Accents on Twitter

When I heard this piece on NPR it made me think of the tweeters I had known online only at first, but then met face-to-face. For example, April Estep (@MsEstep) and I followed each other through our Summer Institutes (Me in Missouri, her in West Virginia). In this case, had no idea she had an accent (a notion she disavows). When we met at the National Meeting in Florida, I commented on how I hadn't pictured her with an accent. I'd be interested to know what other people see in my own tweets. Twitter, being so public and so broad, means we all gain access to a larger array of perceptions of ourselves. Different accents manifested in speech may only be one part of what we gain access to in a Web 2.0 world.