Isn't she pretty? That ship called Dignity

[venta]

Twitter is a strange beast.

I noticed earlier that a user I'd never heard of had re-tweeted a throwaway remark I made (in the guise of Pintwatch) to leathellin. Who is this aboutdignity, I wondered.

It turns out that it's an account which appears to re-tweet any remark anyone makes which contains the word "dignity". Even more strangely, it has 1500 followers.

Is this an isolated oddity, or are these aggregating accounts common things ? Would following it tell me something deep and meaningful about life, dignity, and the human condition ? It seems rather unlikely, to me, since pattern-matching on text has rarely produced much that's hugely insightful. Except by accident.

Do people follow in the hopes of serendipitous wisdom from the masses ?

Comments

[rabbit1080.livejournal.com]

How odd.

Personally I prefer to listen to Big Ben on twitter (I don't follow it, I just wander by for a listen occasionally)
http://twitter.com/big_ben_CLOCK

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

They were playing A Ship Called Dignity in a shop recently - somewhere trend-tastic like New Look I think. The 80s are clearly not yet dead.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Does the capitalisation of 'CLOCK' indicate that there is perhaps another twit with a very similar name?

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

I love that.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I do like Big Ben :)

I also follow The London Stone (http://twitter.com/Thelondonstone), a big lump of rock in Cannon Street which has to stay in The City to keep London safe. It's a little more communicative than Big Ben.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think twitter names are case-insensitive, so it's just indicative of some odd capitalisation on rabbit1080's part.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Your favourite search engine will find many, many more if you look for "retweet bots". No, I don't know either.

[marjory.livejournal.com]

I don't know!

However, I asked someone 'do you dream lucidly?' in a (silly) reply to a tweet and... KA-BOOM! an account called 'Lucid Dreaming' added me.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's a tool in some sociolinguistic experiment. Perhaps next year an academic paper will be out analysing the corpus of verbiage thus tracked, or the strength of the network effects, or sthg like that.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Every so often I worry that one day I will run out of strange and peculiar things to be astounded by, then oh look! The Internet!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Apropos of nothing much, will I be unexectedly bumping into you on Monday evening ?

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

By chance I mentioned "tea" in a tweet once and I found that there is a retweet bot for that.
And I've been manually added by people for various other things I mentioned.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

It's a definite possibility! We shall look out for you.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

The ones that amuse me are the ones that pick up on the opposite of what they're hoping for. I tweeted something about detesting tennis and had a 'UK Tennis Fans' bot retweet me; ditto cricket. I now think of deliberately annoying things to tweet when I find one of these. :)

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

In addition to re-tweet bots, there seem to be quite the menagerie of auto-followers, that will follow you if you incant the right keyword.

[rabbit1080.livejournal.com]

Oddly, google found it with the over-enthusiastic capitalisation. I didn't fix it before posting :)

I like the London Stone. Quite whimsical.

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

It sounds along the same lines as allthesausages (http://twitter.com/allthesausages), but less silly.

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

I follow big ben.

It's actually quite useful having the hourly post when you're catching up with twitter to give you an idea of how far back you're going.