Monday, June 03, 2013

WAIN Mailing List spawns a Twitter List

I moderate a mailing list for library people in Western Australia. The list is called WAIN (Western Australia Information Network) and I established it in 1994. The list has over 1800 subscribers and is an active but low volume list with lots of local job opportunities, requests for local assistance and promotion of local events.

Recently I decided to curate a Twitter list that reflects a subset of the WAIN community and it has 70 members and over 45 subscribers. If you think of a mailing list as the notice board in your staff room, then a Twitter list is like overhearing the conversation of a room full of staff having morning tea. Same work place very different activity. Lists are one of the essential tools used by those who are immersed in Twitter as a way to manage the information deluge. You can subscribe to a list or the list can be a useful source of people for you to follow. I know that the internet is global but I think locality matters and WAIN is a geographically defined subset of like-minded people with a common interest. Hence this is a list with a local flavour.

I see the WAIN Twitter list as having the following characteristics:
  • It contains those subscribers to WAIN who are on twitter (to the best of my ability) 
  • It will NOT be a mirror of WAIN, will NOT replace WAIN, will NOT provide the information functions of WAIN 
  • It will be an ongoing conversation, babble, information stream by people who happen to also be WAIN subscribers
  • It will be useful resource for finding like minded library people to follow
You can find the list at https://twitter.com/WAINmoderator/wain-tweeps

If you would like to be added then ping me at @WAINmoderator or @lgreenpd -- I will expect you to be a WAIN subscriber (that is my criteria for curating the twitter list).

If you are NOT on WAIN then join at https://lists.curtin.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/wain


4 comments:

  1. As one immersed in the twitter environment I haven't had frequent need for lists. If they took twitter lists away I probably wouldn't notice.

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  2. Hi Peta, interested in your comment. I follow a list of learning technology people but just dip in and out from time to time. It isn't relevant enough for me to add them to my timeline but is an area of interest. I have also looked at lists to find interesting people to add to my timeline. In any case it is horses for courses.

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  3. Last time I used a list was to collate a group of tweeters going to educause Australasia in Perth. Use of hash tags is more accepted and consistent now making it easier to find folks to follow and tweeters are much more common now.

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  4. Thanks for your comments Peta. Good to get a different perspective from a long time tweep.

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