EightBlack.

Ok, so call me old fashioned. Or technically challenged. My 7 year old son would agree on both counts.

One of the things I’m going to make a concerted effort to explore and understand at Web 2.0 is Twitter. No doubt, they’ll have plasma screens plastered all over the joint, showing “live” Twitter conversations.

And until last week, I was sort of trying to ignore it. Along with a hundred other things. Then I got this email from Dave Taylor, one smart dude and one of the founders of the highly successful Blogworld Expo event.

Anyway, much clearer now. Thanks Dave.

I’ve re-printed his email below. See if it makes sense to you…

The world of blogging proceeds apace, and there are even new
Fortune 500 corporations jumping into the blogging space in these first few
months of 2008, which either means that it’s a great validation of the
marketplace or a proof that things are getting a bit musty and unexciting.
Or maybe both.

Truth be told, some of the old guard in the blogosphere are finding that
it’s harder to stay focused on creating so-called long-tail content because
they’re being sidetracked by new microblogging systems out there, most
notably Twitter.

Blogging started out as personal diaries, and even now when I speak with
different organizations about blogging, someone invariably says “isn’t that
just personal diaries and stuff?” It’s not. Just for the record, blogs are
tools and more sites than you realize are now using a blog backend to manage
the publication of their information and pages.

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to go back in time a decade and be one of the
very first bloggers out there? Unfortunately, I can’t turn back the dial on
your clock, but in a very similar way, Twitter is at its early stage and
jumping aboard now can reap rather surprising benefits.

The big difference is that Twitter is like blogging one sentence at a time.

No worries about being too long-winded but rather the challenge of conveying
interesting and fun concepts, engaging ideas in less than 140 characters.
Ten to fifty times a day. Or more!

Most people are using Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/ - to send out daily
updates on their personal life (remember, I told you it was like the early
days of blogging) but some of us are figuring out that it has far greater
potential to communicate with a core audience of engaged followers, of
people who pay attention to you and who want to know what you’re doing and
what’s new with your business.

My Twitter account is http://Twitter.com/DaveTaylor and if you look at my
page, you’ll see I have over 700 people who pay attention to what I’m
sending out. That means that when I write a blog post now, I promptly
twitter about the new page and instantly see dozens to hundreds of thought
and opinion leaders hop over to my blog and read it, add comments, and often
blog about my postings on their own weblogs.

Let me say that again: when I publish blog entries, I update the hundreds of
followers I have on Twitter and *instantly* see a spike in traffic.

There’s so much more to Twitter, which I’ll talk about in the next issue of
Blogsmart News, but for now, sign up and start following people who are in
your marketspace and start sending out short updates of your own to
demonstrate you’re an engaging member of your community!

See ya online. Both on Twitter and my blogs, of course!

Dave Taylor
——————————————————————–
Intuitive Systems: Online Strategies and Communications
——————————————————————–
Innovative Business Thinking @ http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

ps: Want to connect with me on a social network? Here’s how:

Facebook: http://profile.to/d1taylor
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/DaveTaylor
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/d1taylor
Digg: http://digg.com/users/d1taylor
Twitter: http://Twitter.com/DaveTaylor

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under People, Twitter, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.