NCTimes.com Blogs

There’s been a lot of talk about Twitter lately, and the North County Times has started using the service. But what is it? And how can you use it?

From Twitter.com:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Tweetnet.com has a more detailed explanation, along with good links to more resources:

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, “What are you doing?” by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets”, to your friends, or “followers.”

How we’re using Twitter

NCT has a Twitter page at www.twitter.com/nctimes. The online staff will add updates or “tweets” throughout each day with headlines and links to full stories. If you have a Twitter account and “follow” the NCT page, you can log on to your page and see our tweets.

I have been using my personal Twitter account as something of a news aggregator. I am following several local and national news organizations in addition to my favorite sports teams and some journalism groups, and this means I get a steady stream of headlines to my account home page. When I want to read more about a story, I simply click through.

Two things to know about navigating Twitter

First, people can direct their tweets to a certain person by using the expression “@username.” For example, I may be hungry and tweet “Who wants to go for pizza?” One of my friends might respond to me “@tracy — I do! Make mine pepperoni.” By using the @ symbol followed by my username, I know their tweet is intended as a response to my tweet.

Second, Twitter users have developed a way to easily find tweets related to a particular subject by using the expression “#word.” This “hashtag” using the pound symbol makes it easy to search for related tweets from everyone across Twitter, not just your followers. For example, during the recent presidential inauguration, people at the event or just talking about it used the hashtag #inaug09.

Send us your news!

NCT is using the hashtag #nctimes to solicit news tips from Twitter users. Are you sitting on the 78 because of a bad accident? Your kid’s classroom is closed due to mold? Tweet about it and add the hashtag — we’ll get the info to a reporter to follow up.

Follow us! www.twitter.com/nctimes