Now, I don't want your eyes glazing over but I want to talk to you about ....Twitter. Yes, yes, you don't use, you've no need for it, you're not interested in what other people had for breakfast. I thought that once but I've certainly changed my mind in the past few weeks. For my journalism course we had to set up a Twitter account and have to tweet (see, four weeks in and I've picked up the lingo already) about news that interests us, as well post updates about our blog pages. Now, even if you're not doing a journalism degree, you still might be interested in the latest news and Twitter is certainly an easy way to find it. There's a lot of it on there.
Last week I submitted my first journalism assignment, a media diary where I logged my media use for ten days then
analysed it and compared it to the rest of the class. Part of my analysis was that while I could see the value of Twitter for journalists, I felt I was being a bit swamped by all the information that was on it. Twitter's ideal for reporters to post links to stories and to give updates about breaking news but I was finding that I was missing updates and tweets from my classmates.
This morning I set out to try and fix that problem. For seasoned Twitter users I'm sure I'm not telling you anything that you didn't know already but for any fellow novices out there I suggest you have a look at TweetDeck or a similar application.
I've been able to set up columns with a news feed for all updates, plus a separate one that lists members of my university journalism class. Looking at TweetDeck now, I see that Anne was the last one in my uni group to tweet four hours ago, while over in my news feed I see that Christine Milne has just tweeted. No, wait, The Sydney Morning Herald was the last one, tweeting about cricket. No, sorry, the last one to tweet was the Queensland Police Service three minutes ago talking about 26 people being charged after Operation Stopper. No, hang on, it's....
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