I read neither Twitter nor blogs, although with my pending new job, I may be able to redirect my surfing habits away from a few much-visited employment sites.
But I have noticed (possibly, I could be wrong) that Twitter seems to have stolen the role of blogs, as far as unprofessional depositories of random opinions go. Newspapers have gone to great lengths in the past couple years to launch blogs. And as more professionals have gotten in on the game, I’d be willing to bet visitors to smaller blogs maintained by owners in their own free time has dwindled, or at least growth has decreased.
If I want opinion or insight into a new political development, I’d rather read Paul Wells, Andrew Coyne or, before he started focusing on Ontario, Adam Radwanski, than the local crazy down the street.
Twitter is getting overrun by corporations, businesses and PR folks but there’s also a fair amount of regular people on there. I think it’s still used chiefly by self-promotional folks and technology geeks and thus is hardly a “global conversation.” That said, as a reporter, I’ll be adding almost every Chilliwack twitterer I run into.
The reason is simple. When users talk about a subject, they use a hashtag that can then be searched for globally (Apparantly, in English-speaking countries outside of North America the number sign, or pound sign, is called a hash). That means that I can search for any topic in which I may be interested quickly. I can also, then, find locals to monitor for any interesting developments. Blogs take more time, and thus are used less. You can also set up a twitter account more quickly.
For a reporter, it seems like an interesting way to connect with sources. We’ll see when I start in Chilliwack.
Once a travel blog 