As the conspiracy theories flew around last Friday, one in particular caught fire: the idea that the News Of The World might have been closed down because it would then allow for its assets – i.e. incriminating evidence – to be destroyed.

Perhaps because it was published under the Reuters brand (although the byline abrogated them of any responsibility for its contents) by the end of the day it had accumulated over 4,000 retweets.

I had already personally tweeted a couple of those users to point out that comments on the article had quickly debunked its argument. And by 6.26 that evening David Allen Green had published an explanation of the flaws in a piece at the New Statesman.

But people were still retweeting: how to connect the two?

Creating @autodebunker

It took me all of 20 minutes to hack together a simple automated service that would reply to people retweeting the Reuters blog post.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Create a specific Twitter account

I first of all named it autocorrecter but have now changed it to autodebunker. Make sure there’s an explanation in the biography that it is automated – and attribute authorship so people can make a judgement on its authority. Use the bio link to point at a page explaining more – I’ve linked it to this post.

2. Find an RSS feed for tweets that need debunking

If you use Twitter’s advanced search facility you can search for all tweets mentioning the Reuters blog post in question – even if they’ve been shortened. Just put the URL into the box marked ‘All of these words‘.

You’ll also want to prevent yourself creating a loop where you are replying to your own tweets (because these will contain the URL too). So in the box ‘None of these words‘ put your new Twitter account name – in this case, debunker.

Unfortunately the user’s name is not included in a tweet unless it is retweeted, so it’s best to make sure that you only include tweets with RT in them too. Add RT to the box marked ‘All of these words‘.

As others debunk the story you may have to exclude mentions of them as well, so you’re not tweeting at people who are already debunking. Likewise any other similar indicators.

My search boxes eventually looked like this (the account was originally called autocorrecter, so I had to exclude that as well)

3. Create a new RSS feed using Feedburner

The service we’re going to use will not let us publish a Twitter search RSS feed onto Twitter, and we also need to be able to easily edit this feed in response to changes. Feedburner is a very useful service for doing both.

You’ll be using the RSS feed for the advanced search mentioned above. When you conduct the search you will see a link to that RSS feed on the right – and if you click on it you should be taken to an address like: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=+RT+http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.reuters.com%2Fmediafile%2F2011%2F07%2F07%2Fis-murdoch-free-to-destroy-tabloids-records%2F++-autocorrecter+-autodebunker+-davidallengreen

Copy that address and paste it into the box in Feedburner when you’re asked what feed you want to convert – it’s pretty much at the bottom of the first page you get when you log on to Feedburner. Follow the steps for creating a new RSS feed.

You’ll then be given a new address that begins with http://feeds.feedburner.com/ (something like: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Http/blogsreuterscom/mediafile/2011/07/07/is-murdoch-free-to-destroy-tabloids-records/-TwitterSearch?format=xml)

Copy this address for the next stage.

4. Use Twitterfeed to automatically publish debunking tweets

Twitterfeed is a great service for this. Log on and click on the button to create a new feed.

Give it a name and paste in the Feedburner RSS feed you copied above – but staying in step 1, click on ‘Advanced Settings‘ below.

The key areas here are ‘Post Prefix‘ and ‘Post Suffix’. This is what you want added to what you’re republishing.

Sadly, both are limited to 20 characters, but here’s what I added: in Post Prefix, I typed ‘See comments though’. In Post Suffix I added (probably not true).

You could add a shortened URL in either, too.

In Step 2 connect this to your new Twitter account by clicking the ‘Authorise’ button.

Don’t forget to click the final ‘Finish’ button to activate it all.

After a while it should start publishing tweets like this:

5. Monitor and tweak

Don’t forget to keep checking what people are tweeting, and what the account is tweeting, and adapt the Feedburner feed or Post Prefix and Suffix accordingly.

Any suggestions?

This is just a quick hack – there will be better ways of doing the above, but it’s an illustration of how you can use computer power to communicate with a distributed population of distributors. If you decide to do more with the idea, I’d love to know about it.

And after all this, of course, you have to ask: why have Reuters not updated their blog post to at least acknowledge the criticisms?

PHP Freelancer

When people start out blogging they often ask what blogging platform they should use – WordPress or Blogger? Tumblr or Posterous? It’s impossible to give an answer, because the first questions should be: who is going to use it, how, and what and who for?

To illustrate how the answers to those questions can help in choosing the best platform, I decided to go through the 35 or so blogs I have created, and why I chose the platforms that they use. As more and more publishing platforms have launched, and new features added, some blogs have changed platforms, while new ones have made different choices to older ones.

Bookmark blogs (Klogging) – Blogger and WordPress to Delicious and Tumblr

When I first began blogging it was essentially what’s called ‘klogging’ (knowledge blogging) – a way to keep a record of useful information. I started doing this with three blogs on Blogger, each of which was for a different class I taught: O-Journalism recorded reports in the field for online journalism students, Interactive Promotion and PR was created to inform students on a module of the same name (later exported to WordPress) and students on the Web and New Media module could follow useful material on that blog.

The blogs developed with the teaching, from being a place where I published supporting material, to a group blog where students themselves could publish their work in progress.

As a result, Web and New Media was moved to WordPress where it became a group blog maintained by students (now taught by someone else). The blog I created for the MA in Television and Interactive Content was first written by myself, then quickly handed over to that year’s students to maintain. When I started requiring students to publish their own blogs the original blogs were retired.

One-click klogging

By this time my ‘klogging’ had moved to Delicious. Webpages mentioned in a specific class were given a class-specific tag such as MMJ02 or CityOJ09. And students who wanted to dig further into a particular subject could use subject-specific tags such as ‘onlinevideo‘ or ‘datajournalism‘.

For the MA in Television and Interactive Content, then, I simply invented a new tag – ‘TVI’ – and set up a blog using Tumblr to pull anything I bookmarked on Delicious with that tag. (This was done in five minutes by clicking on ‘Customise‘ on the main Tumblr page, then clicking on Services and scrolling down to ‘Automatically import my…‘ and selecting RSS feed as Links. Then in the Feed URL box paste the RSS feed at the bottom of delicious.com/paulb/tvi).

(You can do something similar with WordPress – which I did here for all my bookmarks – but it requires more technical knowhow).

For klogging quotes for research purposes I also use Tumblr for Paul’s Literature Review. I’ve not used this as regularly or effectively as I could or should, but if I was embarking on a particularly large piece of research it would be particularly useful in keeping track of key passages in what I’m reading. Used in conjunction with a Kindle, it could be particularly powerful.

Back to the TVI bookmarks: another five minutes on Feedburner allowed me to set up a daily email newsletter of those bookmarks that students could subscribe to as well, and a further five minutes on Twitterfeed sent those bookmarks to a dedicated Twitter feed too (I could also have simply used Tumblr’s option to publish to a Twitter feed). ‘Blogging’ had moved beyond the blog.

Resource blogs – Tumblr and Posterous

For my Online Journalism module at City University London I use Tumblr to publish a curated, multimedia blog in addition to the Delicious bookmarks: Online Journalism Classes collects a limited number of videos, infographics, quotes and other resources for students. Tumblr was used because I knew most content would be instructional videos and I wanted a separate place to collect these.

The more general Paul Bradshaw’s Tumblelog (http://paulbradshaw.tumblr.com/) is where I maintain a collection of images, video, quotes and infographics that I look to whenever I need to liven up a presentation.

For resources based on notes or documents, however, Posterous is a better choice.

Python Notes and Notes on Spreadsheet Formulae and CAR, for example, both use Posterous as a simple way for me to blog my own notes on both (Python is a programming language) via a quick email (often drafted while on the move without internet access).

Posterous was chosen because it is very easy to publish and tag content, and I wanted to be able to access my notes based on tag (e.g. VLOOKUP) when I needed to remember how I’d used a particular formula or function.

Similarly, Edgbaston Election Campaign Exprenses and Hall Green Election Campaign Exprenses use Posterous as a quick way to publish and tag PDFs of election expense receipts from both constituencies (how this was done is explained here), allowing others to find expense details based on candidate, constituency, party or other details, and providing a space to post comments on findings or things to follow up.

Niche blogs – WordPress and Posterous

Although Online Journalism Blog began as ‘klogging’ it soon became something more, adding analysis, research, and contributions from other authors, and the number of users increased considerably. Blogger is not the most professional-looking of platforms, however (unless you’re prepared to do a lot of customisation), so I moved it to WordPress.com. And when I needed to install plugins for extra functionality I moved it again to a self-hosted WordPress site.

Finally, when the site was the victim of repeated hacking attempts I moved it to a WordPress MU (multi user) site hosted by Philip John’s Journal Local service, which provided technical support and a specialised suite of plugins.

If you want a powerful and professional-looking blogging platform it’s hard to beat WordPress.com, and if you want real control over how it works – such as installing plugins or customising themes – then a self-hosted WordPress site is, for me, your best option. I’d also recommend Journal Local if you want that combination of functionality and support.

If, however, you want to launch a niche blog quickly and functionality is not an issue then Posterous is an even better option, especially if there will be multiple contributors without technical skills. Council Coverage in Newspapers, for example, used Posterous to allow a group of people to publish the results of an investigation on my crowdsourced investigative journalism platform Help Me Investigate. The Hospital Parking Charges Blog did the same for another investigation, but as it was only me publishing, I used WordPress.

Group blogs – Posterous and Tumblr

Posterous suits groups particularly well because members only need to send their post to a specific email address that you give them (such as post@yourblog.posterous.com) to be published on the blog.

It also handles multimedia and documents particularly well – when I was helping Podnosh‘s Nick Booth train a group of people with Flip cameras we used Posterous as an easy way for members of a group to instantly publish the video interviews they were doing by simply sending it to the relevant email address (Posterous will also cross-publish to YouTube and Twitter, simplifying those processes).

A few months ago Posterous launched a special ‘Groups’ service that publishes content in a slightly different way to make it easier for members to collaborate. I used this for another Help Me Investigate investigation - Recording Council Meetings – where each part of the investigation is a post/thread that users can contribute to.

Again, Posterous provides an easy way to do this – all people need to know is the email address to send their contribution to, or the web address where they can add comments to other posts.

If your contributors are more blog-literate and want to retain more control over their content, another option for group blogs is Tumblr. Brumblr, for example, is one group blog I belong to for Birmingham bloggers, set up by Jon Bounds. ‘We Love Michael Grimes‘ is another, set up by Pete Ashton, that uses Tumblr for people to post images of Birmingham’s nicest blogger.

Blogs for events – Tumblr, Posterous, CoverItLive

When I organised a Citizen Journalism conference in 2007, I used a WordPress blog to build up to it, write about related stories, and then link to reports on the event itself. Likewise, when later that year the NUJ asked me to manage a team of student members as they blogged that year’s ADM, I used WordPress for a group blog.

As the attendees of further events began to produce their own coverage, the platforms I chose evolved. For JEEcamp.com (no longer online), I used a self-hosted WordPress blog with an aggregation plugin that pulled in anything tagged ‘JEEcamp’ on blogs or Twitter. CoverItLive was also used to liveblog – and was then adopted successfully by attendees when they returned to their own news operations around the country (and also, interestingly, by Downing Street after they saw the tool being used for the event).

For the final JEEcamp I used Tumblr as an aggregator, importing the RSS feed from blog search engine Icerocket for any mention of ‘JEEcamp’.

In future I may experiment with the Posterous iPhone app’s new Events feature, which aggregates posts in the same location as you.

Aggregators – Tumblr

Sometimes you just want a blog to keep a record of instances of a particular trend or theme. For example, I got so sick of people asking “Is blogging journalism?” that I set up Is Ice Cream Strawberry?, a Tumblr blog that aggregates any articles that mention the phrases “Is blogging journalism”, “Are bloggers journalists” and “Is Twitter journalism” on Google News.

This was set up in the same way as detailed above, with the Feed URL box completed using the RSS feed from the relevant search on Google News or Google Blog Search (repeat for each feed).

Likewise, Online Journalism Jobs aggregates – you’ve got it – jobs in online journalism or that use online journalism skills. It pulls from the RSS feed for anything I bookmark on Delicious with the tag ‘ojjobs’ – but it can also be done manually with the Tumblr bookmark or email address, which is useful when you want to archive an entire job description that is longer than Delicious’s character limit.

Easy hyperlocal blogging – WordPress, Posterous and Tumblr

For a devoted individual hyperlocal blog WordPress seems the best option due to its power, flexibility and professionalism. For a hyperlocal blog where you’re inviting contributions from community members via email, Posterous may be better.

But if you want to publish a hyperlocal blog and have never had the time to do it justice, Tumblr provides a good way to make a start without committing yourself to regular, wordy updates. Boldmere High Street is my own token gesture – essentially a photoblog that I update from my mobile phone when I see something of interest – and take a photo – as I walk down the high street.

Personal blogs

As personal blogs tend to contain off-the-cuff observations, copies of correspondence or media, Posterous suits it well. Paul Bradshaw O/T (Off Topic) is mine: a place to publish things that don’t fit on any of the other blogs I publish. I use Posterous as it tends to be email-based, sometimes just keeping web-based copies of emails I’ve sent elsewhere.

It’s difficult to prescribe a platform for personal blogs as they are so… personal. If you talk best about your life through snatches of images and quotes, Tumblr will work well. I have a family Tumblr, for example, that pulls images and video from a family Flickr account, tweets from a family Twitter feed, video from a family YouTube account, and also allows me to publish snatches of audio or quotes.

You could use this to, for instance, create an approved-members-only Facebook page for the family so other family members can ‘follow’ their grandchildren, and publish updates from the Tumblr blog via RSS Graffiti. Facebook is, ultimately, the most popular personal blogging platform.

If it is hard to separate your personal life from your professional life, or your personal hobby involves playing with technology, WordPress may be a better choice.

And Blogger may be an easy way to bring together material from Google properties such as Picasa and Orkut.

Company blogs

Likewise, although Help Me Investigate’s blog started as two separate blogs on WordPress (one for company updates, the other for investigation tips), it now uses Posterous for both as it’s an easier way for multiple people to contribute.

This is because ease of publishing is more important than power – but for many companies WordPress is going to be the most professional and flexible option.

For some, Tumblr will best communicate their highly visual and creative nature. And for others, Posterous may provide a good place to easily publish documents and video.

Blogs – flexible enough for anything

What emerges from all the above is that blogs are just a publishing platform. There was a time when you had to customise WordPress, Typepad or Blogger to do what you wanted – from linkblogging and photoblogging to group blogs and aggregation. But those problems have since been solved by an increasing range of bespoke platforms.

Social bookmarking platforms and Twitter made it easier to linkblog; Tumblr made it easier to photoblog or aggregate RSS feeds. Posterous lowered the barrier to make group blogging as easy as sending an email. CoverItLive piggybacked on Twitter to aggregate live event coverage. And Facebook made bloggers of everyone without them realising.

A blog can now syndicate itself across multiple networks: Tumblr and Posterous make it easy to automatically cross-publish links and media to Twitter, YouTube and any other media-specific platform. RSS feeds can be pulled from Flickr, Delicious, YouTube or any of dozens of other services into a Facebook page or a WordPress widget.

What is important is not to be distracted by the technology, but focus on the people who will have to use it, and what they want to use it for.

To give a concrete example: I was once advising an organisation who wanted to publish their work online and help young people get their work out there. The young people used mobile phones (Blackberrys) and were on Facebook, but the organisation also wanted the content created by those young people to be seen by potential funders, in a professional context.

I advised them to:

• Set up a moderated Posterous so that it would cross-publish to individuals’ Facebook pages (so there would be instant feedback for those users rather than it be published in an isolated space online that their friends had to go off and find);
• Give the Posterous blog email address to the young people so they could use it to send in their work (making it easy to use on a device they were comfortable with);
• Then to set up a separate ‘official’ WordPress site that pulled in the Posterous feed into a side-widget alongside the more professional, centrally placed, content (meeting the objectives of the organisation).

This sounds more technically complex than it is in practice, and the key thing is that it makes publishing as easy as possible: for the young users of the service, they only had to send images and comments to an email address. For members of the organisation they only had to write blog posts. Everything else, once set up, was automated. And free.

Many people hesitate before blogging, thinking that their effort has to be right first time. It doesn’t. Going through these blogs I counted around 35 that I’ve either created or been involved in. Many of those were retired when they ceased to be useful; some were transferred to new platforms. Some changed their names, some were deleted. Increasingly, they are intended from the start to have a limited shelf life. But every one has taught me something.

And those are just my experiences – how have you used blogs in different ways? And how has it changed?

PHP Freelancer

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.

At the same time, however, a number of other people tweeted their thanks for the coverage, including Mark Comerford, Alison Gow, Nick Booth and Mark Hamilton.

Summed up in two tweets, the debate went something like this:

“nmcintosh: Sorry @paulbradshaw – Twitter isn’t the place for liveblogging. Am unsubbing.”

“gmarkham: @paulbradshaw I like it. easy enough to ignore those that don’t tweak something in the mental wiring.”

But was this “liveblogging”? For me, it wasn’t. If I was liveblogging, I’d do it on a blog. Perhaps you could call this livemicroblogging.

Why didn’t I liveblog? Well: been there, done that. Where would be the learning in it? I wanted to experiment with mobile phone journalism, and around the potential conversation that could be had (and that liveblogs don’t do as well) via Twitter. Here were some of the tweets that people sent:

“davidcushman: @paulbradshaw what social media does he use? [to keynote speaker John Pilger]

“davidcushman: @paulbradshaw investigative journalism is the only journalism – discuss?

“amonck: @paulbradshaw Little conference reading for you – sorry I can’t make it, shud be some City folk there http://tinyurl.com/69yc3l

“amandachapel: @paulbradshaw | De-professionalizing journalism doesn’t just reduce cost, it eliminates the genre.

“stevebridger: @paulbradshaw I spent 6 months on www.afterwilma.info – newspaper journos engaged with it. Would use Twitter now

“lalorek: @paulbradshaw Yes we do see ourselves as part of the fourth estate. Many of us believe in investigative journalism. Check www.ire.org

“lalorek: @paulbradshaw or some of the new models emerging like www.propublica.org or www.tpmmuckraker.com or www.muckety.com and many more.

Twitter lended the conversation an immediacy and access that liveblog comments simply don’t (although CoverItLive provides a halfway house).

The problem? Twitter wasn’t sending me @replies.

Well, at least it was working at all.

Things fall apart

I love things going wrong. It makes for some very useful lessons. Here are just some:

1. @replies were not reaching me – I did tweet this early on but overlooked the fact that not everyone will have seen that tweet. Solution 1: keep asking for direct messages; Solution 2: set up a twitter account taking the RSS feed of a Summize search for @paulbradshaw and feeding that through Twitterfeed. Then subscribe to text messages from that feed. Sadly Twitterfeed restricts you to a maximum of five tweets, only arriving every half hour, so there will be some limit/delay to the conversation.
2. The venue had no 3G connection or open wifi, which meant I had no internet or email access even from a mobile phone – so liveblogging was not technically possible anyway (it also meant my hopes of using livestreaming tools Qik or Bambuser bit the dust). Solution: arrange to text a blogger elsewhere.
3. Twitter overkill – yes, this must have been bloody annoying for some, and I should have set up yet another separate Twitter account for my live coverage, as Amy Gahran has (thanks Jay Rosen). But if you only have one mobile this runs the risk of you only getting messages directed at one of your Twitter accounts. In that instance, I could rely on my users to just switch me off for a while – perhaps even direct them to Twittersnooze, which will do it for you (thanks Dan Thornton and Jon Bounds).
4. I also should have hashtagged the tweets – at the time I decided not to because no one else was covering this, but for those coming into the coverage mid-stream, a tag like #IJGG would have sent a semantic signal that this was part of event coverage.

A final point: it’s well worth investing in a bluetooth keyboard for your mobile phone (no, I didn’t do all of this with my thumbs) – oh, and the ‘Cmd’ button is very useful indeed.

Let me know what you think about live coverage on Twitter – or take the online poll.

PHP Freelancer

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.

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.

PHP Freelancer

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!

PHP Freelancer