It’s fairly simple. Your tweets must have the #avlnews hash tag to make it into the feed. From there, one of the community moderators must approve it (or maybe retweet it ... I’m not sure) for it to show up on the Mountain Xpress feed. If you want to know more, you could tweet Xpress publisher Jeff Fobes (@fobes), and he’ll probably be able to fill you in on the other details.
It’s open to anyone, although at the moment a lot of companies are just now learning to use Twitter to do marketing, so there’s a higher percentage of content from them. Once the novelty dies down in a few months, we’ll probably see more citizen journalism.
Are any of the forum crew part of the MXNow/avlnews project? I know a few of us are contributing to the BlogWire project, but I’m not really involved with the Twitter one.
Once the novelty dies down in a few months, we’ll probably see more citizen journalism.
Surely, you jest. Spamming only grows over time the more companies learn how to exploit ways for people to see their ads. Hopefully MX won’t allow that to take place, assuming they do moderate what gets posted.
I have occasionally posted to the Twitter feed, but more often Fobes will just retweet things I write and add the appropriate hashtag so it appears there.
However, I’ve gotten so disenfranchised with Twitter I rarely check it or post to it anymore.
Once the novelty dies down in a few months, we’ll probably see more citizen journalism.
Surely, you jest. Spamming only grows over time the more companies learn how to exploit ways for people to see their ads. Hopefully MX won’t allow that to take place, assuming they do moderate what gets posted.
Wishful thinking, more like. I guess the only real way to address it is with moderation.
The more I think about it, the more I think that twitter’s usefulness in arming “citizen journalists” (whatever those are) is already done. We saw it work in Iran, and then it went away. I get the feeling now that all it is really good for is spamming and to generate web traffic to a company or individual’s site.
It also helps inflate people’s egos by thinking everyone cares about what they have to say. Maybe richey should get on Twitter; I think he’d have a lot more support there.
I’m not trying to point any fingers, since that would make it hard to type.
But it does bother me that “news” comes from private companies that seem to get their name splattered all over the front page of the Mountain X on a continual basis.
If it’s to be truley “Citizen” oriented - at least..
It also helps inflate people’s egos by thinking everyone cares about what they have to say. Maybe richey should get on Twitter; I think he’d have a lot more support there.
richey could have literally thousands of fans in a few days, assuming he wasn’t picky about who they were.
