Results of @statesman Twitter survey

Thanks to everyone who filled out my Twitter survey. I learned a lot in reading it, and I enjoyed every comment.
Here’s the report I sent my bosses:
I built and put out an unscientific survey of the followers of our Statesman Twitter account to get a feel for who they were and what they were thought [...]

Hook’em on Twitter

Sports editor John Bridges has been Twittering for a few weeks no on @bevobeat using his own voice. We still feed the Longhorns-related blogs on there as well because we figure people who follow that account probably can’t get enough Longhorns coverage.
Bridges, also does an excellent post-game chat using CoverItLive.
To my surprise during Saturday’s big [...]

Word clouds made easy

Thanks to @ericasmith, I learned about http://wordle.net, which creates word clouds in super-easy format. It takes all the words of any text you put into it and spits out something like what you see below. The bigger the font for a word, the more often it was mentioned in a text.
Once you create one, you [...]

Op-Ed: How the Statesman uses Twitter

Just hours after Hurricane Ike roared ashore over Galveston Island, American-Statesman journalists Tony Plohetski, Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon and Jay Janner sat in their rental car on the north side of the I-45 causeway looking at a scene they will likely never forget.
12 p.m. Sept. 13: We’re at the Causeway at Galveston Island. It’s a MESS. The [...]

Evangelizing Twitter

Here are excerpts from an e-mail I wrote to another online editor last night who is going through a hard time convincing her staff to embrace Twitter (and the Web in general). I hope my advice works for her.
Hi!
I’ve been reading your blog, so I know pretty much what you’ve been going through.
Here’s how it [...]

Databases don’t have to be boring

Let me start this by saying I don’t know how to build a database, but I’m the Statesman’s database guy.
Instead of building databases the old-fashioned way (with language I don’t understand and mind-bending logic questions that  hurt my head to think about), we use Caspio.
I learned it on the fly, with the help of my [...]

Tracking Ike on Twitter with @TrackingIke

It has been 48 hours since we made our first post on @TrackingIke. It feels like 48 days.
I’m working as mission control here in Austin for the Twitter count that I set up to serve as a vehicle for our Hurricane Ike coverage. I’m worn out; but I think it has all been worth it.
First [...]

Twitter, welcome to the mainstream

Hurricane Gustav has and will put Twitter in the spotlight like never before. There’s no better social media tool out there to mass communicate news – and now we have a big story to give it a boost.
CNN has been playing up its Twittering efforts frequently during the storm. CNN’s Rick Sanchez is leading the [...]

Independent bloggers on an MSM site

Part of my job at the Statesman is to make sure the reader blogging community is thriving. This is no easy task. I’ll explain why in a minute.
First, quick background: The Statesman was one of the first, if not the first sites in the country to host reader blogs on its site (and promote their [...]

The Statesman tide floods Twitter

The American-Statesman is all over Twitter. I list a directory of sorts so you know who to follow.