Twitter Me This

As I settled in Sunday at my desk, popped open my MacBook and sipped my second cup o’joe, I started my research journey for the remarks I’ll be making at Tuesday evening’s social and new media panel discussion and dinner at the American News Women’s Club.  I didn’t realize four hours later I’d be delving into an exorbitant number of articles on Twitter alone.  Granted, Amy Argetsinger (1/2 of WaPo’s Reliable Source) and I will only be speaking for about 10 minutes or so each before we open up the floor for Q&A, but the amount of interesting content on Twitter, especially pertaining to the State Department’s message to the company to hold off on an upgrade because of the Iranian elections and protests, was unbelievable.  I was also looking into the blogosphere, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other new media sites.  Then I joined FriendFeed at the advice of a friend, where all of the above and more are connected (because its platform agnostic… put that one in your pipe and smoke it!).

Some sites that I used that were most helpful were:

TIME Magazine

Technorati

Facebook

Twitter

New York Magazine

Mashable

PBS MediaShift

Wikipedia

Google

What I found to be most interesting as I my eyes grew weary, my legs fell asleep and my rear end grew off the sides of the chair, is that traditional media and new media are truly melding into one.  They are playing in the sandbox nicely, tentatively perhaps, but nicely.  They are figuring each other out (like two dogs sniffing each other’s behinds) with an understanding that there IS a way to complement each other.  A few examples (credit to mediabistroFishbowlDC) is that legacy media focused National Press Club is set to vote on creating a membership class for Bloggers ARTICLE. The New York Times recently hired a Social Media Editor ARTICLE. And last but  not least, I am sure you’ve noticed that the bottom screen trailers on television news channels scream out: Follow us on Twitter! Join our Facebook Group! Be a Fan on Facebook! Read our blog! Upload photos to Flickr! etc. etc.

Thanks again to the ANWC for the invite to speak and to the friends who will be in attendance! More to come …