Orange: the only juice for which manufacturers can claim, “No no, we meant the COLOUR.” Bemused by people who can afford a computer and broadband but email me because they’ve run out of prepay minutes on their phone. If Beck and Palin had announced their 2012 Presidential candidacy on 9/11, then the terrorists would have won. Also, the Mayans. On the cover of Handwriting Analysis for Dummies, the title is set in Comic Sans. What is the author trying to hide? An online review of Decline and Fall describes Evelyn Waugh as “not my favorite post-modern author.” God bless user-created content. Imagined UC Library suggestion box: “Could the ‘Library is being munted by an earthquake’ announcements be in English and Māori, please.” My friend’s new kitchen has so much cupboard space it could inconspicuously house a small nocturnal child. It’s all fun and games until the pale-skinned sunbather realises the swan thinks he is a lady swan. Even if a student has an amusing name, I really shouldn’t make up nursery rhymes about them. Force de frappe. Does anyone have a wussier name for its nuclear arsenal than France? Scary as a wet slap. Why are those folks most clueless about the internet—even self-described technophobes—the ones convinced they can make money off it? Ignorance is seen as a barrier to getting rich from medicine, property investment, or racehorse breeding. But the Web’s fair game, it seems. My mum, looking for an easy-to-remember phone number, was chuffed to find that one ending in “666” was strangely not taken. Now every time I call her I shall think, “Hail Satan, Mum.” @adzebill

Natural disasters create a surge of helplessness in those not directly affected. Many people want to do something concrete, something more than a quick donation or a Like on Facebook. Nowadays this desire to help can be harnessed by social media, but it’s easy to waste the time and goodwill of volunteers if this isn’t managed well.

On October 5th, the cargo ship Rena ran aground on a reef near Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty, a couple of hour’s drive from Auckland, New Zealand. It leaked 350 tonnes of fuel oil, which blanketed nearby beaches and killed or injured dozens of seabirds and seals, among them Blue Penguins (Eudyptula minor), the most common penguin species around New Zealand coasts. Thousands of volunteers went to Tauranga to help shovel oil-soaked sand, and veterinary specialists set up a facility for cleaning oil-soaked birds. The Rena spill was and is a national tragedy, and all around the country people wanted to know what they could do to help.

Back in 2000 a similar oil spill near Phillip Island, Australia, left many Blue Penguins oil-covered, and a bird rescue team through trial and error developed a little knitted sweater (or jumper, in Australian) that would keep them warm and stop them from preening oily feathers. The Tasmanian Conservation Trust organised a knitting drive, hoping volunteers could supply them with 100 or so. As often happens with unmanaged email requests, it was wildly over-successful: they ended up with 15,000. The Trust page now politely requests people stop sending them jumpers; they’re supposedly filling a small room somewhere waiting for a gigantic oil spill, but are actually being sold at the Phillip Island gift shop, adorning toy penguins.

© saskyumchar on Ravelry

Six days after the Rena grounded, in a discussion forum on the knitting website Ravelry, one keen knitter posted the Australian penguin sweater pattern, and said a friend’s daughter was in contact with the bird rescue crew, and there were Blue Penguins in need of sweaters. A Napier wool shop, Skeinz, volunteered to receive completed sweaters and send them on to Tauranga. Having seen what happened in Australia, I created a Ravelry project page that anyone knitting could link to, partly to make gallery of completed sweaters, but mostly so there was a single place that allowed control over the message and would let me notify knitters when enough had been received.

My concern from the start was that we had no direct link to actual rescue workers: our only contact was the coordinator’s friend’s daughter, who was “in touch with” the veterinarians (note the similarity to that classic “friend-of-a-friend” setup we see in urban legends), and all communication was by two-stage mail, channeled through Skeinz in Napier. The coordinator at Skeinz then went on holiday, and the fun began.

First the pattern was linked to by multiple different forums in Ravelry, and knitters from all over the world got busy. Then it started being emailed to knitters not on the network. Most critically, the call to action, full pattern, and mailing address were posted in the Skeinz online newsletter, where anyone could link to it, up to October 25th. And link to it they did: knitting blogs, conservation websites, the popular craft site Etsy, the Huffington Post, and the world’s most-read blog, BoingBoing.

© beforesunrise on Ravelry

Hundreds of sweaters started flooding in, far outnumbering the rescued penguins. Skeinz was contacted by local and international media wanting pictures of cute penguins in sweaters. The organiser’s holiday coincided with a long weekend, so there was another delay in shutting down the campaign. But by now the horse had bolted, as the online newsletter content remained unchanged and was easy enough to copy and paste into emails; the penguin sweaters had gone viral.

And by now it turned out that none—not one—of the sweaters was actually used. The rescued penguins were being kept in warm water and recovering under heat lamps, much less stressful for wild birds than dressing them in a cute knitted sweater. Nobody seems to have asked the vets and rescue workers if they in fact needed penguin sweaters, and those interviewed seemed a bit surprised by the international knitting effort.

The end result is that “hundreds, possibly thousands” of unneeded sweaters will continue arriving at Skeinz. The organiser claimed, “the sweaters were a way for people to help, even if they weren’t going to be used.” Apparently the sweaters will be sent to a conservation group in Australia, though with crates of penguin jumpers already in storage it’s hard to see when they’ll ever be needed; some might be sold for unspecified fund-raising purposes. It all seems like rather a poor use of thousands of hours of volunteer effort: the knitters would have made more of a difference supplying gloves and hats for the volunteer clean-up crew, or donating a few dollars to Greenpeace, or writing to their MP with their views on maritime safety or offshore oil drilling. Knitters didn’t sign up to make sweaters for sale; they made them for penguins.

© jenromero on Ravelry

So history repeats itself in the Great Penguin Sweater Call To Arms, and the result is once again squandered effort and goodwill. This is an example of how not to use social media to rally the troops; how should a similar effort be organised in the future? Enlisting the crafting skills of volunteers really can work: see for example the knitting drives of WWII, the Knitted Periodic Table project, or the campaign to knit a cosy for the shipping containers of Christchurch. Here’s what I’d do, if we had a chance to rerun the project:

1. Set up a dedicated website: say, using a WordPress blog (these can be updated from any computer) or even a Facebook fan page. Registering a domain name would help its credibility and make for more concise links.
2. Make sure all URLs in tweets, emails, and forum postings point to that top-level domain name (e.g. www.volunteerproject.org), not an individual page with a knitting pattern (www.volunteerproject.org/whattoknit.html).
3. Get the visible support of the group being helped: say, a short message and photo from them on the home page. In this case, perhaps show a sweater actually being worn by an actual rescued Tauranga penguin. Most importantly, the group being helped should also have editing privileges for the site, so they can correct mistakes and add a news release as soon as any target is reached.
4. Date-stamp everything, especially any page that might be linked to or emailed out of context. Add day-to-day updates on targets: the number of rescued birds, how many sweaters received, and so on, so volunteers can judge whether their effort is still needed.
5. Keep any pattern or instructions from being emailed. Make the instructional text hard to copy and paste by embedding pictures and CSS styles, so it’s more convenient for a supporter to just pass on the page URL (write out the URL on the page itself and tell them to only mail this). Block search engine spiders so the pattern won’t be indexed (and cached) by Google, only the home page. The goal is to have the pattern existing in just one place, on that web page.
6. Put the mailing instructions on a different page from the pattern, preferably the main page. Make sure this has a press kit link and instructions for media, in case the whole thing goes viral.
7. And when the target is reached, put a big THANK YOU on the home page, post a gallery of the finished project (say, happy penguins in their sweaters), and… take the pattern down.

Phrase I did not expect to read in a Dashiell Hammett crime story: ‘“I knew a fellow once in Onehunga,” he drawled…’ (Nightmare Town, 1924) Amazingly, nostalgic about paying $14 to see a DVD projected onto a screen the size of a bath towel in a 15-seat cinema. Much like watching at home, except you can’t pause for toilet breaks, and there are three complete strangers on your couch. Great Zoological Discoveries 27: Cows sound just like people saying “moo”. Or, sometimes, trying to muffle screams of agony. Amazing new tool for de-cluttering computer desktop: put everything in a folder called “Desktop [Sort]”, never to be heard from again. I used to be disgusted by people who ate raw cookie dough, but now I find there are folks who eat raw frozen pizza. Thanks, Internet. Why should del.icio.us be the only one having fun with country codes? Quick, nicega.ms is free. Also goldarn.it, gottabe.in, iyamwhati.am, fakesteve.jobs, and (very proud of this) jorgeluisb.org.es Kazakhstan is apparently still hung up on Borat. Just let it go, Kazakhstan. Let it go. Everything made much more sense when I realized Tom Waits is a werewolf. If you see a car with Hawai’i plates in the mainland US and steal it, there’ll be a pot of gold in the trunk and you’ll get a wish. I think we’re all in agreement that the biggest letdown with Inception was the lack of a Joseph Gordon-Levitt dance sequence. Call me stuffy, but I refuse to buy my kazoos from someone who believes in Atlantis. Dear Mr Obama: why not come and be President of New Zealand? I guarantee less than 18% of us think you’re Muslim. Apparently I appeared in a friend’s dream and yelled, “You can’t stomp on Incas: they’re part of history!” I’d heard of Robert Evans’ success, downfall, comeback, book, audiobook, and movie, but a cartoon show too? That, my friends, is a career. The fastest starfish is the Sunflower Star, Pycnopodia helianthoides, which can reach 75 cm/minute, or 0.045 km/hr. Starfish racing would be like greyhound racing, but more restful. And with a terrified fleeing abalone. @adzebill

Auteurs are not like you and me. For example, the German director Werner Herzog is at first glance something of an eccentric. When you learn more about him, however, you realise he is not simply an eccentric, but an ECCENTRIC, written in foot-high capitals carved into an enormous granite boulder that has crushed our will to live.

Recently there was a fad for listing fake facts about actor Chuck Norris: “When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down.” These even have their own website, novelty book, and amusing t-shirt.

After reading a recent interview, I realised that one could compile a similar list of Facts About Werner Herzog.

It would be just like chucknorrisfacts.com, except everything would be true.

1. Werner Herzog was invited to guest star on The Simpsons, but asked for a DVD because he had never seen an episode.
2. Werner Herzog saw Avatar, but didn’t care what happened in it.
3. Herzog was once shot during an interview but rather than stop, tell the police, or get first aid, he kept speaking dourly.
4. Herzog hates introspection so much he won’t look in a mirror and so doesn’t know the colour of his own eyes.
5. To propose to his wife, Werner Herzog walked a thousand miles across the Alps, because that is what a manly man does.
6. Herzog (unlike Oliver Stone) read the Warren Commission Report into the JFK Assassination. He quite enjoyed it.
7. Werner Herzog only respects people who know how to milk a cow, and he can tell who knows how just by looking at them.
8. Klaus Kinski and Herzog simultaneously plotted to kill each other; Herzog was about to firebomb Kinski’s house, but was too scared of his big dog.
9. More people die in Werner Herzog’s movies than Chuck Norris’s if you count his crew.
10. Herzog thinks of himself as a little girl in a fairy tale who steps out at night and holds open her apron and stars rain into it.

If you were to put these on a t-shirt, I think Herzog himself would hunt you down, fix you with his pitiless gaze, and anatomise your sad buttonless-shirt-wearing hipsterness until you cried. This is, after all, a man who really believes the twentieth century was a mistake; the entire twentieth century. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

Never wear shoes you wouldn’t walk in for an hour.

I ditched the car when I was halfway home. The Riccarton Road traffic was inching along, and walking was looking more and more sensible. I watched a stream of pedestrians straggling away from the shattered central city, where my apartment was. One I suddenly recognised. In fact, we’d broken up the day before. I pulled over and hugged her, these being, after all, exceptional circumstances. She had checked my apartment on the way out of town—it was standing and didn’t look damaged—and then she was off one way, me the other. At that point driving was becoming increasingly nonsensical, so I parked in a side street and set off home on foot. For some reason, I’d decided that morning to wear uncomfortable dress shoes, and soon regretted it. Never again will I wear shoes I can’t walk in should there be a natural disaster.

I was on the ground floor, about to get my photo taken by a university PR person, when the earthquake shook us like a dog. I wish she’d gotten that shot, just to see the expression on our faces. I’m my workplace Health & Safety warden, and through a odd coincidence just a couple of hours before had attended a training session on what to do in case of an earthquake, so was able to busily usher people out from under tables and shoo them outside, checking each office for stragglers on the way.

It wasn’t until we were all milling in the parking lot that I realised I’d left my phone in the building, along with my jacket, keys, wallet, ID, pocket knife, camera, and laptop: essentially, everything I need to exist. The next time evacuation, be it building, crashed aeroplane, or burning car, I ignore official instructions and grab jacket and bag on the way. At this point, there was no obvious damage to the university. One of the students asked me if lectures would be cancelled for the rest of the day. Probably yes, I said. We watched cars wobble back and forth in another aftershock, and I knew, with mounting anxiety, that my family and friends were probably all txting me right now. Getting on Twitter could tell us the magnitude of the quake and the amount of damage.

Some of my workmates also were without keys or phone. After an hour of fruitless standing around, we decided it was worth a crack. “Please, we need to get back into our offices. One of my colleagues needs her medication.” The Facilities Management chap in his hard hat could probably tell I was lying, but, very much against the rules, he let us venture back inside to quickly retrieve keys and bags. The Learning Skills Centre then scattered to the four winds.

An hour later, walking across Hagley Park after ditching my car, I saw the first photos of what was left of the Cathedral on my phone, and realised just how bad things were. The procession of people escaping the central city on foot had eerie echoes of 9/11, except these people weren’t covered in dust; we chatted as they passed, and I could tell some tourists the airport was closed, and also quite a hike, so they might want to stay put. Crossing the Botanic Gardens, a prodigy: the Avon River was flowing backwards from east to west. Signs and portents. I half expected a rain of blood. At that stage, I was ready to believe anything. (A week later I checked a map and realised I’d crossed the river where it looped back around, and this was the direction I’d seen it flowing all my life.) Only the ducks seemed unperturbed by the unusual day we were all having.

There is a feeling of sick anticipation as you first enter your house after an earthquake. Photographing my way from room to room, it was clear that there was hardly any damage. Pictures had fallen down, some of the cracks in the wall were a little bigger, but the place just needed a clean. And, well, electricity. I changed my shoes.

One simple method for improving the quality of student essays: don’t let them pick their own topic. The problem with goat cheese is that sometimes it tastes rather like it originated in the nether regions of a goat. That Kim Cattrall is such a classy dame: I wish she were MY mum. Olduvai, Amboseli / Turkana, Tsavo, Gombe / Olorgesailie, Tanganyika / Serengeti, Aberdares: the biologist’s African litany. The Chch Press today twice bylined food writer Paula Wolfer. Next week: guest articles by Jamie Olive and Nigel Slate. It’s exam time. The university seems as deserted as if there’d been a Zombie Apocalypse. But if the Uni were infested with zombies, how would you tell? Answer: zombies can’t ride skateboards. ‘The command “” is not currently available.’ Thanks, Adobe Bridge CS4, for that helpful message. And for sucking royally. My band is called the Broken Bear Club, but based on our last gig a better name might be The Dunning-Kruger Effect. MHRA is the style guide for the Modern Humanities Research Association, but also stands for Michigan Hot Rod Association. Their style guide: 1) More fonts. 2) Bigger fonts. 3) Fonts with flames. I am trying to popularise an alternative term for submitting a thesis: “having a wordbaby”. Almost want to get another ukulele, just so I can write “this machine annoys fascists” on it. In literary quiz, thought “Last Man in Europe” must be the working title of Mein Kampf. No actually it’s 1984. Sorry, George. The UC library bans messy, smelly, hot, or noisy food. If they banned messy, smelly, hot, or noisy students it would be deserted. Those moaning about how the Web rots our “ability to focus” should recall the innate concentration skills of monkeys and toddlers. Pre-human Long Island was the home of herds of dwarf mammoths and flocks of giant flightless cranes. After a find/replace of double spaces in InDesign, a “Search completed.9 replaced.” message using double spaces. Is Adobe taunting me? Someone who would microwave a croissant would steal sheep. G#7 is not in fact the Devil’s chord; that’s FM7. G#7 is Cordo Diabolo, Esus4 is Main Crispé, and Asus2 is The Buster. #fakeukulelelore One of my vert bio students once claimed that the gastrocnemius connects the humerus and femur, or the ulna and heel. He did not pass. @adzebill

I stumbled across the following short story in my archives and thought it was worth sharing. It’s actually an assessment task from my BIOL 139 (Biomechanics) class back in 2002, which was taught by the inspiring Steve Vogel. Steve’s assignment for us was to imagine a world in which the only structural force was tension, and nothing existed in compression—no pillars, bricks, struts, props, or even bones. These sort of thought experiments are the perfect task for science fiction. The Baton Races of Yaz setting was from a half-remembered childhood board game. Engineers are welcome to leave comments on the physics, but no harshing on my prose style please!

When I woke, it had stopped raining. On Yaz, this happens once a year, if you’re lucky. It’s not lucky if you’re a Yazian, though, because the Day Without Rain is when you go to war. Me too. And all because of that stupid Baton.

I extricated myself from the damp pile of dozing Yazians, found my waterproof pack, and crawled out of the tent. It had been built in an excavated hollow lined with groundsheets, and although a ring of bladders had been laid to act as a dike, water had pooled in the bottom in the night. Typical. The Yazians didn’t mind this, but I did. Outside, the rolling expanse of marshes and moors went as far as I could see. To get a better look, I took a running jump at the side of the tent and scrambled up it to the central peak. I still couldn’t see very far, so I climbed up the main support rope for twenty feet or so, using the knots the Yazians had thoughtfully tied the night before. Resting with my foot in a loop just below the balloon, I finally spotted the support balloon of our companions a few miles away; we’d missed them in the night.

I munched an energy bar while the Yazians made the boat. They hauled down the balloon, sat on it, and squeezed the helium into bladders. One cast a net into the stream for breakfast, and collected some floating pods of helium weed to replenish our supply. Our weapons were bundled up in the balloon skin, which was lashed with the bladders into the net. We piled on, and one Yazian swam in front to guide us into the current. We didn’t float very high, and I kept my pack on my knees.

To rendezvous with the other war party, we had to head upriver. The Yazians unrolled the largest square groundsheet, and attached their thinnest five-braided rope, tying it to loops on each corner and the center. Two of them swam it to shore, and ran with it into the freshening breeze until it caught and lifted. For some reason, the wind blows one direction here in the morning and another in the afternoon, which makes for predictable sailing. As it strengthened, we launched two more sail kites, each heavier and stiffer than the one before, until we were moving at a fair speed. When we met the others, we sailed upriver together for a couple of hours, keeping clear of the main current. The Yazians amused themselves by tightly twisting together bundles of elastic fibers and lashing them by their ends the length of the raft. I had no idea why.

Yazian fighting in the old days was throwing mud in your opponent’s face, then sitting on them. Since the Break, things have gotten more sophisticated. The enemy surprised us; suddenly water balloons were exploding all around. Some splashed in my eye and hurt like hell. Luckily, nothing touched my pack. I ducked for cover while the Yazians unslung their stomp rockets in pairs. One jumped on the bladder while the other aimed gobbets of corrosive glue at the charging enemy. Their aim was good: almost always right in the eye. The Yazian beside me was using a slingshot between two of its tentacles, firing what looked like (but can’t have been) some sort of fruit. We counter-charged, throwing sticky knotted bolas at the retreating enemy, entangling one. The Yazians pinned and immobilized their blinded opponents with whips, and strangled them. One they just sat on.

Before long we heard the yelling of a war band, and ran for the raft. The Yazian we left on board had been busy rigging something to the stern. As we piled on board, it yanked five ropes at once, pulling slipknots. The bundles of fibers untwisted convulsively, and there was threshing and flapping in the water behind us. The raft jerked forward into the channel, not for long but enough get clear of a shore filled with livid Yazians. We cowered under a mat as the mother of all stomp rockets dropped hissing blobs into the water near us, until the current caught and we were swept downstream.

I gathered that our sortie had been a diversion. As we rounded a bend into a shallow gully, the river getting stronger all the while, I saw the real target. Suspended above us, straddling the rapids, was a huge clot of tents, sheets, and rope ladders, stretched between four thick hawsers. I could see maybe fifty Yazians climbing over and through it. We beached the raft under a bank of ferns, and picked our way up the slope to the nearest hawser, me lugging my pack. One of the Yazians pointed to the suspended village and whispered to me. “Baton!” he said. In Yazian, of course, but it’s one of the few words I know.

Until forty years ago, the Day Without Rain was the occasion for the famous Baton Race of Yaz. The Baton is, or was, a stick of solid rock, or maybe dense wood, about two feet long. Nobody knows exactly: the Yazians won’t let you near it. Baton is what the first anthropologists called it, of course; its Yazian name means something like “Doesn’t Bend”. It’s the most rigid, and most venerated, thing on the whole planet. Then one day a Yazian (tribe still disputed) decided to test the Baton’s name. They’ve been fighting ever since.

Apparently the pieces were kept in the village above us.

By the time we reached the hawser, we’d been spotted. A howling mob, brandishing whips and slingshots, poured out of the village, and swarmed up a suspension bridge towards us. My companions screamed taunts at them; I caught the chant of “Break you! Break you!” (my other Yazian word). I looked at the hawser; it was as thick as me, and plunged straight into the mud. Apparently, it was connected to a huge mesh of thick rope submerged about two feet deep in the marsh and spreading over a square mile. Even so, it must have been stressed close to its limit.

The mob was getting close. The Yazians all turned to me. ‘Time to earn ten thousand cubic meters of helium,’ I thought.

I opened my pack. And pulled out my chainsaw.

UC is sacking librarians, but I pass a full crew of guys with leafblowers every morning. I guess you need nice lawns for the brochures. At Duke, the wanna-be frat boys carried around pledge bats. Here, the corresponding dork object is the skateboard; but what’s the frat? BOI? As late as 1974, a popular history of NZ claimed Māori, like Anglo-Saxons, were descended from Aryan Caucasians. I’m not sure if even Te Rangi Hīroa could have convincingly argued “We’re Aryan Caucasians!” to the Third Reich if WWII had gone badly… The problem with a Facebook page for your newborn baby is they won’t have the tech skills to admin it until they’re about 3 or 4. MORE work… Richard Dawkins’ wife is the great-granddaughter of the world’s first motor-vehicle-accident victim (Lalla and Mary Ward respectively). Reeves, 1898: Average NZer loathes “Mongolians, Negroes, and Aborigines…but he likes the Maori, and is sorry that they are dying out.’ “Clear enough the aunt let a stranger’s praise change her life.” E. Annie Proulx, on the power of teachers. In the Green Room at the Aotea Centre discussing Rousseau with my learnèd panel-mates before we’re miked up. La di dah. Implausible country songs: “I’ve Got Tears in My Ears All From Lyin’ There and Cryin’ ’Cause I’ll Never Have an iPad and I’m Sad (iPad Sad)” and the follow-up hit “If I Could Unskew Your Heart (with a Log Transformation)”. Just bought a used iPod, and found upon connecting to iTunes its name is “Bdawgs ipod” [sic]. Ecch. Cannot wait to wipe it. Pop quiz: Elucidate the five (5) errors perpetrated by the phrase “Bdawgs ipod”. (5 marks, 140 characters). Answers: 1) no apostrophe, 2) l.c. “p” in iPod, 3) redundancy: of course it’s an iPod, 4) dawg, and 5) calling oneself Bdawg. @adzebill

1. Which king died from eating too many lampreys?
2. Which Roman emperor saved a slave from being thrown to the lampreys?
3. What’s the green stuff in the yolk of hard-boiled eggs, and how do you stop it appearing?
4. Where can one see Arnold Schwartzeneggar’s handprints (not just footprints) on public display?
5. What problem does the Scarecrow face when he gets his brain?
6. There’s a science fiction story I read once where a mad scientist operated on crocodiles to repair the imperfect septum in their heart and make it four-chambered. The crocs became frisky, agile, and started putting on weight. What happened to them ultimately?
7. What’s the major scientific flaw in this story?
8. How many Philistines did Samson slay with the jawbone of an ass?
9. Why an ass?
10. When did people stop calling the stuff in your head ‘your brains’ and start calling it ‘your brain’, and why?
11. Do people really eat live monkey brains?
12. Which bit of the cow’s stomach tastes nicest?
13. How can you tell that skeleton on the banner belonged to a bird, and was it a bird that could kick you to death?

Matthew Dentith, @HORansome on Twitter, is a philosophy graduate student in Auckland. He decided to organise what’s perhaps the first scholarly conference entirely in Twitter: the 1st Episto Tweet Conference, or #twecon. Papers, on any subject, had to be delivered in six tweets; no cheating. Here’s what mine looked like:

All the conference papers are archived at the #twecon page. Half the fun was for us participants jostling to be next, spreading the news that #twecon was running all day, retweeting each other’s choicest tidbits—indeed, one talk was composed of retweeted snippets from the other participants. Very meta.

Finding an idea worth presenting, and condensing it to the limited confines of Twitter, was an interesting exercise. In many ways, it was to a conference paper what pechakucha is to a conference talk. What was surprising was how little content was lost, and how quickly one could convey a novel and engaging idea despite the limits. I’d recommend it as an exercise for a dispersed group of scholars wanting to quickly and simply bring each other up to speed with their research.

Are we seeing a new, 21st-century model of academic communication taking shape?

OLD NEW
Formal talk Pechakucha
Scholarly conference Barcamp
Academic journal Online, open access journal
List of abstracts Twitter conference

I don’t know, but it’s interesting to watch the emergence of what might be mainstream tools in a decade; of being early, and helping the party get started.