Saturday, August 27, 2011

Tweet, Tweet ... Scotland & More On Twitter


Last month, I joined Twitter. Why? Partly because my niece said it was fun to follow famous people. It also seemed like an excellent way to share the Scottish Emigration Blog with new readers and to find out what was happening out there in history-land, genealogy-land and Scotland. Follow me by  clicking on the wee birdie at the top of you screen.

What have I found on Twitter? All sorts of cool stuff! I already knew about @ScottishHistory as they have been tweeting my blogposts for some time. I don't know who is behind @ScottishHistory, but they pull and forward posts about Scotland's history - even from those not on Twitter. I thought about listing some good people and places to follow, but there really are too many. If you are interesting in following Scottish-themed tweeters you should check who @ScottishHistory follows or look at my "Scotland" list.

There are scores of genealogy related tweeters - individual researchers, software companies, Ancestry, Family Search, Archives, Societies, etc. I have a genealogy list, but it is in no way comprehensive. Just look around and see what you find. You can also search for #genealogy.

Archive tweets will also be of interest to historians. H-Albion tweets and I would imagine some of the other H-Net listservs do as well. Many historians tweet - some famous, some not so much.  A good way to find historians is to search for #twitterstorians, an effort spearheaded by @katrinagulliver to locate historians on Twitter. To get you started you can have a look at my History & Archaeology list.

I have not found anything much related to immigration history on Twitter, most of what is there is related to modern migration policy issues and migrant rights. I did find @MigrationUK, the twitter feed for the Migration Museum Project, and @MigrantHistory, from the NSW Migration Heritage Centre.

If you want to know more about Twitter consider getting one of the many books about it. I checked out from the library, and later bought my own copy of Twitter Tips, Tricks, and Tweets.

Have suggestions for organizations/people to follow? Leave them in the comments section.
Happy Tweeting!

image from Tweetle, http://etherbrian.org/tweet/tweetle.html

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