I’ve set up a Twitter account for the blog and installed the “Tweet This” WordPress plugin. Now you can click the “tweet this post” thing below a post and the post will be tweeted.
You can read our Twitter feed here, though I’m not sure why anyone who is already reading the blog would want to.
I will probably set up automatic tweeting for all Chicagoboyz posts. Twitter’s TOS says that you can’t automatically tweet a blog post without the author’s consent, so I want to be cautious about using this feature until I can contact all of the relevant people. It appears as well that any reader can tweet any CB blog post, so the consent issue may exist even without automatic tweeting. (Our Twitter plugin, like most WordPress plugins, is not designed with group blogs in mind.) But I’m sure we will get these issues straightened out.
I just can’t get into Twitter. I am a blog guy and enjoy reading interesting articles and essays, not the tiny snippets that Twitter gives out. Blogs might be the best buggy whip around but there still seem to be tons of them with good content, so I am riding it as long as possible.
Twitter is essentially a clever combo of feed aggregator and minimalist blog platform. Probably a lot of people use it mainly as a source of links that they can follow up on as they wish. Because users can retweet posts an interesting meme can quickly go viral. It is a great tool for marketing and spreading ideas.