I read today on http://mashable.com/2011/12/16/sweden-twitter-acount that:
‘Sweden’s people have officially taken over the @sweden Twitter account — and with the blessing of the Swedish government. One Swedish citizen will control the handle each week, tweeting about whatever they’d like, as part of a new project called Curators of Sweden.
“No one owns the brand of Sweden more than its people. With this initiative we let them show their Sweden to the world,” says Thomas Brühl, CEO of VisitSweden, the tourism ministry that had been updating the @sweden account since January 2009.
Curators of Sweden is based around the idea that no single voice can represent the country, so a slew of guest Swedish curators will do the best job to portray the national character.’
Now this is a pretty cool idea and I can see a lot of uses for this. Say, you manage the National Gallery of Canada, why not create a Guest Twitter account and let visitors curate the collection for other Canuks?
Outside the National Gallery of Canada: Maman Sculpture*
Companies, not-for-profits, charities, NGOs, political movements could all do a riff on this.
Artful curating is really what Twitter is all about, at least for me and I suspect many people like me. I rely on folks I follow there to curate the world for me– to parse ideas and news from the firehose of information being created each day in the vast Metaverse that the Internet has become. This story came via one of them: Pete Cashmore, https://twitter.com/#!/mashable who has more than 2.6 million followers.
I can see cities setting up @Ottawa or @NewYork this way and letting visitors as well as residents curate their towns for each other and the world beyond. Maybe you could create @Cisco or @IBM too although I can see the obvious corporate risks that would come from bad PR generated by obnoxious tweets or offensive ones. But I think that you could formulate an application process whereby people would have to sign up in advance for a chance to be guest Twitter Master for @IBM or @NewYork and then you’d vet them and screen out weirdos (maybe) or shut them down if they are.
Perhaps it only works in Sweden because they are all nice, non crazy people. But I would give it a go.
Prof Bruce
For more on ‘Profession to Watch for in the 21st Century: Curator’, please see: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=487.
* The giant spider called Maman was created by French-Born artist Louise Bourgeois, who died in New York on the 31st of May, 2010, age 98.