Lots of people are talking about Twitter right now, and a lot of them are pretty high profile and influential. Twitter is pretty big, and it’s going to get bigger.

What is it? The best way to describe it is as micro-blogging. You can only write posts of 140 characters or less. Hardly the medium for composing massive essays on the future of the web, then. But pretty useful if you just want to let people know where you are and what you are up to.

To make posting more accessible, you don’t have to visit the Twitter homepage everytime you want to post. Instead, you can activate your instant messaging client to send messages to Twitter. That 140 character limit is important too – because you can post via SMS as well.

Another cool feature is that Twitter works as a kind of social network – you can subscribe to other’s Twitterings, and they can yours. Everything is RSS-ified as well.

What are the applications here, though? Apart from inanely keeping people interested in the minutae of your life? Marc Orchant notes some benefits:

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now and must admit that it has stuck in a way many social tools have failed to for me. Part of the reason, I suspect, is that it’s very low effort. But more to the point, many of by online buddies are using the service as well and that makes it a very convenient way to keep up to date on what they’re doing.

Yes, there’s an inevitable noise level inherent in this sort of thing. And the volume has gone up (way up) since Scoble, Pirillo, and Rubel decided that Twitter was cool. But all in all, there’s little not to like and the conversations are often quite interesting.

It is in the conversations that the benefit lies for me. Massive, disparate communities could grow up around Twitter, making it a great platform for discussion and sharing.

Tags: twitter

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Ning is a great platform for creating individual social networks or communities of practice. It allows you to have your own site to which people can sign up and leave blog posts, have forum discussions, upload photos and videos and publish RSS feeds. I had a play here.

It’s another example of being able to get a social site up and running quickly and freely. The only ads are Google text ones, so they aren’t really intrusive.

Another reason to pay attention to Ning is that it is backed by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame – a man who knows his stuff.

To find out more, Scoble has a couple of videos up.

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Tom Foremski over at Silicon Vallery Watcher points out the things that annoy him about search:

- There are many publishers that try to make sure their headlines catch the attention of the search engines rather than catch the attention of readers. The same is true for content, editors increasingly optimize it for the search engines rather than the readers.

- Why should I have to tag my content, and tag it according to the specific formats that Technorati, and other search engines recommend?  Aren’t they supposed to do that?

- Google relies on a tremendous amount of user-helped search. Websites are encouraged to create site maps and leave the XML file on their server so that the GOOGbot can find its way around.

- The search engines ask web site owners to mask-off parts of their sites that are not relevant, such as the comment sections,  with no-follow and no-index tags.

- Web sites are encouraged to upload their content into the Googlebase database. Nice–it doesn’t even need to send out a robot to index the site.

- Every time I publish something, I send out notification “pings” to dozens of search engines and aggregators. Again, they don’t have to send out their robots to check if there is new content.

- Google asks users to create collections of sites within specific topics so that other users can use them to find specific types of information.

- The popularity of blogs is partly based on the fact that they find lots of relevant links around a particular subject. Blogs are clear examples of people-powered search services.

It’s my view that web search has come as far as it can based on algorithms and sheer grunt alone. There needs to be a human element in terms of whether or not a result is actually a) relevant and b) useful to the searcher.

This is the thinking behind the Search Wikia project which Wikipedia and Wikia’s Jimmy Wales is running. I wrote a little about this on my personal blog here and here.

It’s also why I am working on a human generated ‘search engine’. The aim will be for people to submit links they have found useful, tag and categorise them, and allow others to vote them as useful. This database of links will then be searchable, producing fewer results, but ones which have been recommended by others. I think it is going to be really useful, but it will need the committment of other people to make it work.

Watch this space.

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I’ve started a new page on the LGNewMedia wiki, called the Local Government Blogger Directory. I’m working from a pretty liberal definition of what ‘local government’ means so feel free to chuck in anything that comes even close to the LGNewMedia sphere of interest!

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Thanks to David Wilcox for pointing me in the direction of nfp 2.0, Steve Bridger’s blog about ‘How not-for-profits can benefit from blogs and social media’.

A great addition to my blogroll.

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A couple of weeks ago, I noted the new Lib Dem’s manifesto website, which pleased me as it ran on WordPress. Well, thanks to Guido I have come across two more WP powered sites maintained by the Liberal Democrats.

The first is Corruption is a Crime:

For far too long, it’s been acceptable to turn a blind eye to corruption when it comes to foreign contracts. The Liberal Democrats believe that corruption is a crime and should be stopped. Allegations of serious corruption must be fully investigated.

The second is Home Office Watch:

Welcome to the Home Office Watch blog, a single repository of all the shambolic errors and mistakes made by the British Home Office compiled from Parliamentary Questions, news reports, and tip-offs by the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs team.

Interesting to see that a political party has cottoned onto the fact that you don’t need expensive bespoke solutions to get a social media site up and running. WordPress is free and fast.

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