low post

This year’s web 2.0 expo in San Francisco was all about twitter – not literally, but you certainly couldn’t ignore twitter this year whereas it was relatively insignificant at last year’s event.

As a recent twitter user (have had an account since last year’s expo but only started using it in the last couple of months), I find that I use it primarily to follow interesting information but it has absolutely no “social” value for me at this point. Largely because I do not have a network of friends who use it – at least for now. As a result, I would say I’m 99.9% information consumer and 0.1% contributor. I do actually post frequent updates but it’s unclear to me at this point if anyone reads them and, for the most part, they are not tweets that would be classified as useful. Still, much like this blog, I think that it’s important for me to take part to be involved in the technology and possibly even find new and different social interactions.

While I continue to play around with twitter on a day-to-day basis, it was at web 2.0 expo that I saw the value of twitter in a conference setting. By using the search feature, I continually tracked all tweets tagged as #w2e which gave me a real-time insight into the all the various goings on and commentary at and around the conference. Furthermore, most speakers used twitter along with a keyword/tag to take questions in real-time during their presentations. Of course this went further then simply questions and allowed people (including myself) to post supplementary information about a given topic to other attendees and/or make comments throughout. I found this to be extremely valuable and it allowed me to “virtually” attend certain sessions that I couldn’t get to.

The twitter eco-system is certainly evolving rapidly. It will be interesting to see where it goes. Will twitter become the facebook of 2006 in Toronto where, in a matter of weeks, the entire “connected” city opened accounts 2 years ago? in 2009, I believe the value and long-term viability of facebook is still unclear. Will twitter take the same uncertain path?

Welcome to my blog. I have attempted to do this a few times but have failed as I felt I needed to have something to post for other people and not myself. This time, I’m going to take the approach of writing a blog for myself, that will hopefully appeal to at least a few people out there. If it doesn’t, that’s ok – it allows me to explore something that I haven’t explored before and will hopefully let me learn a few things along the way.

Now, for the name… The Low Post. This comes from my love of basketball. The low post in basketball refers to the area almost under the hoop and on either side (post) of the key. It seemed like a fitting name given the “posting” nature of blogs and that there are always a lot of good things that a player can do if they get good position in the low post and have some skills.

In the end, the title of the blog does not describe a theme or anything else that might guide people to read this. It simply sounded good to me.

Getting to what I hope to do on this… well, I don’t know for sure. I suspect I will use it to comment on the things I enjoy in the world of technology for the most part and possibly a little sports. Mostly, I’ll just use it as a place to write about the things that are of interest to me at any point. Hopefully you will find some of these things interesting as well.

I’m just about to leave for the web 2.0 expo in San Francisco and expect to find at least a few topics and ideas that will inspire some posts.