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A Law School's Profile, in 140 Characters
What is going on right now at the University of Chicago? Well, 3L Cleve Doty, president of the school's chapter of the Federalist Society, is organizing a last-minute poker game. Professor Tom Ginsburg is pondering the unlikelihood that President Bush would commute John Walker Lindh's sentence. 1L Becky Mosely finished her first quarter of law school and headed home to Texas. And Assistant Professor M. Todd Henderson just finished an hour of shoveling snow.
Even though I am 1,000 miles away from Chicago and anything but omniscient, I know all this thanks to the very clever mash-up, TweetChicago. A "tweet" is a post to Twitter, the microblogging platform that enables you to post updates about yourself, of 140 characters or less, from your computer or cell phone. This page tracks and collects the Twitter posts of the law school's students and faculty. Tweets are presented in a page as thought balloons coming from a picture of the Twitter-er, below which is the person's name and class or title.
As I wrote on Law.com recently, I see good reasons for lawyers to use Twitter in their practices. I like this Chicago site because it illustrates how Twitter can add vibrancy to other applications. Compare taking the pulse of the school this way to other alternatives. You could, instead, check its events calendar, where you would see that two faculty members will be speaking on Jan. 14 on a topic to be determined. (Yawn.)
As you might expect of a law school with its own Twitter mash-up, it also has its own Twitter feed: @uchicagolaw, which is another good way to keep track of goings on there. If nothing else, it beats walking around Hyde Park on a cold winter day.
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on December 19, 2008 at 11:01 AM | Permalink
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