Monday, June 15, 2009, 4:53 pm

Short and tweet

Recently, whoever keeps track of such things declared “Web 2.0″ the millionth word in the English language. The newspaper I work for — traditionally stubborn toward the Web, the norm in the industry — last week set up Facebook and Twitter accounts. The Time cover story last week was about tweeting, and several of the podcasters I listen to regularly — Bill Simmons, Adam Carolla, etc. — in recent weeks have gone from disparaging the tweeting phenomenon or claiming ignorance about it to using it to promote upcoming shows and criticize Dwight Howard.

Sigh. I guess I might as well get on board too.

I think there’s a legitimate news application for Twitter, and I guess there’s a legitimate social application as well. It seems to work for The New York Times, as it does for Miley Cyrus. (By the way, if asked to bet I would have guessed Miley has more followers than The Times. Not so. NYT leads by about 200,000. I suppose that’s encouraging.)

I’m excited about the possibilities of implementing it at the paper, but we should all quit if mainstream, legitimate news ever begins to look like this:

we getting hustled? all candid’s pre-selected by clerics and hold position a-jad regime? takes bite out of “populist revolt”? #iranelection
about 10 hours ago from web
ChrisCuomo [ABC anchor]

Right.

So begins Round 2 of my Great Twitter Experiment. I had an account for about a week senior year, but I quickly realized I neither had the time to “micro blog” nor was I interesting enough to do it consistently. But if the aforementioned starlet can figure out something worthwhile to, uh, tweet, I better be able to come up with something too.

(Sry for goin over 140 chrctrs.)

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