Writing Boots

The last line of yesterday's Twitter poem was a complaint that the association's "social media creds" were tarnished because "Angela Sinickas prohibits tweating during her session."

After I stopped chearing, I e-mailed Angela to get the background. She came back:

If there was a civil rights movement just for speakers that fought to make it illegal to tweet during sessions, I would march in it.

The speaker has learned about the audience, prepared and rehearsed a lecture, traveled to the event and summoned the fortitude to stand before his or her colleagues and present his or her ideas for evaluation.

Do we or do we not owe it to the speaker to sit still for the course of the talk and take the speech in in all its context before sending our glib little 140-character evaluations and raccoon insights out into the world?

I think civilized people will agree that we do. As for the rest of you: Tweet this.

The International Association of Business Communicators is holding its annual International Conference this week, and I'm sorry not to be there to this year to cheer, jeer, leer, loathe and fear.

But an hour spent gaping at the conference Twitter stream felt so amazingly like being there that I was inspired to turn some key tweets into a poem, to take you there with me.

I remember the very first time I heard about "hyperlinking," where a writer would willingly give readers wormholes to follow out of his story and out onto the great blue Internet. Seemed like just about the dumbest idea I'd ever heard of.

As if readers didn't have enough distractions!

Now my problem may be that I link too much. Like, in the blog item below, I linked "W.H. Auden" to his Wikipedia page.

But I did worry that the English majors who read this blog would resent the implication that they needed a brush-up on the poet. (As when a nervous in-law-to-be was talking to my dad about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and mentioned parenthetically that Edward Albee was a 20th century playwright. My normally temperate father reacted later, "I don't need some traveling salesman from St. Louis to tell me who fucking Edward Albee is!")

I can think of at least two other reasons to control your linking: 1. Too many links makes an article look like a research project. 2. And by God, you don't want to give people too many paths out of your story.

Has anybody seen a guide to moderate linking?