Virtual Colleagues
I'm now about four months into my "Twitter Experiment," and I can confirm that my initial skepticism was entirely misplaced. I have been intrigued, delighted, inspired, and educated by micro-blogging in ways I could never have guessed before. I remember vividly the day my ad agency had its first email system installed. By the next week, it seemed to me that the sheer velocity of thinking and transacting had radically increased. And I have the same feeling now about my own intellectual growth. I'm learning more, faster, and more conveniently than ever before.
As I write this I'm an official blogger at the World Business Forum, which means I tweet it out to those who follow me, and I watch for some of the other bloggers' tweets, re-tweeting those I feel are really insightful, etc. We had a dinner last night - all 50-some-odd bloggers that HSM, the conference organizer, has corralled into following the event. But truth is, I only know five or six of them by sight, I have to look at the name tags for everyone else, and I still haven't met everyone on the blogging team. But in tweeting, we all use the hash tag symbol #wbf09 so we can follow the stream of each others' thoughts.
One of the bloggers whose tweets I've particularly liked has been Seth Kahan, and I've retweeted him several times (@SethKahan). So here I am now, at break, waiting for Bill Clinton to come on the stage as the finale act at 4:30, and I turn to the guy sitting next to me and shake hands, say "hi, how are you" and so forth. But guess what? It's Seth Kahan. And we feel like we know each other already!
