Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The Watering Hole

Everyone has heard it, seen it or participated in it. Every group of people in society has one. I'm talking about people getting together to spread gossip, facts, fish tales, hunting stories & moments of pride for themselves, this has become known as a local watering hole. You may think of barber shops, hair salons, coffee shops, grocery stores or any other meeting place.

Social media has taken the watering hole to new levels...we now have wells or fountains of knowledge and information at the tips of our fingers. No longer is it a local matter, we can share our stories (like in this blog) to people all over the world. Technology has become a part of our everyday lives and we benefit from it in many ways. I don't want to focus on the benefits and downfalls of technology or social media here because I want to spend time talking about a special watering hole known as #agchat.

#agchat is a hash-tag (twitter lingo for a search) that allows anyone to post tweets that can be seen under the #agchat hash-tag. Agchat holds weekly question banks on twitter allowing anyone to submit answers under the hash-tag and they can be seen by whoever searches the hash-tag. They spend time focusing on different aspects of agriculture & important events happening in the ag industry. The key to #agchat's weekly talk is that anyone can post answers which gives a huge variety of ideas and ways of looking at questions. Technology has helped us to spread our knowledge to others interested through #agchat.

Today is the agchat foundations first birthday. This was when the weekly discussions started and they have grown faster than anyone could have expected. The Agchat foundation has also held several events in the past year to help farmers strengthen their social media skills. They work hard to make sure that the positive side of agriculture is heard through producers voices and communities.

For more info on #agchat and the Agchat Foundation look at their facebook page:
  http://www.facebook.com/AgChatFoundation
And follow them on twitter at @agchat or search the hash-tag #agchat

My fellow agvocate and agchat attendee Mike Haley or @farmerhaley has posted a similar blog about agchat and has compiled a slideshow of photos from different agchat foundation events. If you're interested more in photos be sure to look at them!
http://haley-farms.com/blog/2011/04/04/agchat-birthday/

So Happy Birthday to the Agchat Foundation and be sure to tweet into agchat sometime for some great discussions and thoughts.

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