Right on the heals of complaining about my bad habit of information foraging, I stumbled upon a very good way to search Twitter for interesting anthropology links. I know some people are convinced Twitter is the end of civilization as we know it, but as Chuck Tryon explains:
articles that complain about Twitter typically focus on the content of individual tweets rather than focusing on those tweets in a specific context. It would be similar to denigrating conversation by pulling out individual pieces of dialogue rather than seeing how conversation involves a variety of practices
Twitter is only as good as the conversation you are having – and that depends on finding interesting people to follow on Twitter. I recently discovered that you can filter Twitter search results for posts which contain anthropology related links. The only problem is that many of the results are links to various Twitter services that let you find other anthropologists on Twitter. By excluding “twitter” from the search you end up with a fascinating feed of what people are reading, watching, and thinking about in the anthropological twitterverse. For instance, I just discovered the SFAA Podcasts twitter feed!
OK, now back to complaining about information overload!
A fascinating feed to nowhere…
Sorry about that! Fixed.
Another search tip for Twitter is to look for phrases, like “about culture” or “on anthropology”, which are likely to point to resources of interests to anthros. Because Twitter is so limited, there’s only a small number of ways to easily point out info for anthros, so a couple of variations should be plenty.
and for those of us who just haven’t really explored twitter yet — go to search.twitter.com to do those searches!