We're a-Twitter Over Here

I've been busy finishing up my third and final OJ trial preview, this time for The New York Times. And still, nobody gives a damn, as documented by Jane Ann Morrison in her column this morning. I also have to finish an update to a travel website's Vegas section today (a week overdue), edit up some new Petcasts and a few other things I can't discuss yet.

But the whole chatter in the prior post about the Las Vegas Sun's Twitter efforts for O.J. Simpson have finally broken down my resistance to yet another social-networking thingie. Mostly, that's because the Sun's Twittering on this case is actually useful and informative to me, so I set up an account, which you can find here. Twenty-three of you already have, which is more than the number of Sun follwers for O.J., telling you something about interest in the trial, I suppose.

The bulk of what Twitter is, so you know, is a means of spitting out 140-character messages to your "followers" either online via text message. People can live-blog their own lives right down to the most mundane detail, like "stuck in traffic" or "bored today" or "i'm frying up eggs for breakfast."

But media organizations are using it to send out little updates and newsflashes. I'm impressed that the R-J, Sun and other local media outlets have embraced this thing, usually sending out links to stories or quick bursts of information. Sadly, I've got a stupid old cell phone and can't do anything with these links, but if I had a Blackberry or something I imagine it would be more useful.

Not sure what I'll do with this yet. I suspect this interest will fade out fairly soon.