Anders Brenna

I tried something new today at the Search Summit Norway conference. I used Twitter to report live from the conference.

It’s probably nothing new for you guys out in the English speaking world, but back here, I believe it was a first. So does Journalisten.no, The news site for union organized Norwegian journalists. They did a short story on my little experiment. (I’m not a union member. It’s a personal thing, after once being member at an airline I worked for. Never again!)

The Twitter-phenomena has not exploded yet here in Norway, altough it’s probably right around the corner. From what I could tell, I was the only one at the conference using Twitter. That’s a bit sad, and it limits the possible benefits, as Twitter could not be used to have a sub-conversation at the conference.

The feedback I got from my readers, was positive. They enjoyed following a conference they couldn’t attend in this way.

I have been thinking about using Twitter for reporting for about two weeks, but I did not decide to do it before after lunch yesterday. I then tregistered a Twitter-account for digi.no. I ended up with digi_no, as digi already was taken (it’s already a usernname shortage, just like with the dotcom-domains).

It was quick to set up, and we created a page at digi.no where we described the Twitter-phenomena, and used the API’s to get the Twitter-messages published for those who didn’t want to go to the digi_no user page. It doesn’t look that good, but it worked well and served it’s purpose.

The page was published last night, but there was no link from our page. This made it available only to readers who enters our site through RSS. There were plenty of those, but most Norwegians still prefer manually visiting the home page of the sites they read (Norway is different, read my post The curse and blessings of a small native language for more on this).

I started out with the usual test messages, and some on what we where planning to do. Then the morning after, I wrote a message on the train to the conference using my cell phone, as well as a couple of messages at the forum, right before it started.

I was unsure what kind of messages would work, and how many I should send. I tried all kinds, and I tried both sending few and many from each of the speeches. My first impression is that the quotes worked best.

For instance this by Chris Mahoney, business developer from Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life:

“3D Web” is 5-10 år years behind “2D web”

Or this from John Marcus Lervik, CEO and founder of Fast Search & Transfer, the Norwegian search company that Microsoft recently bought.

One of his answers to why Norway has such a strong community around search technology (Microsoft, Yahoo and Google all have search development departments in the city of Trondheim):

“We had a lot of smart students in the nineties”, says Lervik and received a laughter from the audience.

Everyone knew that’s when Lervik did his PhD.

The best example, however, was not from today’s conference. It was from my earlier private fiddling around with Twitter using my own private Twitter-account. I used it for breaking news.

Twitter is both the perfect journalist tool for being first with breaking news, and the best relief from the tyranny of breaking news.

What do i mean by that? For starters, it means that there is no way to faster publish the most important fact of a breaking news. 140 chars is not much, but enough. I first did this in Norwegian with the OOXML story.

Then I quickly wrote the normal news article. It was published as soon as I had the title, the ingress and the front page picture. Then I quickly wrote out the whole story while I continuously updated it until it was complete.

The advantage with Twitter was that I could inform our readers lightning fast, without destroying the potential for the complete story. Net journalism is a fast business, and most readers feel happy with reading the first story, even if it’s short. It does not “pay” in the form of visitors to take your time and write the complete story, if there has already been a short story with the most vital details.

This is what I consider to be the tyranny of breaking news, and I must say that I dislike it. As a journalist, I enjoy the most stories where I can dig in deep and explain things, as well as inform, entertain and report. Being first is a great advantage of the net, but I feel that interaction with readers, links to more information and the fact that we have no limits on how long the stories can be, to be at least equally important.

The problem with short breaking news that kills the good long stories is different with Twitter because of the 140 char limit. You can get the main point, but you don’t destroy the complete story for those who need to know more. You just wet their appetite.

Then, afterwards, when the complete story is written and published, Twitter can once again be used to point your readers to it. I did this after completing the English version of my OOXML-story. It looked like this:

abrenna Breaking news: Formal protest against Norway’s Yes to OOXML-vote http://tinyurl.com/3xxa6c

This is why I love the prospect of Twitter news, even though I loath short news stories.

This was my first attempt at Twitter journalism, and although I don’t believe I hit the right formula spot on, I felt it was close enough to merit further exploration. Next attempt tomorrow, when I will be covering two conferences. One at Oracle and one on Topic Maps.

PS! The digi_no Twitter-account is only written in Norwegian. My personal account, abrenna, will probably be in both.