2007-07-10

Astronomy Bloggers and Twitter

It's two months now since I created a Twitter account and made my first post (mainly because of Stuart's rather neat back). Since then I've been trying to hunt down astronomy bloggers and astronomy related people/things on Twitter and adding them to my watch list.

Here's who/what I've got so far:

Anyone got any others? Am I missing a handy little source of instant updates?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

They're all the ones I know of too. Embarrassingly, I'm mostly responsible for seven of them. I'm really hoping that some other astronomy folk will get on there.

Dave Pearson said...

Yeah, I hope more do too. I'm also thinking that I might see about getting one going for the Society for Popular Astronomy, although getting actual content sorted out might take a little bit of doing.

I think the nice thing about it is the mixture of astronomy stuff along with the little snippets of personal stuff about those names you know. To me if feels like it adds to the little community of astronomy bloggers who are out there.

William Hudson said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
William Hudson said...

Ok, second try, without stuttering... :-)

Here's mine. I'm a California-based amateur with access to a permanently mounted 30-inch f/4.8 at Fremont Peak. Here's my blog.

Dave Pearson said...

Thanks for that William. I'm ashamed to say that I don't think I'd noticed your weblog before now.

Feed subscribed to and links added to the obvious places.

Anonymous said...

Dave .. not me ..I have enjoyed blogging since I started at Xmas, while being worried its a bit of self indulgence in the vacuum.. But Twitter ? Err .. why ? Isn't this like those people who make mobile calls every ten minutes, saying "I'm on the train. I'll call you later". ??

Dave Pearson said...

I suppose you could view it like that, but then you'd probably need to view blogging like that too.

Sure, there's lots (really, lots, I mean lots) of twitter accounts out there that tell you nothing more than "I just ate a Mars bar" or "I just got dressed", but the same's true for blogs too. Like with blogging, there's a useful side to it too.

Here I've got a jabber client window sat open, listening to all the twitter accounts I'm subscribed to. So, at any given moment, I can know where one of JB's telescopes are pointing (Geeky? Yes! Useful? Probably not. Fun? Yes, for me), I can know what the JodCast crew are up to, I can know what the JB people are planning, I can know if the Bad Astronomer is goofing off from writing his book, I can....

I guess what it all comes down to is another form of social networking. Keeping tabs on people you're interested in, and offering bits of information (some silly, some possibly interesting) to people who might be mad enough to be interested in you.

Or, put another way: just think Sturgeon's law and decide where your idea of the 10% is.

High Power Rocketry said...

: )