Since I heard about Twitter around 2 years ago, it has been steadily gaining popularity.  These past few weeks there have been a few posts going around, mostly defending Twitter and its challenge to make something out of 140 characters. Twitter is a real easy thing to harass and hate on.  Sure there can be downsides (I mean, who cares about when I’m standing in line or buying groceries?), but there’s a downside to nearly everything.  When radio first came out (or any other new type of communication), I’m sure there were people having these same conversations.  The trick is to recognize the medium and use it to its advantage.  We don’t want to pretend that the medium doesn’t affect the message, and therefore, I don’t think we can say that Twitter is “just like having a conversation” because it’s not.  But there are advantages that Twitter has that our conversations won’t, such as searchability, or hyperlinks, or the strange interconnectedness the web offers.

Let’s skip over all those boring conversations where we try and convince ourselves that using Twitter is like any other type of conversation and see where it’s different.  That’s where the advantages are.

So how am I using Twitter’s medium to its advantage? Every day I come across music, articles, blogs, etc., that I think are important to this whole arts and theology thing, and that I enjoy partking of. Here are a couple recent examples:

1. Storied – site by Corbis that gives the stories behind interesting and important photographs.
2. Re:Sound – The Resurgence’s music stuff is underway, download the MP3 Sampler and chord charts.
3. Cucumber Riot – Download Gasoline Heart’s new album for free, via Paste Magazine.
4. Images of Faith CD – 100 images from many different artists used for illumination’s sake (not illustration) for corporate worship.  Also includes essays on the works and biographies of the artists.
5. Here’s an article from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship on the difference between illumination and illustration; and illumination’s importance in our lives and our worship.
6. Small’s Jazz Club Audio Archive – lots and lots of full sets from their impressive list of musicians, all free.

Now I don’t have the time or the will power to write a post for each of these things, but I enjoy sharing them.  So most of my Twitter use will be in the same vein as this site: the arts, theology, the arts and theology, with a little of my personal life thrown in every now and again.  This is pretty close to making a linkblog, something I’ve thought about doing since this site’s revision.

So how can you take advantage of this awesomeness? Glad you asked:

If you’re on Twitter, you can follow me.

If you’re not on Twitter, but use a feed reader, here’s the feed and now there’s a subscription button up on the sidebar.

If you’re not on Twitter and don’t use a feed reader, that’s OK too, you can always just go to my Twitter page.  Plus, I plan on putting out a weekly post on what I’ve found over the past week.