APS vs. Isis Slam-Down

No, the above photo is not a depiction of this year’s Experimental Biology meeting in Anaheim. It is labeled on Flickr as a Biker Mud Wrestling Party.

As of today, EB is one month away. I am awaiting official updates from the training camps of Dr. Isis, the Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, and Marty Frank, Executive Director of the American Physiologic Society. The contest will see which of these icons of physiology can enroll the most new Twitter followers during the meeting. The rules and other details are outlined here.

Dr. Isis recently acquired an iPhone; her daily tweets show increasing proficiency with the touch-screen keypad. The Frank camp is maintaining silence on his training regimen.

Only one month till EB; let the shenanigans begin!

On The Road Again

Tomorrow I hit the airport en route to Renal Week, the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Nephrology. After some administrative work, my week will be devoted to all things kidney. From the most basic science to the most novel clinical trial, 14,000 devotees of urine (or lack thereof) will be gathered to celebrate their favorite organ.

Attendees and other kidney fans are invited to Tweet the Week. We will be twittering about the meeting and other events surrounding it. I am sure Renal Week will provide fodder for this august venue as well.

I will also try to update everyone on the weather. After all, I will be in San Diego. I get to gloat at those I leave behind in Nebraksa.

A new podcast should also be available soon. I chat with current president Tom Coffman and president-elect Sharon Anderson about the ASN. Look for it and other meeting stuff on the site or in our iTunes area.

For the rest of the day, well, my brain has already flown west…

Tweet the Week in San Diego

Those planning to attend Renal Week, the annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology, are invited to Tweet the Week. A lot of those signing up for the activity have not tweeted before. Some of the nuts and bolts of the service are obvious after the sign-up process, but there are ins and outs of the Twitterverse that may not be readily apparent.

Basics of Twitter

So you have a screen name (if not, click on the logo below; all you need is a valid email to sign up). Now it is time to create your profile page. Try to come up with a photo or image of some kind to represent you online. Put some information about who you are, but nothing you don’t want strangers to see. For an example, click on the Tweet the Week logo below; it will take you to the RenalWeek profile.

You also have to make a choice about whether or not to protect your updates. If you do not, anyone on Twitter can follow you and see what you put out there. You can go through your list of followers every so often and block anyone you want (like the half-naked women whose profiles list their favorite sex act), but you will also encounter a broader, more interesting swath of people this way. If you protect, then only people who you approve can see your updates; however, this means you will have to manually OK each and every follow.

For Tweet the Week, we have chosen to keep the feed closed. Some of the followers are closed, but most are public. RenalWeek is following all of the participants. Anything tweeted by RenalWeek will be visible only to official followers. 

Specific Tweet the Week Issues

If you are tweeting something general on your public feed, anyone who follows you will see it, including RenalWeek. If you want to send a message to RenalWeek that you only want the Tweet the Week crowd to see, you can direct message it. Do this by placing “D” in front of the screen name: D RenalWeek. If it is something of interest to the RenalWeek crowd, it can then be retweeted. Most twitter clients allow you to repeat someone’s tweet; this is how stuff “goes viral” and spreads quickly.

Mechanics of Twittering On the Go

You can tweet from a computer, and there certainly will be internet access in the San Diego Convention Center. Most stuff worth chatting about does not happen when you are near a screen. Luckily, Twitter was made for the mobile world, with a character limit shorter than a standard text message. You can register your cell phone and have tweets texted to you; this may drive you crazy after a while. You can also set it up so you can send tweets to the service via text message. Your usual text fees apply, so figure out ahead of time what this may cost you.

If you have a smart phone, you are in luck. BlackBerries, iPhones, and Pre’s all have Twitter clients that make participation easy and fun. There are too many to list here, and more popping up every day; a quick Google search will take you to lots of choices.

Even if you decide to limit your tweets to your laptop, you may want to check out a dedicated Twitter client. Many will let you group your followers or work with multiple accounts. I am using TweetDeck, and I have my personal account (PHLane; feed shown on the blog page above) and the RenalWeek account for Tweet the Week. A bunch of these are available; some may be downloaded via the Twitter web site, and there is a Wiki that lists many more.

I hope you decided to attend RenalWeek and to Tweet the Week with us. If you have any specific questions, ask in the comments below so others can share your answer.

Why Do We Twitter, ETC?

Why do we blog and text and Twitter and Facebook and email and everything else?

Ever since the first caveman picked up a rock and began grinding things on the wall, we have had the desire to communicate. I have been thinking about this alot, since my husband does not appreciate the current lines of communication. When I send a text or email to someone, he sneers. It seems I should pick up the phone and hear their voice, not settle for the "written" word transmitted electronically.

Last week I went to see the new stage version of Mary Poppins. I do understand that this is not a historical piece, but it did get me thinking about communication in the Victorian era. Pre-telephone people wrote notes. The rich had messengers to deliver these notes when needed. There were multiple mail deliveries each day. Mass media was the spoken voice or newspapers. When events occurred, paperboys hit the streets with special editions to get the word out. Those who could not read or afford the paper had to settle for what the boys yelled or what others told them.

The telegraph allowed our thoughts to be transmitted over longer distances, but the telephone was the next big change for personal communications. Remember the movie Meet Me In St. Louis? The family is excited and shocked that a boy is calling the older sister, Rose, long-distance. There is discussion about a possible proposal and whether or not one should marry a boy who would propose via an "invention." Sounds like my husband's attitude to email, text messages, and the whole social web!

Mass communications also changed through the 20th century, with the spoken word replacing text for immediate dissemination of news. TV and radio replaced the paperboy and the special edition. Newspapers became a once or twice a day publication. Now we are watching many of these papers die as the internet becomes the source of indepth news that they once provided. We can still get our immediate needs met with TV or radio, but we often go online when we want more than can be broadcast.

Personal communications have also changed, moving back to the written word. Fax machines first allowed us to send printed pages quickly, but soon we were emailing and texting information without ever printing it.

So in this brief, rather unresearched history of communications we have come around to written communications again. Some will last, like posts online, and others will evaporate into the ether as soon as the text screen is cleared.

So what will I tell my husband after this mental exercise? Things change - get over it! Some thoughts still require a face to face meeting (I put proposals, break-ups, and really bad diagnoses that I share with patients in this category). Because email and texts do leave a trail, some private conversations should be done face to face or by phone. Otherwise, I believe that anything I can say I can write. Or tweet.

It's been an interesting 2 weeks since I last updated my blog. First, I've experienced every respiratory virus in the area since returning from vacation. At least they didn't spoil Hawaii!

Next, I spent a week on the clinical service. Lots of patients wanted my immediate attention last week, even though my head was imprisoned in snot!

I am beginning to explore other web venues for use in pleasure and business. I now have a page on FaceBook, primarily for personal stuff, and my page on LinkedIn for professional postings. I also signed up with Twitter (see tweets at right) although I must admit I don't quite get it. "They" keep saying how addictive it is, but it hasn't pulled me in the way FaceBook did.

I will keep playing with all of this stuff, because I am a bit of a techno geek. Maybe someone out there will share with me their use of Twitter (or similar microblogs) and how it makes their life better.

BTW, the photo above is a red-crested or Brazilian cardinal. Got a shot of this guy while we were climbing up Diamondhead.