DISQUS

I was particularly grateful for the Carver poem, which I emailed to a friend going through a rough time immediately after you tweeted it. He just loved it, so thank you for that - I've read all Carver's prose, but hadn't read his poetry.

Couldn't agree with your list of 10 best novels, except for the first one, The Great Gatsby. But then judging writing is an admittedly subjective thing.

It was a fun experiment. And great to see you don't default on your bets (being politically and ethnically correct there). ;)

As someone who's always believed it's important to stand up and be counted, I too have been saddened to see how empowered many of my fellow humans are by the concept of anonymity. It's one of the things I really like about Twitter and the transparency that's evolved as one of the underlying tenets of social media.

I still struggle to try to assess how a comment on an online article relates, in terms of numbers, to the traditional snail mail letter to the editor (which they used to say 1/1000 people wrote). My sense is that now that it's easier to engage with media, more people are doing so. And that can only be a good thing.

You'll never be able to please all of the people any of the time. But the chances that you'll please any of them are pretty much nil if you don't even try. :)

The person you "feel" is most likely to respond? Perhaps test the theory before unfollowing all but one person on the list? I agree Twitter is about exchanging information and having conversations, that it's not a broadcast medium. I don't consider being followed back by the people I'm following to be the criterion though. If I send someone @ messages and they answer me, I don't care whether they follow me or not. Even following 300 people is huge investment of my time; to follow 1000 or more merely because that's who's following you is - why - it's madness, I tell you! ;)

So is the TTC going to post it on its web site? Get a blog? ;) It's a great song.

Thanks for the reminder about The Shuffle Demons - love those guys - downloading their 2004 Greatest Hits album as soon as I finish this post.

The challenge of blogging is word processing software interferes with blogging software (at least MS Word does with WordPress). Having said that, I'd add, for crying out loud, there's a spell check feature - USE IT!

I wrote a relevant post a while ago (http://nospinpr.com/2008/11/20/ten-mistakes-beg...). It's a long post, but this paragraph includes a link to some pretty high journalistic standards I think all bloggers should try to follow:

"The Canadian Press Stylebook was long considered the ‘bible’ for Canadian journalists but I prefer the Globe and Mail Style Book. The CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices are among the most stringent in Canada. It’s also still one of the best newsgathering organizations in the world." http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/accountability/j...

Do you think Twitter will ever provide options for rearranging information (you know, the way you can just click a button in Outlook and find your most recent or your least recent emails?). I find many people are disconcerted by having to read from bottom to top, and when people aren't using hashtags, the easiest way to follow the live Tweets of event coverage is to look just at the person Tweeting's messages so you don't have to filter out the Tweets from everyone else you're following.

This is wonderful news. When you're reading an actual newspaper it's easy enough to use the computer at the same time to 'research the research' but it's much harder to do that online, flipping from one screen to another.