What I Learned from Twitter Today

This summer, my attempt to get a second job is being interrupted by my desire to put more self-improvement practices into play. So instead of getting a job, I'm really working on myself this summer. First, I decided I need to make better friends with the huge number of people I know and like, but don't spend time with. Second, I looked at what things I have an interest in and what opportunities I have to put my time and energy into which will reflect my values more. Third, I am looking for ways I can work towards my future goals and things I can learn that will help me later, professionally. Fourth, I am spending time working on my physical health.

So in my second part of my goal, I am putting time and energy into volunteering at the Janet C. Anderson Gender Resource Center at ISU. It was the first place I was given an opportunity to learn what I wanted to know, and get paid for it. I also know they took a very large cut financially from the ISU budget cuts. It seems like a good place where my talents can be put to use.

In the third part of my goal, I want to learn and improve on skills that are practical and even neccessary for organizations I would like to work with in the future. For this reason I am teaching myself XHTML, CSS, and some other fancy languages so I can design and maintain websites. I had planned on going to school for it, but I'm so sick of school right now, and itching to get on with my life outside of Pocatello, Idaho, I didn't want to add 1 more year to my time.

To mix my marketing knowledge and my professional skills, and my interest in acitivsm, I've been learning how to use social networking for marketing. I am working on 3 marketing plans for the JCA Center surrounding events and one of the ways I wanted to improve the center and move them to the next level is by using Twitter. But I get a little distracted sometimes.

I've been addicted to search.twitter.com lately. My favorite search phrases have been NPR, Women, womyn, Gender, ISU, Pocatello, and Poky. But really, the one that is the most fascinating is what people are saying about "gender". As a hashtag "#gender" it doesn't come up much, but when reading through other posts it is a common theme that regularly gets ignored.

For people who don't know what a #hashtags is, check out
http://twitter.pbworks.com/Hashtags. The cool thing about hashtags are that they are meant to be followed. I also like them because they are used to put context on some posts people make. So, for example, you may say "found a place to stay on couchsurfing.org" then #hashtag it with #travel or a place you are talking about like #SLC. They are often implicit references to topics.

I don't expect others to be as highly interested in twitter or gender as I am, but I have been spending a lot of time trying to understand all the neat Twitter possibilities for activism and education and the absence of hashtags is one of those things I noticed when I asked "what are people not saying". This came about because of an article that someone was RTing (re-tweeting) when I searched for "gender". Select bits were posted in the previous blogpost.

So, by searching for "gender" rather then #gender, I get to see what people are talking and thinking about in-the-now. I'm not sure where I was going with this, but if I remember, I'll e-mail a post about it from the car. Currently I am headed down to SLC and the Spanish Fork, Utah to learn about Hinduism.

I'll be posting some pictures from my trip here on my blog as well.

I'll come back to "what I learned on twitter today" next week.