Signal and Noise -- what to tweet

So, like many people creating and following content, the issue of creating signal and not noise is important to me. It requires finesse and subtlety.

As part of my job at Intel, I encouraged to tweet these days, as a form of micro-blogging. For an introvert like me, at first it seemed very unnatural. Reminding me of "winking" that one does on dating sites, which has its places but is hard for carrying on "technical conversations". However, I see that tweets can serve as pointers to longer content and that makes much more sense. Short pointers to longer topics. Note quite the same as bookmarks, since many of these pointers are about timely rather than timeless info. Still, I'm beginning to warm to it. It will take me a while to get the exact level I want.

It doesn't make sense to turn ones twitter account into an unedited newsfeed. If someone wants the latest headlines, there are many places for that. So, as a good twit (I'm sure that not other twitter users call themselves, but it seem right, and I can honor an old friend David Hornbaker with that term.) I will try to be selective in what links I post.

Now, I'm certain other people have thought through these issues and have better formulated the issue and the resolutions than I have (or even than I could). I'm not sure how to find such fonts of wisdom though, and perhaps that is part of this whole revo-evolution. The democraticization of content has made relevant content harder to find. (Relevant quote from some cartoonist in the Iraq-search-for-WMD-days showed two CIA agents sifting through boxes of dots. Caption:
"We haven't been able to connect the dots. Solution, we need more dots.")

Finall, the point I've been heading with all of this. I started a twibe on compilers. That's one of my areas of specialty. It will be interesting to see how many other compiler writers join the twibe (or even tweet at all). One of the things I've been considering tweeting is links to good articles in the newsgroup comp.compilers. It's not like the newsgroup isn't high S/N today. It is. Our moderator John Levine does an excellent job of having just the right light touch. However, I do suspect that there are people who are writing compilers (or compiler like things) that haven't found that newsgroup. If I can help them find that resource and at the same time offer a secondary level of filtering, then that will be good. That brings me back to the point, when I tweet out links to comp.compilers they will be selective links--otherwise I'm just generating noise.