February 27, 2009

Twitter it, just a little bit

Yes like seemingly everyone else in the country, we joined Twitter this week.



Now, there just isn't I haven't seen all that much "tweeting" about poverty happening out there in the known Twitterverse. These matters are beyond the pale for most Twitterers. And it's not yet easy for me to imagine how to meaningfully communicate about these matters in 140 characters. But I've already found quite a few food banks using it, and some legal aid services using it, [UPDATE] and there seems to be a lot of noise about a film called A Powerful Noise.

So we're not yet sure exactly what we're going to do with this tool. Right now it's just a shiny toy. Suggestions for its use are welcome.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why do you assume people who use twitter are somehow different from you? Who do you thing twitterers are? To make a sweepingly general statement that twitterers aren't "tweeting" much about poverty is rather bizarre. I did a search on the term "poverty" just now and found these tweets:

She can't understand @bhenn - actually it's trickle-up poverty. #tcot

tweet to help end poverty?!?! I'M IN! #apowerfulnoise

I want to create healthy millionaires by pulling people out of poverty and debt and destroying sickness and disease in 2009

"Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth. Socialism is the equal distribution of poverty." Winston Churchill

http://tinyurl.com/arkjmq - Help raise money to end global poverty just by tweeting!

Just finished an article about how financial sector development, labor mobility, poverty, and land ownership effect wage elasticity

I know this is starting to sound like a sappy movie, but of all the poverty I witnessed that week, this was the first time I cried.

reporting on India: Slumdog Oscar wins prompts soul searching for India elite - Are they oblivious to all the slums and poverty?

clevelandhomeless.blogspot.com providing weekly grades of the Obama administrations efforts to combat poverty. Interesting idea, done well.

Poverty and homelessness WAY UP in Tucson. Pass on the word that more is needed for National Service stipends for AmeriCorps VISTA

I could go on to list 99 additional tweets on the word "poverty"- and that's just for 03/01/09.

I counted 88 tweets using the word "poverty" for the day of your post. I used Tweetscan to do this search. Tweetscan may or may not capture all tweets, so there could be more. But even if there weren't more, note that I only searched on the term "poverty", not "poor" not "low income" not "impoverished" nor any of the many other words and phrases we use to discuss poverty.

Greg Bloom said...

Yes, good point! The "known twitterverse" to which I referred in that sentence was actually *my own known twitterverse*. And while that TwitterPacks page is sorta useful, it's obviously not meant to be anything like a comprehensive resource. ~sorry for the solipsism~ And plus, our twitter followers have already pointed out that we may as well be the ones to assemble a Poverty Twitterpack. This is a learning experience indeed.