I’m not going to be blogging the next few days while I’m here at SXSW, in fact, most have noticed that I’m not carrying my usual battle gear of digital camera, video camera, laptop, wireless gear. Instead, I’m just using a mobile device and will be tweeting most of the time.
I’ll point to anything that I think is interesting from Twitter, so you can follow me there, I mainly use it as a ‘link stream’ (I point to what I think is interesting) and secondly as a communication tool.
Not sure what Twitter is? It’s a social network that becomes a chat room, so you’ll need to find other folks to connect with. Use the “@” symbol to reply to someone. For example “@jowyang good morning” (minus the quotes) and I’ll see that in my reply feed.
Many business folks have a hard time understanding the value of twitter, (they don’t get it) but I talked to a reporter from NYT, and the Guardian, and they use it to find breaking news and stories.
In this case, what’s important is to focus on the content, not the toolset.
Yesterday, I was on the panel about mobile blogging, and in the spirit of it, we split up into different groups and roamed the hall using utterz, twitter, on board cameras. Here’s my interview with Jemima Kiss of the Guardian (her profile). You’ll have to understand the irony of this, I’m using my cell phone to interview a journalist on how she uses social media.
Twitter has been a great way to see what’s going on, where my friends are, where the biggest party is, where are the good panels or the bad ones. It has been an indispensable tool for this conference.
Jeremiah: You weren’t alone. Many folks at SXSW were using Twitter instead of blogging.
Matter of fact, several folks I talked to said that the use of Twitter has displaced some of the time they use to use for blogging.
Are we going to start seeing increased trends in microblogging versus traditional blogging?
Lionel
I’m pretty sure we’ll see this increase. Mobile devices are plentiful, wifi is not.
Blog posts require more effort, tweeting is fast.
We still need both, as long form content can bring value that micro content can’t.