So as many of our daily tasks start to move online and we start creating our online presence have you thought about if you will leave access to these accounts and information and if so who will you leave it to? Our online presence can be very personal and not all aspects may be shared or even know about by your friends or family so do we just leave list of account numbers, usernames and passwords as part of your will or leave it all out there in the cloud some of which will be viewable and other locked away.

I have been thinking about this recently as I really need to update my will now my kids are older and just general life situations have changed. I did a quick calculation of how many different online accounts I have including bank accounts, and came to a figure around 50. Well that blew me away and seeing that I use some accounts like gmail as a backup facility also some of these accounts will need to be accessed by other after I have gone. If you have flickr accounts and other media sharing accounts that have family and personal files would you want your family to have account access to these? 

I am just putting this out there for all of us to think about, how I would actually go about leaving this information or if I would actually leave access available to or my accounts is something I will be thinking about. So I ask the question Will you leave your online life to your loved ones?

For the past two years I have been an avid user of Twitter, I am sure I have gained more from my conversations than I have given, made many great contacts, lots of real life friends and learnt a lot. Outside of this network I have found that the mere mention of the word Twitter, let alone trying to explain what it has to offer and trying to get other engaged has evoked the word “twit” in the listeners mind. I see their eyes glaze over and the look that say’s “She needs to get a life”. it has been a case of “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”.

Not anymore it seems, with all the current media coverage of Twitter boy has that changed. Twitter is now three years old and it is the word of the moment, everywhere you turn it is being mentioned as the new *BIG* thing. The growth of Twitter users has been massive over the past few months it seems every politician, rock band, celebrity, TV show, magazine, newspaper….  all now have twitter accounts.

So is this good or bad?

This question has sparked a lot of discussion on Twitter with some users annoyed that Twitter is not being used “properly”. Seeing that most of us aren’t actually using Twitter in the way that it was originally perceived where uses left tweets in reply to the question “What are you doing?” I think the more the merrier. Twitter has developed into a communication tool, a community of users who share information, help each other and have many many conversations.

One of the things that is different with the new Twits is they tend to have hundreds of thousands of followers but only follow back a few people, this can lead to one way conversations within their twitter network, it just becomes an outlet for their tweets.  It is understandable that they don’t follow everyone back when you have a look at how many followers some people have like @coldplay (489,914 followers/2670 following) , @theellenshow (Ellen DeGeneres 696,746 followers/17 following ) and @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher 791,101 followers/60 following ) have, they would just be flooded with incoming tweets. I think it all comes down to using a tool for your needs, some like @stephenfry (395,062 followers/55199), and @bobbyllew (20,240 followers/203 following) use it to have 2 way conversations while others like @coldplay simply use it as a way of passing information onto fans, and for celebrities like and @mrskutcher (Demi Moore following 68/followers469,894 ) that have so much false information reported about them it must be fantastic to have such an instant quick way of setting the record straight. I wonder as the celebrities and media get a handle on using twitter whether the celebrities will find the true power of twitter and be able to diminish the power of the Paparazzi? If they continue to post their own photo’s on services like twitpic and video on Qik then the media outlets can sidestep the Paparazzi and simply use those photographs.

I will have to end this article or it will never get published. As I have been writing it I have come up with a few more post that I want to write on things like, Why I use twitter, What I get from Twitter and Tips Tricks and Tools for Twitter. To conclude this post I can sum up with Twitter is a tool, use it as you want to, engage with others and don’t take it too seriously as after all you you only have 140 characters to use.

24 March 2009
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless. http://findingada.com/

I signed the pledge to say that I would post an article on my Blog on March 24th about my tech heroine, someone who I think could be a female role model in technology.”In technology” can be interpreted in many ways and I have chosen someone who is leading the way and encouraging others to become involved in using technology in education.

Sue Waters stands out as someone who is dedicated to encouraging others to see the advantages of using “Web 2″ technologies like wiki’s, twitter and blogs in education. She is a mum and wife, works as a TAFE lecturer, posts to two blogs, answers questions in user forums and twitter and runs numerous online sessions on how to use these technologies. She is masterful at engaging people with and through these technologies specifically wiki’s and twitter. By asking conference attendees to tweet what chocolate they like and where they are from she gets responses from people who may have been reluctant to even try twitter. She has found that using the word chocolate is not threatening and everyone has an opinion about it. She is an inspiration to me, a very positive female role model and I am lucky enough to call her my friend. You can find her personal blog here http://aquaculturepda.edublogs.org/