This morning (August, 2, 2010) one of the first things to come across my screen was that it was Mike Haley‘s birthday. By the time I opened Twitter and caught my first glimpses of my tweet stream, it was loudly mooing! The laughter and memories had struck me before the loudness of Twitter but it sure made me laugh.
A year ago, I didn’t have a blog. And some of my closest friends today were just sort of names in the tweetstream. August 2 was a Sunday, the Sunday that I traveled to Fort Worth for the Agricultural Media Summit. My morning was spent in airports and getting to the hotel. I still remember having UberTwitter up in the cab and mooing like nobody’s business.
I registered for the conference (while mooing mobile), joined the conference well underway. I listened to the speaker some and continued mooing through retweets & comments. I was thrilled to tell someone it had in fact trended – they looked at me like I was insane.
Later that afternoon as sessions cleared, I spent a while in my hotel room directing people to Ray Prock’s blog and the what the hashtag page. What a rush!
Will Gilmer did a great job of placing people’s tweets in context with a reposting of last year’s blog. And I enjoy reading his first-hand account of the #moo fest as it was underway (love the shoutout)! The fun was mixed with serious undertones last year as well. I’m one of the folks who doesn’t always think about what goes into each of my snacks or meals — I think it would be overwhelming to ALWAYS remember — but I certainly have learned a lot more about what’s going on in some of the parts of agriculture I didn’t use to have touch points in.
Social media has given me a range of perspectives. And whenever folks ask me about what a single farmer can do I point to the increase in my individual understanding and the ripple effect that comes from me passing that along to my friends and family. Oh, and sometimes I let out a #moo with a grin.
I’m feeling like I missed the boat! What is mooing, and what are hashtags. My education in the technical world is lacking!
Lana,
I’m sorry, that is probably a good question to a lot of people! On Twitter, people send short messages (just 140 characters or less). On of the things you can do is use what’s called a hashtag – simply the # sign with a word – that provides a search of the latest things on Twitter.
In this case, people tweeted something about loving dairy products or their cattle, etc and put a #moo in the tweet. That way other people could do a quick search & see what was being said about it. There were a lot of us who were explaining what was happening with dairy economics, and sending links to magazine articles, etc to help increase understanding. .
You can see what’s happened most recently in #moo by going to http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23moo
Hope that helps! If not, keep asking questions!
jp