Follow NPR's Super Tuesday Coverage on Twitter
As the precinct results begin to pour in tonight, the NPR News Blog is going to try something new. I'll be posting updates throughout the evening using the group messaging service Twitter.com. For those of you who aren't familiar with Twitter, think of it as a way to hold a conversation with lots of other people using the Web, instant messaging and text messaging simultaneously. Users of Twitter "follow" each other to receive short updates from them, no more than 140 keystrokes each. That way, users can chat with each other whether they're sitting at their computer or off somewhere with their mobile phone. No matter where you are, the conversation continues.
Yeah, it sounds a little crazy, but after a while you get the hang of it and it's a really powerful way to communicate with others.
In this case, I'll be posting precinct results, as well as whenever NPR makes a call on a particular race, using a Twitter account called nprnewsblog. If you're not a Twitter user, you can just visit this page or follow its RSS feed, if you're technically inclined. If you're a Twitter user, simply go to the nprnewsblog page on Twitter once you've logged in, and click the "follow" button. After that, you'll receive notifications automatically. You can even set it up to receive every notification via text messaging, but just be prepared for a lot of text messages, particularly if you don't have a flat-rate text messaging plan.
If that's not enough for you, be sure to check out the Bryant Park Project's Twitter account. They'll be covering tonight's action as well.
Meanwhile, if you're a Twitter user and plan to be yakking a lot about Super Tuesday tonight, please feel free to post your Twitter name as a comment to this blog post so I (and everyone else, for that matter) can check out what you're writing.
So please join us on Twitter tonight. It's gonna be quite a ride.
-- Andy Carvin, aka acarvin on Twitter
4:08 PM ET | 02- 5-2008 | permalink
