On Twitter and the Iran Riots

See this interesting short article about the role Twitter is playing in getting the word out about the unrest in Iran following the recent "election."

Twitter Experiment: Seneker Book in Bite-sized Chunks

As you may already know, last year I edited and published a book titled Frontier Experience or Epistolary Sesquipedalian Lexiphanicism from the Occident, by J.E.L. Seneker. This book was written in the 19th century, and was previously published in 1906. You can buy the book for just $15.95 at Amazon.com.

This book is very special, a unique piece of work. I've never seen another book like it. The story is pretty basic: letters describing his trip to the frontier west in the 1870s. But the telling is anything but simple. Seneker wrote by purposely using the biggest, most obscure words he could in every sentence of the book. It it really an amazing thing to behold, and a challenge to try to read. Fortunately, he provided a glossary on each facing page, so that you at least have a hope of understanding what he is talking about. I have a personal connection with the book: I'm related to Mr. Seneker, but there is more to the story... detailed in my preface. But I also just find the book hilarious to read, or to try to read I should say!

So here is my experiment with Twitter. I've set up an account on Twitter called Lexiphanicism. My plan is to tweet messages that are quotes from the book. In most cases these will come in batches of two, since many of the sentences in the book are more than 140 characters long (for non-Twitter users, know that 140 is the limit on Twitter messages).

Why am I doing this? Well, its an experiment. I see it as an opportunity to market this book using just about the hottest platform around today. Afterall, I published with Lulu.com, the popular self-publishing platform, so all marketing efforts are up to me!

But the nature of this book makes it difficult to read like a regular book. Many people have said they can only read a page at a time. So, it occurs to me that parsing it out as "Tweets" might be interesting -- if I do a tweet every day, or even every week, some people might enjoy that. So the idea is: if you follow the Lexiphanicism twitter account, you'll get an interesting puzzler to read on a regular basis.

Give it a try... I hope you like it!

Who Should I Be Following?

When stated like that, "Who Should I Be Following?" doesn't sound so good. What I mean is... on Twitter, what people should I add to the list that "follow"?

I've not blogged here at Philosopher Stone about my use of Twitter. I started late last year, right about the time that apparently Twitter's growth really started to skyrocket.

I get a lot of value from Twitter, especially professionally as I follow several dozen people who are in the Learning and Development field (sometimes called "Training and Development" or other similar names). I've listed some of these people at this posting at the Element K Blog (I'm the company blogger). The list is not complete, since I've added many others from the industry since then, but that gives you a sense of it.

But what about gurus, experts, smart people, technophile geeks, etc., who are not in the L&D field? I follow some people who specialize in different areas, and I get value from them too. But I'm sure there are many interesting people that I could add, and that I'm just not aware use Twitter. Here are the folks of this type that I already follow (in no particular order):

• davewiner / Dave Winer
• LanceUlanoff / Lance Ulanoff
• rohitbhargava / Rohit Bhargava
• ginatrapani / Gina Trapani
• Lifehacker
• thurrott / Paul Thurrott
• gtdguy / David Allen
• Scobleizer / Robert Scoble
• jimmy_wales / Jimmy Wales

So... who else would you recommend? Who are your favorite people who tweet, that you think have broad appeal along the lines I just described? Please give me their name and Twitter account name in a comment to this posting. Thanks!