Of course, the downside to following someone solely for the purpose of knowing when they’re live streaming or doing something else interesting is that you’re potentially subject to a ton of really boring stuff, like me complaining about the papers I’m grading, or to TMI, like a couple new media friends of ours who sometimes alert us to impending whoopie. One workaround that’s emerging for that is the use of hashtags: keywords like Technorati tags prefaced with a pound sign, e.g., #livestream. Personally, I’m trying to decide whether to sacrifice 13 of my precious 140 Twitter characters to #streetteam08 to tag my news-relevant tweets, or hope that the shorter #st08 is clear enough. The # symbol is only necessary for these tweets to be aggregated and archived at Twitter-related sites like tweetchannel.com or hashtags.org. But in order to get real-time updates about my livestreaming without following the rest of my life, you could send Twitter the command, “track streetteam08;” then, so long as I remember to include that tag in every streaming announcement tweet, you will receive that message when I send it out.

Sorry for the mini-lecture. Hope it was all relevant.

So for my readers here and for a discussion I am having about this at the new Wired Journalists site how do people get on your Twitter list and when and where will the livestreaming take place.

And finally technically how will you do it, with what gear etc.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Our Choose or Lose coverage of Super Tuesday is going to involve some live streaming video, and I plan on Twittering as much as possible. Twitter seems like a natural companion to live video. Without it, people who tune in late aren’t sure what they’re looking at, and unless you stare at the page all day nobody knows when to tune in in the first place.