By Leigh Andrews

According to Wikipedia, micro-blogging is: “a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates and publish them, to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group, which can be chosen by the user. The messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text and instant messaging, email, or MP3”. The content of a micro-blog differs from a traditional blog due to the limited space per message. Many micro-blogs provide short messages about personal matters, commentary on a person-to-person level, or a link dump – simply a collection of related or otherwise relevant links.

Melissa Attree, social media consultant and online brand strategist, feels that micro-blogging is an incredibly powerful tool for delivering information as it happens. Twitter, for example, has been credited by major broadcast organisations with breaking news stories, simply because the media was paying attention and listened to key updates, known as ‘tweets’. She adds: “Pictures, text, video – these can all be communicated in 140 characters using links. I use Twitter as the freshest source for latest industry news, campaigns and commentary, and feel that more and more people are relying on Twitter as a quick, easy information-sharing centre. Whereas before opinion leaders may have been ‘measured’ by their blog posts, more and more so, they are being followed and quoted as a result of the quality of their tweets.”

Beyond tweeting…

The most popular micro-blogging service is Twitter, which was launched in 2006. Its main competitors have been Jaiku and Rakawa, which documents daily accomplishments, based on the question "What have you achieved today?" Micro-blogging services are usually all about raw minimalism, but there are exceptions to the rule which seek to differentiate their services. Mashups are also becoming increasingly popular in the micro-blogging sphere, with daily and monthly .mashup awards. A mashup is when data from more than one source is merged into a single integrated result. Spoink, for example, is a micro-blogging service that asks whether users have ‘done anything interesting’, and has upped the stakes by integrating blogging, podcasting, voice calls and SMS messaging. Spoink also supports all major mobile audio, video and picture formats. Plurk, dubbed ‘a social journal for your life’, has included a rich interface and horizontal time-line which adds a spatial dimension to micro-blogging, and Pownce has integrated micro-blogging with file-sharing and event invitations.

If you can’t decide on a single micro-blogging service, give www.Twhirl.org a whirl. This runs on your desktop, connects to multiple micro-blogging accounts, and allows users to cross-post and mashup their Twitter updates to Pownce and Jaiku. Popular social networking sites Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn also have a micro-blogging feature called the status update, where users state their current feelings and actions in a short sentence. In May of 2007, an article listed a total of 111 Twitter-like sites internationally – this number has since risen in leaps and bounds.

Microblogging on the up and up

According to South African media expert and Twitter user, Gino Cosme, “Twitter reported in February 2008 that in January 2008, the total number of Twitter users trebled in about eight months, with over 700 000 users. Today, TwitDir, the directory of some of Twitter’s users, says there are over 960 000 twitterers on the database.”

In a blogpost titled ‘The Rise of Micro-blogging’, Matthew Buckland, General Manager of Publishing & Social Media at 24.com, mentions the relevance of micro-blogging in today’s world. To paraphrase, he says much has been written about the power of blogging, and while the beauty of the blog is that just about anyone can be a publisher as it’s cheap and easy to distribute content on the Net. He adds that writing a piece for a blog or an article takes time and a reasonable amount of skill, as one needs to be able to construct a fairly decent piece of writing in order to engage one’s readers. Added to this, Buckland feels that not everyone has something interesting to say or the ability to craft it into prose, let alone the time to do it - and not everyone is born to write.

Buckland then introduces the world of micro-blogging: “The service allows you to write… bite-sized posts… that are published to a network of people who have opted to follow you. It’s built for brevity, spontaneity and ease, and is short, sharp, fast blogging. If you don’t have the time to construct award-winning prose, but want to get your point across, then [micro-blogging] is the thing for you”.

While some dismiss the service as irreverent, micro-blogging is worthwhile for those who believe in networks, and the importance of being privy to the information that emanates from them. Buckland adds that we live in the information economy, where ‘knowing things and knowing people translate into business’. He adds that it’s a horrible feeling ‘when everyone is talking around you, like they know something you don’t’. This is an unfortunate truth of micro-blogging - you’re either in, or out, and it’s easy to get left behind if you don’t keep up.

The business of microblogging

Buckland adds that some businesses and media companies are beginning to ‘play’ on Twitter, with Standard Bank’s Pro20 cricket commentary on the service an admirable effort. Bellinda Carreira, Senior Manager of Online Marketing at Standard Bank, adds: “Worth a mention is the usefulness of the Twitter RSS feed that enables us to feed certain highlight tweets into our blog, which helps keep the conversation going.” This emphasises the importance of the interconnectedness of all things social media.

Some media companies have started to experiment with delivering their headlines through Twitter – but the content tends to ‘come in floods’, which can be quite overwhelming. Buckland feels that if corporates want to penetrate micro-blogging networks, they have to do so subtly, offering something of interest to users. He adds that social media is largely a private space, and crude advertising can be seen as intrusive. Relevance is therefore key. Buckland suggests reporters use micro-blogging sites for reporting and news gathering, and gives an example where Twitter recently made headlines for supposedly breaking the news of the Chinese Earthquake, as people were ‘tweeting it’ as it happened.

Micro-blogging is certainly useful when a topic arises that one wouldn’t necessarily blog or write a story about. For more on micro-blogging, visit Microblogging.com. This is a social media site where you can discover, share and discuss microblogging content with others.

Micro-blogging is easy to do and may well become ‘a tool in every reporters’ armory’, particularly in the current media environment where journalists need to become platform agnostic in order to get the news across in as many media formats as possible.

Buckland, who is also co-founder of South African blog aggregator amatomu and group blog, Thought Leader, concludes: “Micro-blog platforms are as important as they are trivial. They are for inanities as much as they form a key social and business networking role. They've also filled a niche for those who don't have the time or the will to write a blog.”