Tripp Fenderson

VCU Tech Services knows where their customers are. Do you?

This could get interesting. I wonder if the participants in Richmond’s mayoral race would be up for something like this. No wait...who am I kidding?

Time magazine blogger Ana Marie Cox is moderating a debate on technology and the government on Twitter.

Read the full article here: BREAKING: PdF2008 Hosts Obama-McCain Twitter Debate

The McCain campaign will be represented by Liz Mair, the online communications director of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign will be represented by Mike Nelson, a professor at Georgetown University who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues. He is an outside advisor to Obama’s campaign on issues of technology, media and telecommunications.

The debate is an initiative of Personal Democracy Forum and is being launched in tandem with next week’s annual PdF conference, which is taking place Monday and Tuesday at Rose Hall in NYC.

Mike, Liz and Ana will be using their personal Twitter accounts, @mikenelson, @lizmair and @anamariecox, and we’ve also asked them to tag their responses with the hashtag #pdfdebate. We suggest that readers who want to follow along use a Twitter application like Summize.com to track the conversation.

Writing headlines is an art but those skills don’t always translate to the web. I found the following on Google News tonight.

Be honest, which one are you going to click on?

Me? I’m clicking on the one that mentions Twitter.

Related articles:
Newspapers search for Web headline magic
The Sexy Art of Writing Headlines that Kill
CNN Shirt

Yesterday, I noticed that Twitter added a link for me to “share my story”. The team at obvious.com wanted to know who I was and why I use it.

I responded telling them that I was an Incognito Anthropologist interested in Twitter for four reasons:

1. Richmond has an incredibly smart, savvy, and downright friendly group of people when it comes to all things Internet. From our projects in citizen journalism to wi-fi initiatives to the general chatter on the blogs, we’re creating meaningful connections. Twitter serves to extend and enrich those connections.

2. Many local media outlets aren’t connecting with their audience in the way they used to - or rather, the local audience wants a different kind of connection. Adopting Twitter and using it to meet the needs of their audience (a crucial point that will be missed by many media companies) adds capital to the social connection that needs to exist between local media and the informed citizen. I’m interested in following media companies using Twitter to learn more about how they use the service.

3. My Twitter feed is much more entertaining than scanning the 5000+ new posts I get in Google Reader every day.

4. Twitter lets me directly connect, in 140 characters or less, with brilliant minds around the world and that’s a beautiful thing.

Stowe Boyd, eloquent as always, has his take on the survey here:

http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2008/04/my-twitter-stor.html

It’s over. After today, you’re no longer an early adopter of Twitter. Scoble called it.

Anyone who joins Twitter after today is not an early adopter. So, not interesting for me to follow.

Tess, you just made it under the wire. Whew.

I just talked to a co-worker, Ryan Squire, the Managing Editor at NBC-4 WCMH-TV, our NBC station in Columbus, OH. Ryan and his crew recently fired up a Twitter account for the station.

Ryan understands the value of Twitter as a communications tool for the station but he and the staff are taking it one step further by maintaining personal accounts which let you look in on the inner working of the newsroom.

Recent staff tweets include:

LaurenDiedrich: Is working on a super secret sweeps piece!
NBCSquire: Working with the desk to cover several afternoon shoots, including a cat stuck in a tree for 5 days!
Jason_WCMH: Getting details regarding a Washington County deputy that has been shot in the face with a .22 caliber rifle. Suspect is on the loose.

They’ve also received some praise on the270, a central Ohio resource site.

Channel 4 twitters! Much like the Dispatch does.

But what’s so much cooler, is that so does some of WCMH’s employees. I follow them, and it seems like I’m ease dropping a bit as to what’s on tap for the evening news. But that’s a good thing. Because they’re *building a relationship* with me (whether they know it or not). When they say they’re sending the feed of some report for editing, I want to watch it. Thus, I’m going to watch Channel 4’s newscast over the others.

Cheers to Channel 4! Now I’m off to see if the other stations are a cool as them.

Nice work Ryan!

I wonder if we’ll see any other outlets adopt Twitter soon.

Would you follow them?

Terry Heaton’s post “Informing each other of Heston’s death” rings so true for me.

After a brief separation from Twitter, (it was me, not you, Twitter) I recently reactivated my account. Now that there is a groundswell of local users, the service is more viable and more fun.

Heaton notes that within hours of Heston’s death, word of mouth was the means of informing many people of his death - myself included.

I found out about his passing from jkennett via Twitter.

Heaton says, “Like it or not, mainstream media, this is the way it is.”