Don’t build walls! Twitter’s new API

I logged into my blog tonight intending to write about the life of an academic with reference to the “true” meaning of spring break. What I didn’t realize when I went to update my plug-ins was that a change in Twitter’s API would render my Twitter app for WordPress useless (I use Twitter Widget Pro …

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Dealing with Draco: Twitter and holiday travel woes

This saga begins with an all-too-common experience: Trying to get a relative home for Christmas. But for me, this became a cautionary tale on how companies can fail using social media, particularly Twitter, to help out stranded customers – or how they can succeed. My sister Amanda was supposed to be coming home to Madison …

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Multi-modality debating: How social media (especially Twitter) are changing the presidential debates

How we choose to watch political debates changes what we get out of them. That’s not really news: scholars have been discussing this effect since the first televised presidential debates in 1960. Popular wisdom suggested Nixon’s poor appearance (“death-like”) on TV hurt his standing compared to Kennedy’s vitality, later supported by finding that people who …

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Google+: Doing too much to succeed?

As someone who was pretty enthusiastic about the potential of Google+, I’m sad to admit that I’ve been disenchanted lately. Although I have a lot of friends who relentlessly enumerate its benefits and try to convince everyone to join, I wonder if Google+ will be able to overcome its biggest challenge: the fact that Facebook simply …

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Is Twitter outgrowing itself? Disengagement on this “social” media

I haven’t always been a fan of Twitter. For years, I was completely unconvinced of its utility – I couldn’t see the point in yet another social networking site with even more mundane status updates. But I changed my mind during the Wisconsin protests at the beginning of this year, in which social media – and …

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