Wanna try twitter, worth the time

Chris Hedges, editor of Life in Northwest Indiana and beyond and Northwest Indiana Blogs, suggested last week that I write a longer than normal post on Twitter. You see, normally I try to grab the top ten or fifteen issues affecting Northwest Indiana for my sites, but occassionally write a longer post.







With the birth of a Northwest Indiana blog community, I've been doing a lot more commenting and quick posting, so I readily accepted the challenge. I'll also be submitting this post to the NW Indiana Blog Carnival for this week. If you have a post for the carnival this week submit it here.



What is twitter? Twitter is a way to communicate quickly and efficiently with the people you choose to "follow." That's it, quick and easy. Anything you post must be 140 characters or less in length.


I've been watching the twitter community form over the last couple months, with explosive growth, and frankly a growing amount of my traffic and communication is taking place on twitter.


Sound boring? Well it's anything but boring. The communication is rapid fire, with thousands of post a minute. Obviously choosing who to follow is key, you won't want to read the minute by minute posts of anyone that you really could care less to hear the answer to twitter's question "What are you doing?"


I'd like to see all of us here in Northwest Indiana who are blogging on twitter since it's a really fast way to communicate new posts, or throw around ideas on what's really going on. Here's my profile (Daltonsbriefs) head over to http://www.twitter.com/ and sign up, it takes a few minutes and of course it's free. Then hit my profile link here and press "follow" so we can be connected.

It's that easy and we're on our way to communicating quickly, in short bursts.


When posting on twitter one important tool is to add links to your posts or things you've recently read online. You'll find that when you put in the link twitter will in most cases automatically shorten the link to a "tiny url" format making it even easier to read.


This morning alone I found 15 posts and sites that I never would have found on the things I like to follow ie. real estate, mortgages, John McCain, and northwest indiana. One last trick, when replying or engaging a person use the following format: @daltonsbriefs and then your comment. This format sends this specific post of your directly into my replies tab, so that even if I'm not online at that moment I'll find this specific post and be able to reply. Place the @ in front of any person's profile name and you're engaging.


I have had the chance to engage some A list bloggers, who eventually went to my sites. These people would not have done so on Facebook or Linkedin or Plaxo, too time consuming. This has been a terrific way to watch what the A listers do, how they write, how they engage.

Take the few minutes and join me on twitter, I think you'll find it very helpful in engaging with other writers, bloggers, and media personalities.


Daltonsbriefs


Porter County Politics
Northwest Indiana Real Estate
Northwest Indiana Mortgages
Hoosiers for John McCain
Northwest Indiana Blog Community
Daltonsbriefs - International Affairs

Twitter Update 2-15-08: "The Economist magazine recently published a flattering article about Twitter. The article was titled A-Twitter and it compared Twitter to a form of abbreviated communication used by foreign correspondents in the first half of the 20th century called cablese."