As published in The Erin Advocate
I promise I will never tweet about what I'm having for dinner, what I'm
buying at the store or my views on the Maple Leafs, even if they were to
make the playoffs. For better or worse, my tweets will always be
connected to Erin, just like this column.
This is an invitation to follow me on Twitter. It's a way for me to
publish brief bits of information, plus photos and interesting links.
I am a latecomer to Twitter, having just signed up during the winter
while I was laid off from my regular job. I'm back to work now, but just
three days a week, so I still have lots of time to poke around town
looking for things to write about.
Twitter is free, easy to use and helps build up bonds of common interest. You just sign up at www.twitter.com, register yourself with a brief profile, and start sending tweets - blurbs of text limited to 140 characters.
This creates a feed of messages that will be available to people who have chosen to "follow" you.
Your Twitter page will have three main lists: your tweets, an ongoing
stream of tweets from people or organizations that you are following,
and the people who are following you.
If you get tired of someone's tweets (even mine), just click "unfollow"
and they stop coming. That's what I've done with people who treat
Twitter as a diary of their mundane daily activities.
You don't actually have to tweet anything if you don't feel like it -
you could use the site just to read tweets from those you are following.
If you receive a tweet that you think others would enjoy, you can "re-tweet" it out to your followers. You can also send a tweet reply directly back to the sender.
A word of warning: tweets are much more public than emails. They are
more like a broadcast. Unless you make your account private with a
password, you can't control who follows you, or how they might re-tweet
your messages. If you say nasty things about other people, the messages
could be traced back to you and land you in legal hot water.
It's not very private. People who follow you can look at your home page
and see all your tweets, followers and who you've chosen to follow. It's
a social network, a crowded place, with 140 million active users
sending 340 million tweets and 1.6 billion search queries every day.
Like anything else on the internet, some of the content can be considered offensive, slanted or boring.
But if you are interested in Erin issues, please consider following me. I
only tweet a few times per week, and I promise accuracy, fairness and a
reasonable attempt at interesting, just as with the column.
The other suggestion I have is a "hashtag", which is enabled by the search-ability of the system.
If Twitter users in Erin want their messages to be easily found by
others in Erin, it is as easy as using the same unique word in every
tweet, starting with the # symbol.
I suggest that the hashtag be #erintown. I have started putting it into my tweets.
If you click on the term, or put it into the Twitter search field, you
will get a listing not only of my tweets, but the tweets of anyone else
who uses the term.
You can use #erintown in your text, instead of the word Erin, or just
tag it on at the end. The effect will be like a community bulletin board
or forum.
It is important to note that I am not in charge of it. I have only
suggested a hashtag, something that anyone could do. Apart from my own
tweets, I cannot moderate or control the content in any way. People are
fully responsible for what they put in their own tweets. If I don't like
what's on this resulting list of tweets, I will simply stop using the
hashtag.
Looking at the positive possibilities, though, it could be a way to
promote Erin events and businesses, and a way for people to make
comments about local issues of interest.
Of course, if you want to write more than 140 characters, you could
start your own blog or plaster the town with posters, but a traditional
Letter to the Editor is still the best option.
I will also be using my Twitter account to promote this column, and to
link people with my blog, where I re-publish my writing after it appears
in the paper.
The technology for building a stronger community is out there, and it's free. Let's use it.
