This is what I\u2019ve learned, after two days of Twitter:<\/p>\n
To start with, I am currently \u201cfollowing\u201d fewer than a dozen people, but one of them is instapundit\/Glen Reynolds. \u00a0And it\u2019s not so much that he tweets constantly, but he retweets incessantly. \u00a0How to you separate the wheat from the chaff? \u00a0Twitter has pestered me to follow more people, but how do you manage more?<\/p>\n
The other disappointment is this: \u00a0I figured that 140-character tweets wouldn\u2019t really provide any meaningful ideas or information, and that the key to twitter was more the links that people share. \u00a0But too many of these tweets are just cryptic, like you need to be in the in crowd to know what the references are, and whether the link is worth clicking on \u2014 and, of course, it\u2019s not possible to click on every link!<\/p>\n
It\u2019s interesting to see how many followers some major pundits have: <\/p>\n
Charles Krauthammer (who has been writing so long that I think I remember his op-ed pieces from when I started reading the paper as a kid): \u00a0439,000.<\/p>\n
Jake Tapper: \u00a0341,000.<\/p>\n
National Review seems to exist as NRO (96,200) and NROCorner (62,700), and I\u2019m not clear what the difference is.<\/p>\n
Instapundit: \u00a031,800.<\/p>\n
Megan McArdle: \u00a021,900. <\/p>\n
I was surprised that Instapundit has comparatively few, and Krauthammer (who doesn\u2019t tweet very much) has so many. \u00a0Really: \u00a0Krauthammer has tweeted 267 times, and Instapundit 232,000 times. <\/p>\n
That being said: \u00a0I think part of the trick of Twitter, for an aspiring blogger, is to use it to promote blog posts \u2014 that is, not so much by sending posts out into the nothingness of the Twitterverse, but by tweeting things directly to a big-audience blogger who may be interested. \u00a0At least, I\u2019m fresh off my first such success: \u00a0Megan McArdle retweeted my tweek and large numbers of her readers looked at my blog. \u00a0Well, OK, \u201clarge\u201d is relative, but compared to my usual number of readers, it was a nice boost. \u00a0How often this works, and how wide the pool of potential retweeting bloggers is, I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
I also see how Twitter is attempting to earn money, via ads that appear in the feed. \u00a0Surprisingly, this isn\u2019t too bothersome, compared to facebook\u2019s ads, which seem to have grown lately. \u00a0Whether Twitter isn\u2019t as aggressive as facebook because they don\u2019t want to alienate users, or because Twitter is meant to be accessed via smartphone (which I don\u2019t have, except for the Blackberry for work), and more ads wouldn\u2019t work in that format, I don\u2019t know. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is what I\u2019ve learned, after two days of Twitter: To start with, I am currently \u201cfollowing\u201d fewer than a dozen people, but one of them is instapundit\/Glen Reynolds. \u00a0And it\u2019s not so much that he tweets constantly, but he retweets incessantly. \u00a0How to you separate the wheat from the chaff? \u00a0Twitter has pestered me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n