Monday, March 3, 2008

Twitter.com/amylive You can follow today's "Editorial/Commentary in Cyberspace" seminar via my "amylive" Twitter posts. Click picture for more.

Today I'm in Los Angeles, where later this morning I'll be co-presenting a session on "future tools" at the Editorial/Commentary in Cyberspace seminar at the Knight Digital Media Center.

Want to follow the action live? Then follow me on Twitter! I use the Twitter ID amylive when I use Twitter as a "live microblogging" tool for event coverage. (That way I don't overwhelm my followers at my regular Twitter ID, agahran, with a stream of very frequent posts.) The only time I won't be Twittering today is during my 9-10:30 a.m. PT session, and during lunch.

How to follow me: If you have a Twitter account, just "follow" me at amylive. If you don't have a Twitter account, you can sign up for free in just a few seconds. Or you can just subscribe to my Twitter feed and follow the action in your feed reader.

Note: Earlier I had been using the Twitter ID amyliveblogging for such coverage. But today I switched to amylive because every character counts in a medium limited to 140-character bursts. I want to make it easier for people to post replies to my coverage (by including @amylive in their "tweets.")

Twitter isn't as sophisticated a live coverage tool as CoverItLive, but its simplicity appears to offer some advantages:

• More options for reading and interaction. Twitter distributes by feed, text messaging, and a variety of third-party clients. In contrast, CoverItLive distributes only to "player windows" embedded on sites -- not friendly to feed readers, mobile users, or people with visual impairments from what I understand. (Please correct me if I'm wrong about this.)
• Archiving on your site. Because Twitter gets distributed by feed, you can capture that content and archive it on your own site. In fact, that's what the Knight Digital Media Center did with my Twitter coverage of their December 2007 seminar Total Community Coverage. And we'll be doing it again today on the Opinion in Cyberspace blog for this seminar. (Just getting that function set up now.) In contrast, as far as I can tell, all CoverItLive content is hosted on their servers. This may present problems if you want your live coverage to be accessible via your site search engine, if you want to attract inbound links to that content over time, and if it makes you nervous to have the only copy of your content on a third party's servers, not under your control.

I'm not saying Twitter is perfect. It's prone to outages, and the 140-character limit is a challenge for live coverage. Personally, I've started thinking in almost perfect 140-character bursts. Kind of like haiku journalism.

Has your news org tried Twitter for live event coverage? What do you think?

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