Social Networker: I'm Officially A Twit(terer)

Last Monday night at the EDN Innovation Awards dinner, several members of the sales team cornered me, with simultaneously praise for the community (and consequent advertising revenues) I’ve cultivated in three-plus years of contributing to the Brian’s Brain blog and requests to further expand my online reader base via Twitter.

This is a step I’d actually been considering for some time. I average between 1-2 blog posts per day, but generating online editorial is only one of the many tasks I regularly tackle and it takes a not-insubstantial amount of time and effort to craft a meaningful multi-paragraph writeup. Since plenty of additional tech tidbits come through my email inbox and RSS reader each day, Twitter’s 140-max-character count at first glance seems perfect to rapidly pass along incremental heads-ups to all of you.

On the other hand, my pragmatic (or, if you prefer, pessimistic) side sees a potential downside to Twitter. Many of my readers (and all of my original readers, at the dawn of my EDN career 12+ years ago) are engineers. Engineers tend to expect substance in the information they receive, and are correspondingly loath of brief fluff (especially in large amounts).

Will Twitter’s 140-character restriction tip the information balance in a positive or negative direction? Last weekend, I decided to take the plunge and begin an experiment to find out. Head here (www.twitter.com/brianzbrain) for the Twitter feed associated with this blog, and here (www.twitter.com/howweseece) for Tweets referencing the How We See CE blog that I also moderate.

At minimum, I’ll use these two Twitter accounts to alert you to new blog posts, thereby augmenting the capabilities of the Brian’s Brain and How We See CE RSS feeds. What else will you find up there? Who knows; subscribe to the Twitter feeds and we’ll find out together.

I welcome your feedback on what works (and doesn’t) for you in this emerging communication medium (and others). Either publicly comment at this particular blog post or drop me a private email. Thanks as always for your constructive critiques

By the way, I also created a personal Twitter feed (www.twitter.com/bdipert). Since my everyday life isn’t terribly interesting, your expectations here should be correspondingly muted Nonetheless, feel free to subscribe should you be fascinated by monotonous, mind-numbing minutia.

In closing, enjoy this related-subject video clip from last Thursday’s episode of the Colbert Report: