Later in the day I talked with Bobby Rozzell, a former minister who is one of the impressive grad students in the Elliott School of Communication. Bobby recommended a book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. That led to a medium-or-message discussion that reminded me of a long-ago Knight Ridder committee called, tongue-in-cheek, The Edge of Knight.

The idea of the Edge group, circa 1984, was that the people who ran Knight Ridder knew that good ideas were dying because they couldn't get through the bureaucracy and the budget process. In theory, anyone with a good idea could come to us with a proposal that might be funded independently of the normal process. It didn't end up working, but I remember one particular discussion about the then hot delivery system -- fax machines!

Our wise technical adviser, Steve Landers, urged us to shift our business focus from the whiz-bang platform (we were sure everyone would have one at home someday soon) to the content. He was right, of course. We're probably at a point where about as many college students will have used a fax machine at home as will have used a typewriter -- virtually none.

As journalism jobs disappear by the thousands, at least from newspapers, it's time to keep a sharp focus on content. What will the audience want, and who will produce it, remain more important questions than how they will get it.

Twitter is inherently hard in the web or SMS interfaces to follow. This site attempts to fix that issue. You can login to post and reply, and once again it is powered by Summize.

A simple entry of any Twitter username and it starts pulling conversation threads together as best it can

Since I was only following a few tweeters there wasn't of a flow - so I added a couple more higher profile tweeters, like Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror.

This morning Jeff tweeted:

I hate #region so much. DIE #REGION DIE!

I quite like #region in VS.NET, (it makes my code look/feel tidy). I was curious to why Jeff had a problem with it, so I tempted to reply to his tweet. But I stopped - thinking it was a bit of a fan-boy thing to do. Also I'm sure someone else would have asked the same question... which got me thinking how do you follow a conversation on Twitter?

I came across Summize (a search engine for Twitter) the other day, so tried that to see if anyone mentions #region or @codinghorror - which they do, but it's a tad disjointed. I couldn't follow a conversation.

So I turned to my old friend Google (how to follow conversations on twitter), and found Quotably!

Now I can follow the conversation: http://quotably.com/codinghorror/statuses/811735028

Quotably is powered by Summize, with some extra jiggery-pokery (and human intervention).

It's almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it's a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together - for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.

In other words, it is what you make it and the only way to figure it out is to start using it. The following is a guide to getting started on Twitter as a journalist, and some of the things that can be done with it.

Twitter for newsgathering

Contacts are central to a journalist's work. Twitter makes it easier to find them. But whereas, for instance, Facebook requires someone to accept you as their 'friend' before you get updates; you can follow people on Twitter regardless. It's where blogging meets social networking.

The more people you follow on Twitter, the more likely you are to come across a lead or a useful contact. News of the recent UK earthquake, for example, broke first on Twitter, while last year news of a fire in East London broke there too. And even as I type this, someone I know at St Pancras station has twittered that it is being evacuated. You might also use Twitterverse or PicoBuzz to spot important phrases (e.g. events).

Here's a simple ticklist to fill your Twitter contacts book:

1. Obviously you should begin by searching Twitter for people you know, or know of, in your field. The Labour Party, Lib Dems and Conservatives all have their own Twitter accounts, for example, as do some politicians. But beware of hoaxers. This isn't really Chuck Norris, for example. Is it?
2. Then, look at who they're following (I find entering someone's username on Gridjit is the best way of seeing someone's contacts and what they're saying, or you can use Quotably to follow their conversations).
3. Then try Twits Like Me to find people with similar interests (based on what you've twittered)
4. and Twubble (based on your friends) or Who Should I Follow? (which allows you to adjust according to whether you want people nearer your location or more or less popular)
5. and Tweetscan for key words (e.g. "health", "NHS").
6. Finally Twitterlocal will help you find twitterers in your local area.
7. You can also find a list of significant Twitter users in various fields at the Twitter Pack Project. However, as this is a wiki there is a risk that people have added themselves. It's also US-focused.

The Birmingham Post, and particularly reporter Jo Geary, are leading Twitter-users among regional newspapers. She sees it as a great way of building a relationship with your contacts and target audience.

"It's not just popping in, getting something, and popping out, but building something more. And because of that it's also become a support network of people who help me, and vice versa. It moves into the crowdsourcing thing - if you want to do something you can put out questions and get answers."

It's all part of the wider move of journalism to becoming a conversation with readers. Abbie Lundberg, for instance, wrote one article by soliciting tweets on the topic from her followers. Nico Luchsinger even conducted his interview with me via Twitter (which gave me the unique experience of being interviewed while shopping in Tesco.)

Managing your Twitter feeds

Once you've set up all those contacts, it's useful to create some filters to help manage the incoming information. Gridjit, again, has a clearer interface for viewing tweets. Desktop applications like Twhirl will give you an audio alert; Snitter allows you to filter your tweets - for key words or tweets containing links for instance. You can also set up pages to organise tweets from 'crowds' of twitterers (for example, friends, colleagues, contacts) using Crowdstatus.com.

You can - and should - set up Twitter to send updates to your mobile phone (click on 'add device' or look in settings). It's free, and is particularly useful for following what's happening while you're on the move. But pick your sources carefully - Twitter will only send 250 updates per week, and it's easy to hit that.

The first thing you should do once you've set up Twitter to send text alerts is to text Twitter the word "track" followed by your username. This means Twitter will text you whenever anyone mentions your username on Twitter - very useful for picking up messages aimed at you. You can use the same trick to track mentions of key words in your area, such as a key employer or your own organisation (More tips on mobile commands can be found here). If you prefer email alerts, MobiFeedLive.com and Tweet Scan (not to be confused with Tweetscan) provide them.

You can also follow links that are getting passed about a lot on Twitter though Twitterbuzz and Twitt(url)y. While Twist is a pretty impressive equivalent of Google Trends (from comments).

Twitter for news publishing, distribution and creation

If you want an idea of what Twitter can do for news publishing check out BreakingNewsOn. Headline alerts of breaking news that people can receive on their mobiles are the most obvious application, and used by dozens of organisations including the BBC, the Guardian and CNN (This post has a list of news organisations using Twitter). It's a good way of alerting people to your content, as well as inviting participation, as Emap's David Cushman recently tweeted: "Comments on my blog are going mad. Nothing has changed except I now use twitter regularly."

Many newspapers have separate Twitter accounts for different sections, such as business, traffic and sports. Sky even have one for news about Madeleine McCann.

Twitterfeed will save you typing updates by pushing RSS feeds from your newspaper to a Twitter account, but this means you have to write the article first and risk missing the scoop. Instead it's better to 'tweet' (post to Twitter) before you write the article - ensuring you get to the top of Google quickly, as Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves did with the arrest of Karren Brady:

"I'm only followed by 30 people or so ... But these people are all ... in the business of sharing information and knowledge. Consequently, a number of them followed my link to the story on the Post website, and started to talk about it on their own blogs and again through Twitter, with the effect that the Post site received an incredible number of hits as word spread."

If you really want to track how many people are clicking on any of your links you can also use Tweetburner (or Twitt(url)y to see what they're saying if they pass it on). Or you can use Intwition to see who's linking to a particular domain.

Twitter is particularly useful for journalists reporting live via text message themselves. Sky reporter Julia Reid recently used it to post her "minute-by-minute" experiences at Heathrow's Terminal 5. Robert LaHue used it "to semi-liveblog a board meeting via texting" and it's often used at conferences and events. You can also download applications that allow you to update Twitter from your mobile - this article compares 20 of them.

Going beyond 140 characters

And if you're frustrated by the 140 character limit try some of these tools:

• Twitzer is a Firefox extension that allows you to write tweets over 140 characters. MessageDance does much the same via email, and also allows comments on tweets.
• twi8r translates text speak into 'English' and vice versa, allowing you to truncate your messages
• Twittermail.com and Tweetahead allow you to pre-schedule tweets to be posted (for when you are not at a computer); the latter also lets you send and receive tweets via email
• Tweetr is a Twitter reader that allows you to send files up to 10MB through Twitter.
• TwitPic allows you to send images from your phone and not only posts links straight to your Twitter account but allows people to post comments that are then posted on their own Twitter page (with a link to the photo). Mobypicture does something similar. TwitterSoap is a mashup of Mobypicture and Twitter.
• SnapTweet posts your latest Flickr picture to Twitter; Autopostr.com does much the same.
• Twiddeo allows you to do the same with video.
• Twixxer does both photo and video sharing
• And American and Canadian users can phone in their tweets using Jott.
• Or you can use the Firefox plugin Power Twitter, which does most of the above and much, much more.

But Twitter becomes really impressive when you tap into its social, conversational nature - or combine the RSS feeds from a number of twitterers. Shawn Smith used it to create the Michigan Twitter Network, which "follows more than 1,300 Michigan twitterers. We’ve gained about 200+ followers and use this account @mlive to send breaking news alerts and also poll users." (I've created something similar for Birmingham twitterers). In Spain, ADN.es used it to follow voter reactions during a televised presidential candidate debate on TV.

My recent experiment with, of all things, a live book review on Twitter demonstrated that the boundary between publishing and conversation becomes blurred when you use the technology - confusing if you're bothered about semantics, but encouraging if you're interested in positive relationships between the journalist and reader.

At the end of the day, Twitter is just a platform. What I've outlined here is just the start, and there are plenty of experiments being done - the really interesting stuff starts when you try something completely new...

Feel free to follow me, by the way, at twitter.com/paulbradshaw

For more information see my Twitter-related links, or read my other blog posts about Twitter.

     Twitter users don't just share 140 character missives about themselves, but often share news, both personal, local, national and beyond.  This news isn't just simple notes either.  Many of the messages contain links as well.

     Tools available today make this news accessible to bloggers and others as a resource, even if the blogger isn't following those providing the news. These tools provide for searching and organizing Twitter messages without using a Twitter client or being at the Twitter website.

     Tweetscan is one of my growing favorites.  Tweetscan is like Google for Twitter.  Type in any search terms and Tweetscan returns messages containing those terms.  It will find public messages, even across people that you don't follow.  A good example is "Atomic Cowboy", where the recent St. Louis Bloggers Guild met for a social.  That search returned many tweets related to that event from bloggers across St. Louis.  You get some inside news about what happened and when as well.

     Hashtags is another Twitter search engine.  It narrows things a bit though.  Where Tweetscan searches across all public messages, Hashtags is an opt-in service.  Following hashtags is the only your Twitter messages can be searched.  The searches are also limited to hash tagged keywords.  An example would be checking for messages where #SOBCON08 was included.  Hashtags only returns messages where that string is in the message and from people that agreed to share with Hashtags.

     Quotably provides a third way to look at and follow Twitter messages.  Quotably attempts to follow threads of conversation for a specific Twitter user.  Check out what it shows for Chris Brogan, a rather well known blogger and Twitter user.  This basically shows tweets by the selected individual and the immediate replies to that, as well as replies to those replies.  Threads of conversation can be followed this way.

     All three of these tools provide ready access to news and information at varying levels.  From Tweetscan covering all public messages, to Hashtags being opt-in, and not user specific, down to Quotably, which is all about one user, a blogger has a breadth of search options.  Each of these services highlights popular terms or users, giving insight as to what's hot.

     Each of these services only searches public Twitter messages. No private or direct messages can be searched.  Still this allows a blogger to quickly find out if someone on Twitter is talking about a specific topic, or what a specific user is saying.  This is a great way to get related links on desired topics or to find experts.  Once you find an expert, using Quatably is one way to see what other conversations that person is having and with whom, making it a great way to find other experts and interested parties.

     There are many other tools, such as Twitter clients, that make Twitter easier to use.  Websites are also springing up that are mashups with Twitter, providing ways to share pictures with a click or crosspost messages across services.  It's fertile ground for development.

     Are you using Twitter? Come join the bloggers guild there.

Speaking to a few twitter users, I know that this problem isn't unique to me. There's also been some recent talk in the blogosphere of twitter spam increasing and developers have been quick to realise that there is a need to organise the Twitter information better. Quotably, Tweetmeme, TweetScan, AlphaTwitter and more recently Twitlinks are all websites which aim to make sense of the tweetosphere. But, what does this all have to do with Scoopler? Well, we are currently working on a prototype of Scoopler which will begin to tackle this problem.

We had been trying to work out what the essence of Scoopler is over the last few weeks, the feature that made it really unique, which we can demonstrate easily as a prototype running on top of the Twitter API. Two features really stood out:

1) A location focused service which shows a user a events in their location and the tweets about those events. The service would connect people who are sharing the same experience of an event, so that they can discuss it via microblogging as it happens.

2) A Digg like website for the microblogosphere where users can highlight posts about interesting events in real time. As Mike Arrington points out, Twitter is already a great source of breaking news, because the real time nature of microblogging means information is dispersed faster than via blogging and mainstream media.

Option (1) is a bottom up approach to Scoopler, and is actually the path Buzzspotr, a service created by London based startup i-Together, is taking. Buzzpotr was featured on TechCrunch UK last month, when the service was mothballed, but I have been in touch with Jof recently, who has assured me that they're working on resuscitating it. Given that we have just under a week to put together a prototype to demo, when we're in the valley, building a location based service seemed a little too ambitious! So, we decided to go for Option 2, with the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) principle in mind. Building a Digg for the microblogsphere was actually our original idea, so after a month of Biz Dev it's good to know that we haven't lost sight of our vision. The prototype will run on top of the Twitter API, as well as plugging in to Twitter's public stream via Jabber.

How will it work?

When you are twittering and you want to share a piece of news like a product launch, you "scoop" your post and it appears on Scoopler's front page. Scoopler users can rate scoops and comment on them. We forward those comments back to you on Twitter and if you like someone else's post you can scoop it too. If your post is rated highly and there's a lot of discussion about it, it will stay on the front page. The aim is to create a source for breaking news, especially experiences of events as they happen. We're working out the mechanics of how scooping a post will work but its going to be dead easy, I promise! To make sure we don't lose sight of what we want to achieve, we actually put together some mock-ups of what Scoopler might look like. Check out the homepage and the page for an individual scoop and tell me what you think.

Zwei Beispiele belehren uns eines besseren: Die Nachricht vom Konflikt zwischen erstiVZ und studiVZ wegen angeblicher Markenrechtsverletzungen machte zunächst bei Twitter die Runde, bevor sie nach und nach Einzug in die Blogs hielt. Erst als Spiegel Online anrief, zog studiVZ die Bremse. Twitter war über die ganze Dauer Motor und Seismograph der Diskussion.

Manch ein amerikanisches Unternehmen ist da schon weiter, wie Michael Arrington von Techcrunch schreibt: Der DSL-Provider Comcast beobachtet Twitter offenbar sehr genau. Bei einem Netzausfall und nach fruchtloser Zeit an der Hotline des Anbieters machte Arrington seinem Ärger bei Twitter Luft. Daraufhin rief ihn ein Comcast-Mitarbeiter an, die Störung wurde umgehend behoben.

Was kann die Unternehmenskommunikation unternehmen? Die Antwort kann nicht in jedem Fall lauten, sich in den Brandherd zu setzen. Selbst twittern ist die Kür, dieses Instrument muss zur Marke und ihrem Kommunikationsstil passen, braucht ein wenig Fingerspitzengefühl und Zeit. Finger weg, wenn das nicht gegeben ist. Ein wenig Beobachtung kann aber nicht schaden. Von der Public Timeline, in der ungefiltert sämtliche weltweiten Nachrichten dargestellt werden, sollte man sich dabei nicht abschrecken lassen. Eine Reihe von Monitoring-Instrumenten erleichtert die Beobachtung, auch ohne selbst bei Twitter angemeldet zu sein.

Wer sich einen Überblick darüber verschaffen will, welche Themen, Firmen und Produkte bei Twitter gerade heiß diskutiert werden, kann das bei Twitterverse tun. In einer Tagcloud werden dort die meistgenannten Worte gelistet. Den Vergleich der Nennungshäufigkeit mehrerer Schlagworten ermöglicht Tweetvolume, zum Beispiel zwischen "Clinton" und "Obama". Dass Obama weit vorne liegt, überrascht nicht. Er bedient die internetaffinere Klientel und betreibt auch bei Twitter die bessere Kommunikation. Zum Beispiel indem er seine Fans nach den Regeln der Attention Economy belohnt: Jede "follow"-Anfrage wird ebenso beantwortet.

Über die reine Quantität hinaus gehen Schlagwort- und Suchdienste: Hashtags sammelt alle Tweets (Twitter-Nachrichten), die mit "#Schlagwort" zugeordnet wurden. Allerdings müssen die erfassten User zuvor einen bestimmten Twitter-Account zu ihren Freunden hinzugefügt haben. Diese Einschränkung gilt für Twemes zwar nicht, beide vereint aber ein Haken: Was nicht explizit verschlagwortet wurde, wird nicht erfasst. Das macht diese Dienste zu guten Tools zur Gruppen-Kommunikation z.B. für Veranstaltungen, aber fürs Monitoring kaum brauchbar.

Simpel und gut für diese Zwecke ist Tweet Scan. Komfortable Details: Man kann sich Permalinks und RSS-Feeds für spezifische Suchen, etwa nach Kaffee, anlegen. So kann man sich per Feed Reader oder Feed Aggregator über Tweets zur eigenen Firma, Mitbewerbern und wichtigen Schlagworten übersichtlich auf dem Laufenden halten.

Auf ein neues Tool bin ich gestern bei Klaus Eck gestoßen: Über Quotably lassen sich Konversationen bequem mitverfolgen, zum Beispiel meine oder die von sonntagmorgen.

Eine Warnung zum Schluss: Arrington rät nun jedem Kunden, der ein Problem mit Comcast hat, sich die Zeit in der Warteschleife zu sparen und gleich auf Twitter zum öffentlichen Angriff zu blasen. Die Kunden bemerken, dass dieser Rückkanal effektiver ist. Spricht das also gegen eine Reaktion auf Twitter-Nachrichten, Blogs & Co.? In meinen Augen spricht es eher dafür, es nicht so weit kommen zu lassen, sondern den Kunden einen bequemen und direkten Rückkanal zu bieten.

Nahezu alles, was man über Twitter wissen sollte, steht im "Big Juicy Twitter Guide".Eine
umfassende Liste der verfügbaren Microblog-Monitoring-Services einschließlich der Twitter-Konkurrenten Pownce und Jaiku bietet Internetszene.

It's 2008.

And when one friend sends out a great twit that I think another friend should read, there's one very important thing I can't easily do.

Forward twits from one friend to another.

And I think I should be able to.

Keep reading >> 

Here is an example.

[via TechCrunch]