I really really appreciated having the opportunity to work in the new Digital Scholarship space last night. The Codeacademy.com tutorials have been helpful, and I do appreciate how the company simulates a community environment in their lively forums, but there’s nothing like sitting down with a group of people in the same room and trying to do something new together.

I am brand new to Twitter and honestly didn’t truly understand Twitterbots until we started writing our own Python code under the guidance of Matt Burton. For some reason I had this preconception that Twitterbots and Spambots were one and the same, and that they were inherently evil (yes I’m a bit of an alarmist, still, despite learning more about computers every day). Troubleshooting with a group of humans, exchanging notes face-to-face, and witnessing each other’s reactions to various steps of the process, made this exercise enjoyable and far more fruitful than some of my individual struggles with coding.

As regards thinking about what the Twitterbot of my dreams could potentially do, I am curious about its potential in the podcasting world. I wonder how it could generate suspense by Tweeting out excerpts of podcast stories, in sequence, in the lead-up to the actual full-length audio episodes being released? Hmm…I probably need to think through this a bit more, but there might be something there?