Old Spice add goes viral with library version

Old Spice add has gone viral this week.

On Twitter, @wawoodworth wrote "ATTN LIBRARIAN TWEEPS: Need help getting @oldspice guy to say a few words regarding libraries. RT plz. Thanks.


this is the result:

Samuel Pepys tweets

I've found another "lit-twit" even more exciting than Moby Dick: the Samuel Pepys diary.

Some say Samuel Pepys was the original blogger. His famous 17th Century diary gives us a detailed account of personal and public life in Restoration London.

I've been following the diary which is being published online, day by day, on the The Diary of Samuel Pepys website. And since May 2009, the diary is being tweeted day by day at twitter.com/samuelpepys

How is the Tweet being done? Phil Gyford manages the website and the Twitter account. Check out what Phil Gyford says to say about the Twittered diary: for someone already immersed in Twitter it really feels like having a sense of what Sam is up to right “now”.

On the Diary website and on Twitter we are up to June 1666, as the days are more or less synced. The Great Fire of London occurred on 2 September 1666, so stay tuned for an amazing eyewitness account of the Fire in September 2009.

Samuel Pepys maintained his diary for nine years, from 1660-9, writing a personal account of his life, penned in a type of shorthand. He left us "eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London"

I confess I have not read the whole diary which runs to several volumes, but there's a fascinating account of Pepys' life by Claire Tomalin which first brought Pepys to my attention and I've been fascinated ever since: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin.

Tweeting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Now that the Moby Dick tweet I wrote about is finished, "danco" (Dan Coulter) is moving on to tweeting the two Lewis Carroll books: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Tweeting will commence on Monday May 18th 2009. If you want to follow the daily Alice tweets then you need to be on Twitter and follow the publicdomain tweet.

I've been intrigued about this whole project and how it was achieved. The whole 1000+ page book took danco nine and a half months. Read More on the Moby Dick tweet

Tweeting Moby Dick

There she blows!--There she blows!--There she blows!--Tweeting Moby Dick

Thanks to the Maud Newton blog via the reeling and writhing blog I am following Danco who is tweeting Moby Dick.

Follow at publicdomain

I confess I never did manage to finish this book. The tweeting has been going for nine months and they have just sighted the whale: There she blows!--

In a strange way the broken up feed of tweets strangely focuses you on the language, eg:

A gentle joyousness--a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale

Twitter newbie

Finally succumbed and started tweeting under @jaygee35 and using this icon of our dear old Max (R.I.P.)

There are some great Twitter for libraries guides out there:

Phil Bradley's webpage What is Twitter and Twitter for librarians

Ellyssa Kroski the iLibrarian wrote this Twitter Guide for libraries back in 2007 and if you search her blog under Twitter there are a few more ideas.

Things have got to the point that now we need some tips on how conference speakers can manage the "back channel". How about this! How to present while people are twittering

EDUCAUSE also has some resources on Twitter use in universities

Growth in social networking sites over last year

Facebook is not growing as fast as other social network sites now. In the just released Nielsen report covering Sept 07 to Sept 08, Twitter is leading the pack with a 343% growth rate, Tagged.com 330%, and Ning 251%. Facebook comes in 6th at 110%, but overall it is still the largest site.

Nielsen's Blog "Connecting the Dots" has further analysis.