infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

Although I thought I would be taking a break from this darn thing, I saw a blog entry I thought was worth commenting on. Alex King asks what would be the proper behavior for a Twitter WordPress plugin. Given the inanity of my Twitter posts, I think the proper behavior would be to be not seen and not heard, but I imagine more felicitous users can say meaningful things in one-hundred-forty characters.

King would like a plug-in that checks his Twitter JSON feed regularly, imports his “tweets” (love the jargon) into a separate database table, and displays his status in a sidebar widget. This seems like the way to go, except given the ephemerality of tweets, I’m not sure I want to archive these posts. I understand owning your data and all, but I think setting up Creative-Commons licenses on the site is a higher priority.

One of King’s readers, Derek Punsalan, wants greater functionality from a Twidget. Punsalan would like readers to be able to leave comments on tweets, so asks to import tweets as blog posts. Lordy, lordy, lordy, people complain about blogs that merge posts and del.icio.us feeds. I can’t imagine the reaction to adding the banality of tweets to blog feeds. While I obviously think that doing daily del.icio.us linkdumps is a good medium between adding bookmarks as separate entries and ignoring del.icio.us altogether, I think a sidebar widget is definitely the way to go for tweets.