Field of Science

The Reski Laboratory on Twitter

I just discovered that the Reski Laboratory is on twitter. They study the moss Physcomitrella patens at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

I am tossing around the idea of using twitter when I don't have time for longer blog postings. I signed up for an account to check it out and you can link to it here (Not that I have twittered anything yet). I am trying to wrap my mind around how I would use it and how it might add to the blogging. We shall see. It is another experiment!

Feel free to leave a comment about this new experiment to use twitter in association with this blog for communicating science and all that is mossy to a broader audience.
What do you think?
Yes, twitter is great and it will add to the blog.
No, twitter is evil and focusing on more blog posts would be time better spent.

5 comments:

  1. I have thus far avoided signing up for twitter. To put it simply, I just don't get. Please let me know if you come up with a compelling reason why I should sign up.

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  2. So my latest brainstorm is that I could do daily fun bryology factoids. Blogger has a application where the twitter updates appear in the blog's sidebar. So, no twitter signup would be necessary to see the factoids.

    But yeah I am pretty skeptical about twitter myself, but maybe fun facts will make it more than just "I am tying my shoes now" posts. We shall see.

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  3. I was skeptical about Twitter, but since I started using it, the traffic to my website and blog have quadrupled. If you just write a blog post, it gets seen by your regular readers and maybe a few people who stumble onto it through search engines. If you write a blog post and then post a quick tweet and link about it, your regular readers know about it sooner (cause some of them are likely following you on twitter as well). If it is interesting, they retweet it and a larger audience of people who know nothing about you hear about it. They retweet it and the word spreads. Some of these new people (who you didn't know, but who share interests with you) start following you on twitter, you start following some of them and now you've got an entire network of people pointing you toward things you might be interested in, and pointing other people to your work. I highly recommend it.
    It can get out of control though. I use it specifically for one area of interest and ONLY follow people who tweet about things in that interest area. I drop the "I'm sitting by the pool drinking lemonade" tweeters unless their other posts are really providing me useful links or info that I don't see retweeted on any of my other follows.

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  4. Oh... and I would probably follow a fun moss facts twitter feed...

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  5. or better yet (well, maybe?) ..... you can follow "all" bryological posts around the globe if shared/aggregated in a single feed, such as BryoSphere on FriendFeed. That´s the idea!

    ReplyDelete

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