Twit Dah Twit Dah Twit Dah

Twitter Data Portraits from alex dragulescu on Vimeo.

When twitter hit the scene I was very intrigued. I heard a lot of skepticism on the street but the idea of a pure and simple text based application will always be near and dear to my heart. The economy of a 140 character post is genius and lends itself to poetics. We're now in the age of micro - blogging, customer service, life observation, political reporting, activism, comedy, philosophy, weather reports, it goes on and on. Follow and be followed. Through the window of a page of collective steams there's a wonderful sense of now.

Twitter Tools

TwitThis
TinyURL has been around a long time and proved invaluable in wrangling unruly easily broken link that string on for miles. Thanks to TwitterThis, the marriage between TinyURL and Twitter, it's now easier than ever to post URLs to your twitter stream.

The FAVRD Lens on Twitter
FAVRD lists interesting things that show up on Twitter, based on the number of times an item has been declared a ‘favorite’.

TweetDeck
Organize and manage twitter feeds. TweetDeck, "aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces. Tweet Deck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets."

The We Feel Fine of Twitter
Twistori Enjoy!

Add an i-phone and a sprinkle of GPS
You get Twinkle

Connect your IM with Twitter
Excla.im is a nice app by developer and master of web presence, Harper Reed.

Voice to Twit
Jott transcribes voice messages into twitters.

The Whitney - Contributing to Community Discourse on Art by Sharing

I've been looking for new books on live art and sound this morning. An odd inclination considering the fairly intangible and the dynamic nature of these forms. Definitely challenging forms to find well documented in books.

To get started I looked up a Paul McCarthy show I saw this past summer at the Whitney in NYC hoping to find a nice monograph of his work or possibly a DVD. Instead, I was delighted to discover that the Whitney has begun to create editorial content of their past shows with commentary from the curators. The truly delightful part-- the video pieces are enabled for pass along, hence this post. Now I have a high-quality video document that I can share.

This find on the Whitney site also touches on an important discussion I've been participating in of over the years as a faculty member at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago about how the distributed content model can be utilized in the curriculum. Without taking a deep dive into facets of that discussion I'd just like to say that the world's collective, virtual library is in need of quality content on art and culture and it's a huge plus that it's enabled for distribution. There's plenty of teaser content promoting shows but this is the good stuff.

I hope art institutions and galleries will follow and enable their archives of documentation to be integrated into online community discourse. It will definitely help me in my job as an educator to inspire and inform students of contemporary work.

Check out Whitney Focus where they push content to the space where the masses are searching:

Whitney Focus on blip.tv

Whitney Focus on YouTube


'Whitney Focus features interviews with artists and curators, as well as other video-based content, offering a unique and up-close view of Whitney exhibitions and programs.'