Twitter

I went to an American Society of Journalist and Author's conference this past weekend and it was all about Twitter. The message was that all journalists should be out there with their blog, their website, their Facebook and their Linked In and then they should be linking all the thing with tweets.
Tweets are 140 character messages that you send to your friends or "followers." It's the kind of technology that many of us over 30 might dismiss as the latest fad. But what it is is another means of getting your message (whatever that message is) out to the general public. Here's a full explaination on Tweeternet.
That means all of us unemployed, semi-employed and under-employed journalists have to not only send out tweets into the ethernet but also make them witty and well-written and interesting, all in 140 characters. Not an easy task for the long-winded among us (myself included).
Columbia Journalism Professor Sree Sreenivasan introduced us to Twitter by showing a world map with little birds where people were Twittering in Japan, Russia and all over the world.
I wanted to know why my friends would want to know that I was currently eating a pastrami sandwich. Sreenivasan replied that they wouldn't want to know I was eating a pastrami sandwich but they would want to know that I was eating a pastrami sandwich at the same deli where a famous editor eats and they would want to know any other interesting tidbits I might pass along.
He also had a couple of examples of the importance of Twitter, including the story of a young man who was arrested in Greece and wrote a one-word tweet that just said "arrest" and promptly got him out of jail. Another woman posted a suicide threat to actress Demi Moore and Moore was able to somehow connect back to her to get her help.
For most of us, Twitter probably won't save lives but maybe it could save our professional lives. There's certainly enough of us drowning. Many journalists (myself included) also wanted to know how we're supposed to find time for all this. Sreenivasan advised us to target our technology wisely and use it to promote ourselves. So sometime soon look for my tweets. I promise not to write about pastrami sandwiches.