim's blog has a very lengthly, yet fascinating explanation of the Internet - the Web and his new term, the Graph of links. Tim has been promoting the Semantic Web and the ability the semantic web would provide to connect bits of data across the web, so that web pages are no long the important bookmark, data is. Using rdf tagging, and other software types, information may be linked and reused separate from the page on which it appears. It is very exciting, and something I've been following for the past several years, as Tim continues to explain it and promote it. Here's his description of the graph:
In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That’s what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary. tim berners-lee