New year, new world, new camaraderie

Image source: Twitter.com

Earlier today, while working on my upcoming presentation, I kept a running tab on my internationally-scattered group of Twitter friends, one of whom, Carol Bancroft of Pour More, realized she hadn’t updated her blogroll* to include a number of her wine-blogging Twitter friends. She offered to add whomever she had heretofore omitted to her list, commenting:

I am not stingy w/ my links. [I'm] all about the camaraderie in 2008

I had just completed some thoughts about camaraderie in my presentation only moments before and therefore couldn’t help but add to the Twitter conversation with a tweet of my own:

The camaraderie amongst us wine blogging brethren and sistren has been the best thing about 2007, in my humble opinion.

Overlooking my propensity to use made-up words, Carol replied that she hoped that camaraderie would continue, and I agreed, adding:

I sense that camaraderie will continue, simply because we want it to. I hope we’ll all find a way to get some face time.

If Twitter didn’t confine each of us Twitter users to a scant 140 characters, I could have added more. The conversation did later cause me to say something that I had been wrestling with for my presentation, but on Twitter, while thinking of one person – Carol – as my audience, it just came to me naturally:

What’s coinky-dinky about this word camaraderie is it’s a big notion within my sense of the experience that lies beyond the vineyard’s edge.

Sometimes it’s not how you say it, it’s just about saying it, period. That’s the sound byte nature of Twitter, the use of which many have dubbed microblogging. The simple fact is, you don’t have to say much to generate discussion, foster thought, or build camaraderie on Twitter. It’s important to note that don’t have to author a blog, either. You just have to want to say something – anything halfway meaningful, to my mind – to deepen relationships already established (via individual blogs, or not) and to develop new friendships alike, all by virtue of responding – albeit loosely – to the question that gets to the very heart of Twitter:

What are you doing?

For this simple reason, Twitter is a powerful web-based community application.** However, Twitter – great as it has become among its many thousands of daily adherents – is still just an online tool, one that I hope will regularly be a way for people to use computers to get themselves away from them. Indeed, some of us – widespread as we are – are already talking about getting together in 2008. Secondarily, some of us are talking about shipping some of our favorite wines to each other in regions where those wines are not in great supply on local shelves.

New year, new tools, new world, surely. But in the interest of camaraderie, there’s nothing more valuable than face time with your friends. It won’t hurt, either, to gain some of that face time on the trail. With a good bottle waiting, of course.

So what do you want to say today?

~winehiker

*Many bloggers feature a list of their favorite blogs. I’ve got a few listed in my blogroll; you can view them by category in the sidebar to your right.
**Check out the California Wine Hikes About Us page, which displays the latest running dialog amongst my collection of wine and hiking Twitter friends.

Related posts:

• Reflections on a good year, and a window to the next
• Saving myself from incipient vapidity
• A difficult year, a Wine Bloggers Conference and my potential role in the future of the wine country experience

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under grape squeezins, technical stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.