Tag: twitter

Review: Podcamp Halifax 2015

This past Sunday there was an unconference at the Halifax Central Library: Podcamp Halifax 2015. Here are some tidbits and reflections based on my notes.1 General thoughts at the bottom.

These are the sessions I attended:

  1. Text and Context
  2. Community Building: Dungeons and Dragons Style
  3. Painting WITH Numbers: An Intro to Data Analysis
  4. Open House, Rusty Doors
  5. High Performance JavaScript
  6. Codcamp Halifax 2015

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  1. I’m not going to rate the presentations on a 0-to-10 scale like I usually do with my mini reviews. The presentations aren’t supposed to be set-in-stone choreographed song-and-dances anyway. In many cases I either might sort of come to know some of these people, or I have or might form opinions about them that would make me even less objective than usual. And with such an up-close-and-personal thing, I have to consider the feelings of the presenters.

    You also really don’t want to get into saying that any particular presentation would have been better than any other. Even if it’s nigh-objectively true and would be so for 99% of attendees, the truer any superiority becomes, the unkinder it gets to point it out. ↩

Heck yes, my RTs are endorsements

It bugs me a little bit when I see people put “RTs not endorsements” in their Twitter bios. “Hey, don’t look at me!” it seems to say. “I don’t necessarily agree with this stuff, I just thought it might be interesting! I’m just putting these words out there.”

Retweet

If you do a Google image search for “retweet” you should see a screenshot of this Tweet appear. The Twitter development folks put it up in their Web Intents guide. I love the ability of Twitter to virally spread wit and sometimes also more-accurate perceptions.

I can be a morally neutral agent, you see? Not only should you not judge me because judging itself seems unseemly, but in this case your judgements would be wrong whenever they would cast me in a negative light because my retweets aren’t endorsements. Now if you’ll excuse me, this interesting thing came up and I’m going to retweet it: The annual meeting of the Eliminate-All-XYZ-People Club is this Thursday at seven p.m.. But no, don’t worry, it’s not an endorsement! Ha-ha-ha, why would you ever think that?

Clearly there is something moral at work in every retweet. Whether or not we agree with the Tweet, we’re at least assuming that it’s moral that you see it, else we wouldn’t retweet it at all. We might have our minds changed (for us) after the fact, but for you, in the moment of retweeting, there wasn’t a strong enough moral objection to refrain from the retweet.

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