Twittering the day away

"The wonderful thing about Twitter, is Twitter's a wonderful thing" (Apologies to Tigger and Pooh...)

You say you don't know what Twitter is? That's ok. Lots of us are relative newbies. It's worth a look and depending on your interest in text messaging tools and toys, it may be worth trying for yourself.

At its most basic level, Twitter is a networking tool that helps users keep abreast of what friends, or strangers, are doing. It can be useless or useful, depending on who you ask and how you choose to use it.

Here's why it was useful today:

I got a text message on my cell phone that read:

The reason I got it is interesting...

I get a text message, via my randyweeks twitter account, of any twitter post that contains the words Cincy or Cinci.  Joe Wessels also started following cincy and cinci on his JoeFoto account at Twitter after we talked about how interesting (or not) it can be some days. You can, too, with your own Twitter account (yeah, I know... you're thinking, geez, why should I WANT to? I'm not sure. Really. This behavior is a chronic condition of mine).

Back to Twitter:
Twitter allows a user to communicate with family, friends or the world at large by sending and receiving short text messages about pretty much anything. Tweets (messages sent via twitter using the web or registered cell phone) are most often little more than electronic blurts that answer the general question, "what are you doing now?"

It's kind of like updating your status on Facebook. (You say you don't know what facebook is? come on...).

Other interesting things one can do with Twitter include:

• follow other users (receive their posts automatically), including news and other publishers
  
• be followed by other users (have posts sent through twitter received automatically by anyone interested)
  
• and more interestingly for me, lately: follow (receive automatically) any twitter posts (or tweets) that contain certain words or phrases.

When I signed up a few months ago, I decided to track the words cinci and cincy (because cincy.com also operates as cinci.com and I was curious how often locals or others use the short, friendly "cincy" to talk about Cincinnati -- quite a bit, as you'd expect).

It's been fun to see what kinds of messages get snatched out of the airwaves and delivered from one twitter account to another based on those terms.

Sometimes it's someone saying "I'm flying into cincy this am", or "taking the family to festival of lights at the cincy zoo", or "sigh... watching Cincy get beat again by _____ (fill in the blank...)"

Today, it was the link to a news story about the Cincy Post's closing.

For anyone interested in the the interpretation of that twitter message, here it is:

The message:

"(Poynter): Romenesko: Cincy Post staffers pack up as they put out their last editions: Editor & Publisher... http://tinyurl.com/35sduu"

came from Poynter.org, which has been broadcasting posts via twitter for a while.

It was an entry by Journalist Jim Romenesko (wikipedia bio) linking to a story about the Cincinnati Post at EditorAndPublisher.com

The full story, by Joe Strupp, is at:
 http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003684364

I'll write more about that actual article in a different entry, seeing as how I wandered off into geekland in this particular post.

More about Twitter and the use of it by Poynter and other news / journalism sites can be found in this and other articles:

 http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=128918
RBW