Twitter and Facebook are nice to use even if you don't post anything. I like to see news and interesting weather posts on those. Facebook is especially annoying if you don't login, but if you signup for both you can pick what you like and then in the main feed you can see various posts from what you follow. I love that. For Facebook, there are a lot of privacy settings you have to change to keep things private and you have to live with constant nagging to update various things on your profile, but you can ignore it all if you don't want to post personal info. (Just your name is public if you change all the settings.) I only use Facebook for my website and to follow news and weather. I deleted everything from my profile and don't use it for anything else for privacy/security.
Twitter doesn't nag you like Facebook does and can be more anonymous.
They are a fast way to get information if you follow the right things. I stick to major news outlets, science sites and reputable weather sources. I don't follow individual people unless they might be a meteorologist or reporter that posts interesting things. I don't follow other individual people and use neither for sharing personal info anymore.
I don't usually engage people on my business Facebook and Twitter. While it's not one way, I usually use it that way. I like to post links to official content, highlighting important parts. I don't like to engage people like I do here. Here you can explain it more. I don't want someone seeing what I post in a short tweet without more to explain it. A single tweet might show up in someone's timeline. If you were to post something about what a model showed and the explanation that a lot of other models don't show that, or this was just one run, is in another tweet, someone might get the wrong idea. I don't post about models on those social media feeds, but as an example, that is how it is bad to have a short amount of characters. With Facebook you have more, but the important part might be hidden and people might skim just the top. Here, I can explain something that I otherwise wouldn't, a model that might show something crazy, but I can be clear about it being one run or that other models don't show it. I wouldn't try that on Twitter/Facebook.
I often find I don't read a lot of long form things usually. I guess newer social media is really a negative in that regard. If you can post it fast, you can think about it less. You don't have to organize anything, just post, post, post.
I do check out blogs from Jeff Masters and Bob Henson quite often:
http://hurricaneharbor.blogspot.com/
NOAA Hurricane Research Division Blog:
https://noaahrd.wordpress.com/
If I remember, Bobbi and Jim's blogs:
http://hurricaneharbor.blogspot.com/
http://hurricanecity.com/blogs/
And NHC in the rare instances they post.
https://noaanhc.wordpress.com/
And not really a blog, but Capital Weather Gang when there is tropical activity:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/
I usually forget CIMSS' blog except when CypressTX posts about it:
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/
Excellent imagery there when they post about something.
But other than those I don't usually check blogs. Facebook and Twitter are fast ways to see things. You get a short summary and maybe a picture and you determine if you want to know more. It's tailored to just what you want to see if logged in. But with such a small amount of info presented, you often need to visit a main site to know more. I don't trust anything I see on social media unless it comes from a reputable source. If it seems crazy, I'll assume they were hacked. I'll Google something to verify.
As for YouTube videos, I don't know about weather videos on that. I don't know how people get that info out there easily, other than posting that info on other social media. I find YouTube less friendly to see the latest content there. Old stuff often pops up, even from subscribers. Maybe I just don't use that enough. Other than Jim's videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/hurricanecitydotcom) and if I happen to come across it, Levi Cowan's videos, I don't guess I view any weather videos on a regular basis. I don't know how people discover videos like that unless they post them and then get shared on social media. For actual storms, you can hashtag the name. For general tropical activity, I don't know how you would. I get emails about Jim's videos or see it here or when I check HurricaneCity. I don't use my Tropical Atlantic YouTube enough to see how that gets presented. Videos don't have text archived for search engines, so that makes it more complicated to find content. I guess tropical update videos without a storm threatening is simply hard to find because people don't seek it out as much. But for storms threatening land, especially populated areas, then they do. I guess that is where hash-tagging is important. I try to do that a lot on Twitter and even Facebook with the storm name. |