E-Media Tidbits

Brett L., via Flickr (CC license) Do you have a posse? Could you use one? Maybe Twitter could help.

Microblogging -- including Twitter and its competitors -- is certainly shaping up to become a key form of social media. Over at the Idea Lab blog today, JD Lasica writes about an idea that might make Twitter especially relevant to the BeatBlogging process: "Twitter posses."

Here's how Lasica describes the idea, which arose during a small-group breakout session at the recent Aspen Institute/San Francisco State Roundtable on Mobile Media and Civic Engagement:

"A beat reporter could enlist a dozen or two dozen passionate, driven readers to serve as a kind of Twitter posse. Whenever she was about to tackle a big story or difficult interview, the reporter could begin a mobile dialogue with her posse members, who could pose questions, much like the 'backchannel' IRC feed at conferences such as AlwaysOn or Supernova. ...We'll see how it plays out. Wired News may start experimenting with this in limited fashion early next year."

Interestingly, I've seen my own Twitter "friends" (people whose "tweets" I follow, many of whom are in the media biz) occasionally post open questions and get a quick and often constructive array of responses. When I've done this, the responses have come in not only as publicly visible replies on Twitter, but as private direct replies, e-mails, or phone calls. The mechanism seems to work. It may be worth a try, and I'd recommend it to the BeatBlogging journalists.

Have you tried involving your friends (or "posse") from Twitter or other social media services in your reporting work? How did it work out? What do you think of this idea?