1. 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.)
2. 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.
3. Sorry for the mini-lecture. Hope it was all relevant.
4. 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.

However, if you are one of the many serious thinkers who believe citizen journalism has merit,  you would be left with the impression that Weinstein himself is so wedded to old-school journalism that he is either a ”crackpot” or if not that, then one of its “sly marketers.”

Here is the tip off. He writes: 

If you could convince me that crowdsourcing and mojos and information centers weren’t about cost cutting or lazy journalism, I’d be all for them.

In the old-school journalism world, there would be no way for the passive audience to show how cracked his argument is, but in this new citizen journalism world there are plenty of people who can counter and expose Weinstein’s own lazy journalism and sly marketing for the past.

 However, you can see for yourself. First read Weinstein and then read this counter article in the Publishing 2.0 blog by Scott Karp. Were you better off just reading Weinstein’s professionally edited piece or did you need both to really get a sense of what citizen journalism is and where its potential lies?

This is a very easy-to-use application that takes account of the demands placed on journalists in the field,” said Nic Fulton, Chief Scientist of Reuters Media. “By running on handheld devices, rather than on bulkier laptop computers, the mobile journalism application enables us to create complete stories and file them for distribution, without leaving the scene. This saves us time and benefits our audience by ensuring that they receive high quality news that is absolutely up-to-date.”

You can see the whole toolkit here and example of the Reuters reporters work can be found at Reuters Mobile Journalism. As anyone who has been watching my videos over the last few days knows, I can, actually anyone can, make these amateur videos. However, for me, every time I make one, I keep thinking I have to learn to do this better.

At ConvergeSouth 2007 Brandon Gross and Saskia Wilson-Brown from CurrentTv, were carrying a little $100 Flip Video camera with an hour’s worth of low quality video capabilities. I said I was ready to trade up, and they were saying no, these hand-helds are the future, people are accustom to watching them. Maybe, but for me I have gone through that stage. I want to shoot better videos. However, whether I, and the other amateur videographers, want to go through the learning curve is another question that is yet to be answered.  

 Thanks to Josh Catone at Read/Write Web and Sam Harrelson for the pointers.

Every week, one of the editors, reporters, or contributors to the magazine, regardless of assigned beat, packs a bag of tech gear (laptop with GSM/UMTS/Wi-Fi wireless connectivity; still and video cameras; cell phone) and travels to a different region to follow candidates around, to stay at their houses—and to tell all on a Web site called Blog & Breakfast.

As the BusinessWeek writer explains, it gives new meaning to the term embedded journalist.