Online Journalism Blog

My live coverage of the Investigative Journalism Goes Global conference seemed to polarise opinion among the Twitterati. The Guardian’s Neil McIntosh and Charles Arthur, the BBC’s Bill Thompson, and Pete Ashton all unsubscribed from my updates – and those were just the ones I know about. [Read more]

The following is a longer version of the article that appeared in Journalism.co.uk last week, with some extra tools and quotes.

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. [Read more]

This post is part of a ‘blog carnival’. Read more at CarnivalOfJournalism.com. The story so far (in updates of 140 characters or less):

1. I set up a Twitter account, toy with it for a few minutes, then ignore it.
2. Months later, I return to my Twitter account to cover the Future of Newspapers conference – a perfect use for the technology.
3. Following a tip from Martin Stabe, I use Twitterfeed to push my blog’s posts – and, equally importantly, comments – to my Twitter page, in the process probably doubling the total amount of ‘tweets’ overnight.
4. At the same time, Martin comes at it from a different angle, and pushes his Twitter posts to his blog.
5. Realise I am guilty of ‘Twitter-shovelware’
6. Feel privately chuffed at inventing the phrase ‘Twitter-shovelware‘
7. Think of a better use for Twitterfeed, and create a new Twitter account for my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged ‘onlinejournalism’. It already has an RSS feed, but feeding it to Twitter allows people to receive it on their mobiles or as a ‘river’ on their Twitter page.
8. Realise I will probably annoy people who have to delete ten texts every day I do some bookmarking.
9. Getting even more carried away, I realise I can also use Twitterfeed to create an aggregation of the 70+ online journalism-related RSS feeds I subscribe to.
10. Decide to use Yahoo! Pipes as part of this, which has been on my ‘To Do’ list since May.
11. Discover that Yahoo! Pipes not only generates an RSS feed, but also options for mobile and email alerts.
12. But the process of setting up those alerts is not as usable as Twitter, so set up the Twitter ojblogaggregator account anyway (there are only around 20 feeds included so far, but will continue to add more as I iron out bugs).
13. Also discover three other ‘online journalism’ Pipes, one of which has been created by a former student. Feel proud.
14. Then realise he never finished it. Feel proud regardless.
15. Also realise I can use ‘View Source’ to build on the work of the other OJ aggregator – and that anyone can do the same to build on mine.
16. Result!