How To Split An Atom

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Starting this week I have extended my growing online persona to include Twitter and Jaiku. Before you ask, no I have not completely lost it, instead I have realized that both of these systems open up opportunities that any good blogger would be irresponsible not to take advantage of. First, lets take a look your microblogging future.

The Battle of The Microblogs

Twitter asks a simple questions: “What are you doing?”. From this opening line an explosion of activity over the last several months has been born. People are blogging their lives over Twitter’s network. Everything from the silly, “Wanting somebody to wrestle with…” to the sublime, “is designing a crazy cross-client test automation protocol… and should probably keep it simple.” makes its way into the Twitter public timeline.

Jaiku is like Twitter on steroids. You can blog your life, but the scope of that blogging has been extended to include RSS feeds from any other area of your web empire. You can include blog feeds, flickr feeds or even your twitter feed.

The question becomes why would you, fair reader, want to use it? I’ve decided to give you the top four ways to make the most out of your Microblogging career.

Top Four

Meet People. If you blog, never underestimate the power of friendships. Your friends are your best readers, they tip you off to interesting news and they introduce you to new, exciting opportunities. Not to mention they make this entire, thankless job worthwhile.

Twitter and Jaiku allow you to quickly meet new people with interesting things to say. Since people only have 160 or so characters to say their piece, you can get a really good feel of whether they have anything “interesting” to say.

Shameless Self Promotion. This is the beginning of the, “How to get rich through microblogging!” post that I will never write. That notwithstanding, Twitter and Jaiku are another vector to promote your newest masterpiece. In these situations, more is often less. No one wants to see you blatantly shilling your wares with every post. However, if you can add a bit of value with your advertisements then microblogging is a fine place to drop a link.

Keep Up. Another great facet of these microblogging networks is that they offer channels. For example, “Buzz Out Loud” has a channel on Jaiku, and there was a channel posting WWDC rumors in real time on Twitter. If you are looking for the latest, greatest unfiltered content fresh out of the minds of the editors, then microblogging is a fantastic place to find it.

Become a Web Celebrity. Or, “How to make friends and influence people.” Microblogging is a great exposure tool. If you have something interesting to say, people will want to hear it. If you are consistent, you can develop quite a following. People like Justine from iJustine use networks like Twitter to communicate with their fans. When attempting to use a microblogging network as an exposure tool make sure to keep in mind that adding value should be one of your primary goals. If your posts don’t help or entertain, then no one will care enough to read them.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Now that you know why you should sign up to either or both of these networks today, it’s time to go do it. Once you finish signing up, be sure to friend me on Twitter or Jaiku.