Tweet, Retweet, Rinse, Repeat
As everyone in the entire world knows by now, there is a service called Twitter. Slaw has been announcing its posts on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/slaw_dot_ca) for quite a while now; and from time to time our contributors who tweet themselves will let their followers know that they’ve got an entry up on Slaw. But until now, we’ve not found a satisfactory way of letting our readers tweet about our posts.
Today we’ve added a Tweetmeme button in the upper right-hand corner of every post. So if you’re reading an entry that you think your followers on Twitter should know about, you have only to click on the green to call up Twitter — and your own account, if you’re logged in at the time.
You’ll also see a number beside each green icon. This is Tweetmeme’s best estimate of the number of times a particular post has been tweeted about already. We’re still thinking about how that works in fact; we suspect that Tweetmeme only picks up some of the Twitter mentions.
But the “tweet this” function is the main thing. So hit the green and spread the good word. If it pans out, it will be a fixture here at Slaw.
Nice! It’s showing me those stories I thought no one cared about because there were no comments were, indeed, valuable. Case in point, this one was tweeted 8 times–wow!
http://www.slaw.ca/2009/07/20/is-there-such-thing-as-work-life-balance-for-lawyers/
Thanks, Simon.
I pick up this feed via google reader and find the new tweety-button distracting.
Haven’t hit the unsubscribe button, just yet, but I really don’t like the whole twitter twit twat tweeple twooty nonsense. It takes away from your content rather than adding to it in my eyes.
Can’t you trust people to know how to copy and paste or must the brand permeate throughout your site.
Thanks for your input, Trish. The tweetmeme button is a trial effort and we hope to get more comments from our readers. I agree that the silly names are annoying. But the fact is that lawyers are using Twitter in ever greater numbers. The question for us is how best to let our readers make use of that functionality.
I like the tweetmeme in theory, however, what happens is I end up getting 5 tweets about the same post because I follow so many people on twitter who also read/contribute to Slaw. For the same reason, I’m unlikely to use it. That said, however, I also like seeing a post that shows it’s been tweeted 8 times, as it’s a good indicator I should be paying attention to it.