Tweeting again

Nonsuch HP is having another go with Twitter. We signed up with @nonsuchhp over 2 years ago but frankly didn't do a lot with it.  There is clearly great potential on Twitter to link up with other historians, politicians, journalists etc so please take a look at our Twitter page and let us know if there is anyone else we should be following. We have included a "latest tweets" section on the right hand side of the blog, and if you think there is anything else we should be doing, or any trends we should be following, let us know.

On that subject, you may find this blog post of interest showing tweeting trends during last week's political debates between @BarackObama and @MittRomney. It may not surprise you to know that the most popular subject of interest (hence the picture above) was #BigBird following Mitt Romney's comments...

King Canute

King Canute (or Cnut - on the right of the picture above)was the Viking King of Denmark and Norway who captured the throne of England, conquering the country and ruling it from 1016-1035. Yet the only thing he is really known for is "trying to stop the tide coming in". Recent articles about the Ryan Giggs affair (Nonsuch HP is reasonably confident we can mention his name now without getting sued!) have suggested that he has acted like "King Canute" in trying to stop everyone talking about him on Twitter - ie once the cat has been let out of the bag (mixing metaphors a bit) you can't put it back in.

However, this BBC article suggests that the Canute legend is unfair. The first written account of his reign, by Henry of Huntingdon, suggests that Canute did indeed go down to beach at Bosham, Sussex, and order the waves not to come any further onto the land. However he didn't do this because he was power-mad, but because he knew that his order would fail, and would prove that there were some things beyond his control. In other words, it was an early lesson in the limitations of political power. Indeed Professor Simon Keynes regards him as quite a remarkable king rather than the pompous buffoon of legend. However, Canute in real life was unlikely to have been that humble. His successful conquest of England and his clever marriage to Emma of Normandy, widow of the Saxon King, suggests that he was a remarkably talented soldier and politician.

Famous First Words

Today is the fifth anniversary of the first Twitter Tweet. Not the most momentous of anniversaries perhaps but it is still impressive to see how much progress Twitter has made in such a short space of time. If you were wondering what the first tweet was, it was "just setting up my twttr", whilst the first words mentioned on YouTube were, "Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants." (At the time the founder of YouTube was standing in front of an elephant at San Diego zoo.)

There are more of these in this BBC article, including "Come here Mr Watson, I want to see you" (First telephone message, 1876 - Mr Watson was Alexander Bell's assistant), and "Merry Christmas" (First text message, 1992). Can you remember your first text / email / phone call?

Obama Tweets

We're now following Barack Obama's Twitter feed. He's currently got 1.6 million followers, which is 1 million more than the official White House feed. Sarah Palin meanwhile has just started twittering, so see what you make of her comments here (which seem to be mainly about fish...)

Historical Tweets

This site is quite amusing - what would historical figures have written if they had access to Twitter?

Here's one from Johannes Gutenberg

and here's Abraham Lincoln asking for speech-writing advice

We're on Twitter

Nonsuch HP has tentatively established a presence on Twitter. We're known as nonsuchhp and you can find us here. We will initially use it to send updates about the blog but if you know of other useful ways to use Twitter, please let us know!