See Twitter News Experiment on Super Tuesday
A couple of days ago, I blogged about Robert Scoble combining Twitter and livestreamingas a way of involving audience in real time interviews. Afterwards, Shelby Highsmith, aka, the shelbinator , an MTV StreetTeam08 citizen journalist covering the 2008 presidential race, said he will be doing the same on Super Tuesday. You can watch or even join his experiment. I asked how, he wrote:
- Simple enough: just sign up for a Twitter account, go to my Twitter page, and click Follow. (For instant updates, you’ll want to make sure you set up your IM client and/or cellphone with Twitter. If you’ve done either of those, then after Twitter acknowledges that you’re Following someone, you then have to toggle the Notifications ON — otherwise you’ll only see their tweets on your web feed, not via IM or SMS.)
- 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.
- Sadly, following that #streetteam08 tag will only alert any interested parties to my particular live stream on Tuesday or subsequent video updates, as I appear to be the only one of us 51 that actually uses Twitter, and I haven’t inspired any interest in joining, yet, either.
A note from Witt: Please don’t engage me in an discussion of whether the Street Team folks are real journalists, at least not here. This is just a nice Twitter lesson that Highsmith was kind enough to provide.
