A Twitter Circle for Journos and Publishers

~ making twitter a useful communications channel ~

I started a little experiment last week and it seems to be getting traction. The idea was to see if there was some way to extract more value from Twitter. Like a lot of my friends, I found Twitter to be less than useful -- jammed up with announcements about mundane habits and trivia which really was just a waste of time. Micro-blogging wasn't living up to its potential. The question became: How to get some quality content out of this medium?

It occurred to me that if we could get a group of like-minded individuals who were committed to using the Twitter service for the dissemination of useful information, then it could be interesting. In hopes of achieving that goal I set up a Twitter account and then invited a number of IT Journalists and Publishers to "follow" me. The goal being to set up a circle of users with similar interests.

So far the response rate has been good and the service is proving useful. I've already picked up news items faster than through my regular media monitoring and I am more aware of what my industry peers are doing.

Twitter's strength is immediacy, not thoroughness. It is a service which supplements my other information sources, not replaces them. I don't see that changing.

If you want to join us, "follow" me on Twitter. I will in turn "follow" you. You can then select from the people who appear in my "following" channel to build a list of journos and publishers you wish to track. If someone is posting tripe, stop following them -- vote with your mouse!

My Twitter account: http://twitter.com/ricoflan

And of course: Spread the word!