Apparently I’m worth following, if only on Twitter

Thanks to Tim Shisler and Written Road, a blog on travel writing, for including me as a person you should follow on Twitter.

Should you want to take Written Road’s advice, my Twitter profile is at http://twitter.com/Z_Everson. If you already have a Twitter account and are logged in to it, select the link to my profile and then select Follow under my picture in the upper left corner. And you can create a Twitter account at https://twitter.com/signup.

Incidentally I’m doubly indebted to Written Road as it’s where I first read of the Gridskipper gig. The blog is a must read for travel writers.

My first foray into Twitter: Some tips that will help you use and benefit from it

My friend Christine Prefontaine, who blogs at Facilitating Change, has been evangelizing about Twitter for a while, so I created an account today.

What is Twitter? From its Wikipedia entry:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Feedalizr or Facebook.

At first Twitter seemed a little overwhelming, with no one following me and me not following anyone save Christine. What seemed like thousands of posts a minute, many not in English, were flying by on the public timeline.

But a search for Twitter tips yielded two great resources:

• Caroline Middlebrook’s The big juicy Twitter guide
• Problogger’s 35 Twitter tips from 35 Twitter users

I also downloaded The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific for my Macs and iPhone, which made Twitter more manageable and user friendly.

Twitter seems like a great way to blast the masses, but, as with any social networking site, it takes effort to find content of value.

(My Twitter profile is at http://twitter.com/Z_Everson. If you already have a Twitter account and are logged in to it, select the link to my profile and then select Follow under my picture in the upper left corner. And you can create a Twitter account at https://twitter.com/signup.)

The Obama campaign and new media and social networking

While I’m politically active, this blog isn’t—if you want to read about politics you probably can find a few other websites that delve into the subject.

But anyone interested in online communications and social networking has to be paying attention to Barack Obama’s campaign: Nov. 4 will be the biggest test of the real-life power of that emerging technology.

The Obama campaign isn’t just using, but is distributing quality content via

• A Facebook application
• Podcasts
• Twitter
• A social network on BarackObama.com
• YouTube
• A blog
• MySpace

And the campaign got 2.9 million people to opt-in to receive text messages from it in exchange for being the almost-first person to know whom Obama selected to be his running mate. Think it might use that data as part of its get-out-the-vote efforts?

Will it pay off on November 4? I suspect the Obama campaign has studied Howard Dean’s candidacy in 2004 and realized what it needs to do to translate virtual support into real votes.