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Catch the hot news, as it is written If you don’t want to wait for the newsbots to serve up their bulletins, another way to stay ahead of the pack in your news gathering is to follow bloggers, journalists and subject experts with similar interests to yourself or your readers.

Very often, Twitter-active bloggers will let you know what they are working on throughout the day. This gives you the perfect sneak preview of news and articles you might want to cover or connect to in your own blog, before the news has even been published to the web.

Among the bloggers in the tech-world well worth following, you will find:

• Marshall Kirkpatrick of SplashCast, who is a truly prolific Twitter-user and a great source of interesting news links
• Robert Scoble, who takes Twittering to the next level and often lets you into what he is currently working on
• Marjolein Hoekstra of CleverClogs is also a Twitterholic, and an infinite source of RSS and Twitter links
• Of course, you can catch up on the latest Robin Good’s Media Network news by following Robin Good, Livia Iacolare, and myself, Michael Pick

Subscribe To News Tweets

By far the easiest and most straightforward way to stay on top of your favorite news sources is to subscribe to their Twitter presence. You’d be surprised how many websites and even mass media corporations have accounts with Twitter, providing you with super-short bulletins of the very latest breaking news.

This is a great way to make sure that you always catch the incoming news as it breaks, and with the capability to send your Twitter messages to a mobile phone, you don’t even need to be at your computer to do so.

Among the news sites with Twitter accounts you will find:

• The BBC has a number of channels, including a news frontpage, tech news and video headlines
• Tech news hub Techmeme
• Social networking news blog Mashable
• Web 2.0 news blog TechCrunch

If you are serious about blogging, you will already be leveraging the power of RSS to gather and refine news from around the web. The only problem is having the time to sift through your news feeds, which can soon add up as you subscribe to more and more websites.

Luckily Twitter provides you with some fast, easy additional news sources which you can easily monitor, tap-into and turn-into cutting edge blog posts.

Now it’s a done deal. Twitter has purchased search engine Summize, a deal that leaked out last week but didn’t wrap up until the last few days. Twitter’s Biz Stone has the official announcement here, but of course don’t offer up the most pertinent information, like price.

Our best effort: We hear the 5-man, Virginia-based company sold for something in the $15 million range, paid out in a mix of cash and Twitter stock. Yes, Twitter stock: A company that has no obvious business model but does have plenty of technology problems is now in the position to fund M&A with equity, thanks to a funding round that values the company at about $100 million.

Think of that development as a Rorschach test for your take on Web 2.0 in general: Either this thing is going to implode very soon, or people who get hung up on startup valuations are short-sighted bores who don’t get the possiblities of technology.

And, if you’re feeling generous, Summize might well help Twitter solve its business model problem, too. Twitter users wouldn’t stand for ads sold into their tweets, or on their Twitter pages themselves. But there are a couple of companies we can think of that have done well by selling ads on search pages.

Suddenly, Twitter has become a more interesting business. Or potential business, at least. And as a hedge, there’s also no reason why Summize has to work with Twitter exclusively—it could just as easily search other social networks/applications.

In any case, at a minimum, Summize is growing very, very fast, which in Web 2.0 terms means it has to be worth something, right? In March, the search engine was processing 71,203 queries per week; last week it handled more than 14 million. Chart via John Borthwick, whose Betaworks holding company invested in Summize last year:

Some have called Twitter “the ‘Seinfeld’ of the Internet – a Web site about nothing.” And at first glance, this micro-blogging tool that connects users around the world through short bursts of real-time text messages can seem mindlessly superficial.

“just ate a great burrito,” types one Twitterer.

“time for a nap,” says another.

But drill down a bit, its fans say, and the San Francisco-based network has all the makings of an Internet phenomenon with vast potential for social, business, political and cultural applications. Critics say Twitter, which can be accessed by computer, instant messaging, PDAs and cell phones, is prone to system crashes, has yet to show how it will turn a profit, and seduces its addicted users into unproductive dead zones – “a time-suck” says one critic, “for those not able to stay away.”

But don’t tell that to the users – 1.2 million unique visitors in May, by one account – who have embraced the 2-year-old tool and use it to trade sports scores, organize protests and even hire new employees. Many who try Twitter are smitten.

‘I was hooked’

“Once I figured out how to filter through all the content, I was hooked,” said Christine Perkett, a mother of two using Twitter to trade parenting tips on everything from Montessori schools to the most absorbent diapers. “As your Twitter network expands, you really start to learn from these other parents.”

“It’s nowhere near Advertisement mainstream,” says Rodney Rumford, whose “Definitive Guide to Twitter” is about to be published. “But it represents a fundamental shift in the way people communicate. Just like blogging changed the way people share information, Twitter does that, too.”

Co-founder and Chief Executive Jack Dorsey came up with the idea of friends sharing real-time “status updates” of 140 characters or less. The 31-year-old Missourian compares Twitter to the latest in “a progression from telegraph to phone to e-mail to instant messaging.” Twitter, he says, removes the conversation and focuses simply on updates.

The concept is deceptively simple. Sign up online for free. In the search box, enter a professional or personal interest, such as “food.” A list of Twitterers – iLuvFood, for example – pops up and you select some of these strangers to “follow.” In a box below the words “What are you doing?” you start to Twitter, firing off shorts bursts of 140 characters or less. Before you know it, many of the folks you’re following are following you, too.

Despite its appeal to the so-called early adopters who jump on the latest tech toy, some analysts question whether Twitter will find a larger audience. “Too geeky for the mainstream,” says Mark Glaser of PBS’s MediaShift blog, “even though usage right now is exploding.”

Business model?

Founder Dorsey won’t say how many users Twitter has or how it plans to make money. Revenue could come from ads, which Twitter is now testing on its popular Japanese site. While assessments differ widely, Nielsen/NetRatings estimated there were more than a million unique visitors to Twitter.com in May. And while that’s a drop in the bucket compared with the 26 million visitors to Facebook in the same month, Twitter’s traffic has more than doubled since March.

Even so, Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst with Forrester Research, says “to expect everyone to use this tool is very unlikely; it will be for only a small percentage of Internet users. And it will absolutely have competition, once the cell phone industry figures out another way to enhance their text-messaging systems and charge for it.”

In the meantime, Twitterers are using it for an array of purposes. They’re sharing product recommendations and restaurant mini-reviews. They’re composing Twitter novels, organizing spontaneous parties, sharing diet diaries. They’re Tweeting live updates from Disneyland on Twisney, one of hundreds of third-party sites that have sprung up across the Twitosphere.

In April, for example, Tibetan activists protesting the Olympic torch relay through San Francisco used Twitter to keep tabs on each other, their opponents and the elusive flame.

Yet the same qualities that draw some people to become obsessive Twitterers can drive others crazy. Scott Karp, a well-known media-tech blogger, describes Twitter as a “massive waste of time” and “the temptation to Tweet for the sake of Tweeting is way too high.”

Others point out that the tool, along with lesser-known competitors like Pownce and Jaiku, can be easily abused by self-promoters, aggressive marketers and online ego-trippers trying to build a bigger network than the next guy.

“Some users are actually competing for followers,” says Rod Bauer, 53, a marketing consultant who works out of his sailboat in Sausalito. “They’re either celebrities or they’re promoting their own businesses. It can get a bit tiresome, but it’s part of the culture.”

Twitter’s origins

That culture was born in early 2006 at podcasting service Odeo, where Dorsey worked with blogging pioneer Biz Stone, now 34 and Twitter’s co-founder and creative director. Brainstorming new ideas, Stone said he and Dorsey, “let our minds drift a bit. What if we could reduce some of the functions of the social-network sites, like journaling, but make it less verbose and more lightweight?”

Simplify, they thought. Write code that would allow users to post “status messages” online or with their phones “and you could access them anytime and anywhere and find out what your friends were up to,” Stone says. They ran the idea by Nebraska native Evan Williams, now Twitter’s chief product officer, who had worked with Stone at Google before starting up Odeo. Williams gave the green light, says Stone, so “we built a prototype in two weeks and let our friends try it. Everyone liked it. The immediacy of it really clicked with people.”

In early 2007, they formed Twitter with the help of venture-capital and other investors. Wildfires in Southern California and the South by Southwest music conference in Austin showed that a micro-blogging tool like Twitter could be used to organize conferencegoers, as well as broadcast updates among firefighters, news media and residents in the fires’ path.

Some of the more intriguing Twitter adopters have included Fortune 500 companies like Comcast and Dell, which along with JetBlue Airways, the New York Times and scores of smaller businesses like online shoe seller Zappos, are using the tool for customer service, hiring, instant polls and marketing.

Job seekers are also trolling for openings, commiserating with their fellow unemployed, and in the words of aspiring marketer Clara Kuo, 25, of San Jose, doing a little “personal branding.”

“That’s a big thing right now for people my age,” she says. “There are lots of smart people out there, but you have to differentiate yourself from everyone else.”

So instead of sending out résumés on her own, Kuo’s hoping the 104 people she’s following through Twitter might help lead the way.

this is an opportunity of a lifetime for the right group of investors.

i created this company out of business school.

i have always wanted the same opportunity set as the excite kids.

i think this could be a billion-dollar opportunity.

without venture funding i don’t know how the hell we will actually be able to enter the market properly

the size of the problem is MASSIVE.

• throw telecommuting into the mix and you’ve got a big opportunity for sure.

i don’t want to say the entire business of METANOTES is riding on this demo.

i really don’t want to say that.

but rocking it would certainly rule.

dear god

• please let the demo win funding from this guy or someone in his network.
  • i am specifically thinking of bill gross and jeremy winokur.
• please let GRP be the right fund for this project.
• please let this guy’s eyes bug out at the possibilities.

• connecting and staying connected with friends
• creating an online representation of yourself
  • this is fun
  • this leads to eternal tweaking
• playing with applications
  • very few of the successful FB applications are “work related”

Facebook does not “solve problems” so much as “add fun” to the student population.

some angles:

• Twitter as a news source – how you can tap into numerous aspects of the Twitter experience to bring in hot, fresh news to blog about, well ahead of the pack
• Twitter as a networking tool – how you can tap into other members’ expertise and further spread your online presence
• Twitter as a promotional tool – how you can promote your blog and win over new readers via the Twitter community
• Twitter monetization – how with a bit of imagination you can use Twitter as another source of blogging revenue

So you’ve found some hot news to write about, and tapped into the wisdom of crowds to help you research it. The next step is to make sure that plenty of people know about it, and Twitter can also help you out here.

As a promotional tool, Twitter gives you the chance to publicize your blog content and create loyal followers that could well turn into regular site visitors or even RSS subscribers.

While monetization options for Twitter are nowhere near as far along as they have come for blogs, there are a few enterprising individuals trying to work an angle on Twittering to bring in a little residual income. It certainly takes some imagination, as with 140 characters, there isn’t a great lot that you can do .

Nevertheless, here are the two monetization options that I know of to date. These could be readily adapted to your own niche-targeted readership and are at least worth considering if you blog for a living, or are attempting to do so. I would be interested to hear any of any other methods that are being tested or used within the Twitter community.

Guerilla marketing I am a lot less certain about how popular this next approach is likely to be with the Twitter community, but I guess that there would be nothing to lose by giving it a try with a test account if you were feeling particularly interested in leveraging the monetization potential of Twitter.

TwitCash gives you the chance to rent out your Tweets to advertisers and get paid ‘per follower, per post’. TwitCash then charges $200 CPM to its advertisers, which strikes me as high, and delivers their message via signed-up users’ accounts.

Given that users are paid 10 cents per active user that hasn’t previously seen a message, this is unlikely to make anyone a millionaire (or even enough to buy lunch at Macdonalds), but the idea is an interesting one and a first effort at cashing in on the well-targeted networks within Twitter.

Create blog evangelists

If you keep your ear to the ground and try to answer other users’ questions and requests for help, you will quickly find yourself building followers that will champion your cause.

The same effect can be had by being funny, creative or first-on-the-mark with great links. Whatever your approach, regular Tweets that go beyond what you ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner are likely to be recommended to other users. And as your friend list grows, so more people click through to your website, receive your blog updates and spread the word for you.

You can even make it easy for other people to spread the word on your latest blog post by adding a TwitThis button to the bottom of your article. When users click on it, it automatically creates a shortened Twitter-friendly URL to the blog post and takes a user to their Twitter account, making sharing even easier.

Affiliate links via Twitter: With a little imagination, it is possible to use Twitter to serve up well-targeted affiliate links.

Imagination and cunning are key here, given that nobody is likely to stay your friend for long if you simply throw spam at them day-in day-out. I wouldn’t recommend linking to a one-page web marketing site for your latest $99 ebook, or some hideous money-making scheme that will send users running to the “block” button on your account, never to receive your Tweets again.

However, one effective use of affiliate marketing I have seen is the excellent TwitterLit account. Twitterlit provides users with a daily quote, taken from the first line of a novel, and accompanied by a link to that novel at Amazon.com.

What makes this so effective is that it is interesting to receive and then click through when a well-chosen first-line takes your interest. As such, rather than feeling like spam, TwitterLit Tweets are actually welcomed as a source of entertainment. I doubt that the revenues are earth-shattering, but with enough time and enough followers applying this same principle could prove to be a profitable sideline for bloggers.

Promote your blog posts One obvious way that you can make use of Twitter for promotional purposes is by simply making an announcement each time you add a new post to your blog. It’s surprising how much traffic that this can drive your way once you have built up a certain number of followers, and is well worth adding to your arsenal of social media optimization techniques.

But what if you are in the habit of writing all of your blog posts and then setting them to publish automatically at intervals throughout the day or week, as you sip cocktails by the pool?

Luckily, just as you can automate your blog publishing, you can also schedule future Tweets using TweetAhead. Nobody need ever know.

Relying too heavily on popular news-hubs can leave your blog a little behind the times, trailing the hundred or so other bigger blogs covering the same story. If you are a tech-blogger for instance, and you make extensive use of popular tech news sites like TechMeme to get post ideas from, there is a strong chance that you will write the same blog post as everybody else.

Another approach to tracking the very latest memes, to give you a good idea about what’s hot at the moment, is to make use of a third-party Twitter search tool.

By finding out exactly what’s being talked about most, and indeed what isn’t being discussed at all, this can provide a refreshing, grassroots alternative to following the big news providers.

Among the services you can use to track Twitter Tweets are:

• TwitterBuzz, which tells you which URLs are currently most linked-to from Twitter
• Twitterverse, which creates great looking tag-clouds from the most most popular words used in Twitter within a user-defined timeframe
• Twitterholic lets you find out who’s hot, ranking the top 100 Twitterers in order of how many followers they have. A good place to start if you are thinking about who to add to your list of friends

Additional Resources

If you would like to read more tips and tricks for Twitter users, you might want to take a look at the following links:

• Slacker Manager’s excellent ‘Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users’
• Steve Rubel’s simple Twitter search
• Lifehack.org on ‘5 Ways to Use Twitter for Good’
• Twitter Fan Wiki – an extensive resource on all things Twitter
• John Tropea’s excellent ‘Twitter Tips and Tricks!’

Originally written by Michael Pick for Master New Media and originally published as: “A Bloggers Guide To Twitter: Ten Ways To Leverage The Power Of Twitter For Your Blog“

Once visitors have arrived at your blog, you can make it easy for them to keep tracking your Tweets by embedding a Twitter badge from one of the following websites:

• Your Twitter account – which gives you various customization options and the choice of displaying either your last post, or your recent conversations with Twitter friends
• Chris’ Original Twitter Badge – which has a nice clean, simple look that matches that of the Twitter website
• Jon Aquino’s modification of the official Twitter badge, which lets you display a full ten Tweets at at time
• Morgan Aldridge’s super-stylish CSS-customizable Twitter badge, which looks very nice indeed

Ten ways to leverage the power of Twitter for your blog. Research, promote and monetize your online writing by learning how to best use the power of Twitter.

As a blogger there are all kinds of tools that you can use to research, promote and monetize your writing – Twitter is one of them. In this bloggers’ guide to Twitter, I take you through ten ways that this simple but high-powered networking tool can make a difference to your blog.

If you haven’t encountered Twitter yet, it won’t be long before you do. This easy-to-use micro-blogging service continues to grow in popularity by the day. In my recent beginners guide to Twitter I talked through some of the ways that you can use and enhance Twitter.

Today I am going to show you how you can leverage the simplicity and social networking capabilities of the service to your advantage as a blogger.

Make Twitter a feature of your network

In addition to adding a Twitter badge and TwitThis button to your blog, you can also make a point of publicizing your Twitter presence from your blog sidebar or posts. If you then promise to add additional exclusive content only to your Twitter Tweets, your readers have a new reason to subscribe and follow your every move.

This can turn first-time or casual visitors to your blog into regulars, given that they will now be receiving regular updates about your latest articles.

Among the things you can offer via Twitter are:

• Up-to-the-minute bulletins on your latest blog posts
• Exclusive offers, such as a Twitter friends-only e-book at a secret URL
• Competitions related to your blog content
• Updates from an RSS news-feed of interest to your readers. This can be set up as a separate account and fed directly into Twitter without your intervention via a tool like RSS2Twitter
• Behind the scenes information and gossip

The list goes on, but the idea remains the same. Twitter is another opportunity to create loyal readers, and readers that may in turn become evangelists for your cause. By offering exclusive content, you give readers the incentive to turn into regular followers of your content.

Beyond its ability to bring in news, Twitter can also be of great help to bloggers looking to create a stronger network and presence in the blogosphere.

Using Twitter as a networking tool is a great opportunity not only to draw on the expertise of others within the huge community, but also to engage even more directly with your (potential) readers than you could through the comments section of your blog alone.

Max out on friends

As a blogger anything you can do to build up your readership (within the limits of legality) is worth pursuing, and one quick way to drive traffic to your website is to create regular Twitter Tweets.

The more people you have following your latest Tweet, the higher the page-views should become on your blog. If you aren’t choosey about who your friends are, it is a relatively simple task to go about befriending other users from the Twitter website, and then hoping that they choose add you back. You certainly won’t score a hit every time, but with persistence, you can quickly build up a large following.

Ask for help on your blog posts

As the Twitter community is by-and-large a very friendly one, another way that you can have it benefit your blogging is to do a little crowd-sourcing when it comes to writing your articles.

Let’s say you are writing an article on the best Twitter add-ons, for instance. What better way to tap into the wisdom of crowds than to ask your Twitter friends for recommendations?

Depending on the size of your network – and here bigger really is better – you could soon find yourself deluged with ideas. Just like that you have effectively farmed-out your research to the knowledge of a networked community.

The same approach can be used to find a new webmaster, a couch to sleep on when you visit the next barcamp, or even your next pro-blogging job.

If you really want to be sure of getting the very best advice, it makes good sense to add plenty of subject specialists to your list of friends, giving you a much better chance of getting well-honed insider tips.

If you want to be a little more selective, you can always make use of the following tools and techniques for choosing Twitter friends:

• Twitterholic gives you a way to work out who is most popular in the Twitter community
• Twitterment gives you a great way to search Twitter posts by keyword or even comparative keywords. Tap in some keywords related to your blog content, and you have an effective way to filter Twitter users more likely to be interested in what you have to say
• Twittersearch lets you run a keyword search and returns the latest Tweets which feature that word. You can link directly back to any user’s page by clicking on their name
• One simple way to filter your followers is to rely on the good taste of existing friends from the network.
  • you can browse their contacts and followers directly from your friends’ Twitter page
  • gives you an opportunity to extend your network without having to search through users for yourself

Twitter is not only highly addictive, but also a great tool for bloggers looking to extend their audience, tap into the latest online news, make valuable contacts and even add an additional revenue stream to their line-up of monetization options.

In this short guide I have tried to demonstrate how you can:

• Tap into the wealth of knowledge accumulated across the Twitter network, whether for breaking the latest news, or just seeking out advice as you research your blog posts
• Promote your blog and online presence by using Twitter as both a bulletin board for your latest blog posts and a means to win loyal, regular readers
• Solve problems that you might not be able to crack yourself, by harnessing the power of crowd-sourcing
• Bring added-value content to your readers, extending the scope and range of your blog into a new, quick-fire medium
• Potentially add new earnings to your other sources of blog revenue
• Most of all, above and beyond all of these points is that Twitter can be immense fun, and a great way to keep in touch with people you know, and make new contacts you have long considered speaking to.

Twitter has already gained enormous popularity, and shows no signs of slowing down its growth just yet. As such it is well worth engaging with at whatever level you feel comfortable if you are looking to expand your blog readership and extend your online presence.