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Crowd sourcing: If you have no idea what crowd sourcing is or how it could work for journalists, you must read this post on Beat Blogging. The post gives simple examples where journalists are asking readers for story ideas or for their opinions. For example, the post showcases a Sacramento Bee reporter using his blog to crowd source opinions on what it’s like to be back after being furloughed because of California state budget constraints. We used to just call this good reporting.

Tweeting news: If you’re skeptical of the value of Twitter to news organizations, read this post. It explains how the news of the fatal plane crash this week in Buffalo spread through Twitter with frequent updates. Twitter gives a blow by blow witness description of the crash that you couldn’t get from a traditional news source until much later. Why wouldn’t newspapers want to be able to break news in this immediate way?

By simply monitoring what people are saying about you, you’re using Twitter better than 95% of the companies out there.

Don’t be shy about asking people on Twitter to spread the word for you.

most people don’t have the chutzpah to ask for help.

As many of you know, who follow me on Langwitches, I am working on a Digital Storytelling Guide for Educators. I will be using Wordle to create a storytelling cloud with words that come to mind when you think what Digital Storytelling means to or for you. Please contribute keywords, that come to YOUR mind when you think of storytelling in a comment. Don’t hesitate to add duplicate keywords what digital storytelling means to you. That way Wordle will highlight more important keywords. I will add your reponses through the comments and through Twitter and Plurk to Wordle and add the collaborative cloud to this post and as part of the cover art of the hardcover book that will be available for free download on Lulu.com . This cloud will be a digital story in itself, told by all of us!

wikis

employees gather on them to write software, map cell-phone base stations, launch branding campaigns.Nearly every new project hatches a wiki. This is especially valuable in a global economy, where engineers in Asia can pick up a project as Europeans go to bed. The new groups that evolve on these wikis raze traditional hierarchies: An intern can amend the work of a senior engineer.

Twitter is direct. I can work out lunch arrangements or a meeting about a business opportunity very quickly, with multiple people, from anywhere, as long as I have at least SMS access. This gets at the heart of what Twitter is... Twitter is another level of indirection (for you C programmers), or another layer (for you networking people), for connecting people, and that, combined with its simplicity and ease of operation, makes it very powerful. It's a big lever and a light touch is all you need

Finally, Twitter is a powerful tool for "grass-roots" information. All of that connectedness and genuine interaction leads to a lot of real-time information sharing, everything from restaurant criticism to traffic reports to emergencies, with real results. Real people help each other, inform each other, etc. This is what the media have picked up on and part of why they now can't speak a sentence without saying something about Twitter.

But fundamentally, this micro-announcement service does serve two needs: to post updates with low overhead and to follow a concise stream of updates.

If you care about productivity, don't check your Twitter feed while you're trying to get work done. Disruptions are deadly for productivity because it takes several minutes to reorient the brain every time you go off track looking at something else. Stick to checking updates once per day—for example, during lunch. All the tweets will still be there.