The New Twitter

From the existential Buddhist blog

Anatta, or “not-self”, is a frequently misunderstood Buddhist concept. Let’s clear up three common misconceptions about it right off the bat.  Buddhism doesn’t deny you exist, deny you have a personality, or imply you shouldn’t have an “ego.” What Buddhism does deny is a false conception of the self:  a self that is separate-unto-itself and unchanging.

In its narrowest sense, anatta is a denial of the Vedic conception of atman, an unchanging soul which transmigrates and which, according to the ancient Vedic formula, shares an identity with Brahman, or the godhead.  More broadly, anatta is descriptive of all conditioned phenomena, not just the self, and corresponds to the Mahayana idea of śunyata or emptiness: nothing possesses an unchanging self-nature.

The self can be compared to a whirlpool in the ocean.  A whirlpool is a distinctive feature of the ocean: it’s visible, tangible, and measurable.  It’s real.  It exists.  On the other hand, at any given moment the water that makes up the whirlpool is different from the water that comprised it a moment before, and from the water that will comprise it a moment later.  The whirlpool is a pattern that retains a discernible identity while it continues to exist.  At any given time, there is no separation between the whirlpool and the ocean.  It makes no sense to say that the whirlpool is “here” and the ocean is “there.”  Whirlpooling is a feature of the ocean.
It’s the same with the self.  The self exists as a pattern: a pattern of behavioral response. But that pattern is always in some degree of flux.  While I am always, in some sense, the same person, I am different now than I was at age three, and different from the way I will be at age eighty.  My intellectual capacity and memory will decline as I age.  My tastes and opinions may change as well.  While we are a relatively enduring pattern, we are also constantly changing: learning, developing, maturing, declining.  We also change depending on the situation we find ourselves in.  We behave differently at work, at home, in the bar, and in the zendo.
We are also inseparable from the world around us.  Our skin connects us to the world, rather than separating us from it.


Ok.  I use firefox and have a twitter addon.

http://goo.gl/XlrQ

This post is only about trying to understand a track back.  When you quote from another blog, you track back to that blog.  Like this superbly written piece at mashable.  The links came when I copied and pasted.

Twitter () has announced that it’s rolling out a new version of its web interface. Some users will start seeing the new look as soon as tonight, though the company says on its blog that it “will roll out as a preview over the next several weeks.”
News () of the company’s plan to integrate multimedia into the stream leaked out earlier this afternoon, but we’ve now learned that the redesign goes much further than that. The new interface resembles that of a far more sophisticated web app (as well as Twitter’s recently released iPad app).
The multimedia partnerships we hinted at earlier today extend to 16 different companies: DailyBooth, DeviantART (), Etsy, Flickr (), Justin.TV (), Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo (), TwitPic (), TwitVid (), Ustream (), Vimeo (), yfrog, and YouTube ().
Much has been made in recent months of Twitter’s move into areas previously owned by third-party applications. Today’s announcement will no doubt renew such discussion, with many of the best features of Twitter clients like Tweetie (), Seesmic () Desktop, and TweetDeck () now becoming a part of the default Twitter interface. As we also pointed out earlier this afternoon, it also makes Twitter feel a bit more like Facebook.

The next link is generated by Amazon.  Subho

Twitter CEO Evan Williams prefaced his announcement by mentioning that Twitter.com is already far and away the most popular way for accessing the microblogging service, commanding 78% of unique users (which the company defines as “Of all the people who logged into their Twitter account during the month, what percentage did so via each service.”). Combined with Twitter’s growing need to serve up impressions to advertisers, it’s certainly no surprise that the company is now looking to keep people more engaged on its website.