Wormholes in the Information Universe
For some of you hunter/gatherers in the fields of information hoarding, this will be old news. But for others it may come (as it did for me) as a bit of a revelation.
Twitter lets you create curated lists of selected Twitter feeds you want to follow, or come back to, on a regular basis. Why? Because while you may follow thousands of others (if you are a regular social media back scratcher, especially) you don't necessarily want to wade the whole stream of tweets everyday, just in order to find the gems coming from people you trust on a particular topic.
Eyes On Earth shows 15 Twitter Lists, some our own, some from others we subscribe to. GO HERE
So, for instance, Andrew Revkin (longtime esteemed environmental blogger for the New York Times and now contributing his efforts to National Geographic) has a list he calls Green Blog Voices. These are the 20 environmental sources he relies on daily -- and trusts. And best of all, it's a public list; you can subscribe to the whole list and see what he's seeing. Or, you can cherry-pick ones that sound good to you and build your own. Either way you cut through a lot of clutter. It's like having a guru show you the secrets of the universe. No algorithm making coy choices about what you get to see and what you don't. (Also, you can have private lists, too, just for you to see and use.)
My Eyes On Earth partner Dennis Dimick has 22 lists, some he built, some he subscribes to. These include his own list Environmental Journalists, another that he subscribes to which is a handy one for journalism students called key-list-for-j-students (created by Journalism.co.uk), and one called Women in Energy (created by @JesseJenkins) of leading voices in the energy field.
I have 33 lists, some for work, some for fun. OK, (Scotland is for fun.) But Dark Sky takes me straight to the folks who are working on issues of light pollution.
If you want to make connections, Twitter is the place to do it. It's a wonder to see how a well-timed retweet with an intelligent comment will get you followed back (along with a kindly "thank you") from very powerful people. Twitter gets dinged for all sorts of shenanigans, but lurking in the background are smart people using it as a powerful tool in their information harvesting.
Eyes On Earth has created a few lists with students in mind. (And more will follow.) We've also included several of our favorites from others. For instance Photo List from Big Picture Agriculture is really a very comprehensive menu of top-notch photography feeds from around the web. GO HERE
