Translator Tweets at TED Global

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The nice thing about TEDGlobal is that you can choose between attending in real space (the conference room) or in social space (one of the many TEDActive-like corners of the conference center). I mostly did the former, but occasionally I would stay at my favorite social space, our home base, the hub of our social activities, the Translators Lounge. Advantages, apart from the additional leg space and the better food : it allowed me to connect with the rest of the world while still experiencing the thrill of the live moment.

Over the past few days, I have done a lot of Twitter practice. I present you some of the results.

Easy tweets might start by going into what I call lazy mode. Just wait for a person who is more diligent than you and then retweet their smart tweet it or reply to it. One such person was fellow translator Elena Crescia. Not only did she tweet a lot at the conference, she also had a data card, which allowed her to tweet even when no WiFi was available.

Even more fun than retweeting is being retweeted. The gold medal of retweetion at TEDGlobal is being retweeted by either TEDGlobal, TEDNews or TEDxWomen. Following the buzz on tweetdeck, I occasionally saw TED News and TEDGlobal retweet almost similar posts. And it would seem that TEDNews had a slightly better research department : the TEDNews retweet of Sanjay Pradhan (@skp001) had the right number of 143 countries, the one TEDGlobal retweeted from me counted only 123. Maybe they are doing it the Duolingo way : if you use the data of many, the errors get averaged out.

One step further on the road to twitter excellence is interaction. The person you interact with, can either be sitting next to you, as was the case for Krystian, or somewhere near you. I knew Jack Welde was somewhere in the building. He is the CEO of Smartling and we had met him at Sunday’s workshop. I just couldn’t see him. Sometimes your partner is in a different place, such as Bulgaria. You may not even be able to read their name. And occcasionally, in very rare cases, a tweet about Anonymous gets retweeted by … Anonymous. To make the meta-experience complete, Krystian wrote « ANONYMOUS RETWEETS ME » on a callout Post-IT and put it on my name tag. I guess you could call that a kind of analog tweet.

However, the summum of tweeting is getting favorited, and if the fave comes from a celebrity, you get the nec plus ultra. So here’s my all time favorite. I reacted to a message from Elena Crescia about the talk given by NATO Admiral Stavridis. I replied with a picture taken during the Edinburgh Literary Tour, of a stone saying « Building bridges is my vocation ». The Admiral favorited it. I merrily posted on my Facebook wall what Krystian, who was sitting next to me, had to say about this : if you get retweeted by Anonymous and then by the NATO Admiral (different tweet, I admit), then this may simply mean that the Admiral is Anonymous. May that be a lesson to us all.


--User:ElsDK 06:39, 29 June 2012 (UTC)