And there you have it – one of my pet peeves about Twitter. How every second word is turned into adaptations and variations of the word Twitter and the messages known as tweets. Your words go out into the Twitterverse or tweetstream. People are Tweeple or just Tweeps. The cool kids are the Twitterati.  And on and on. It’s enough to give you a Twitterache!

So what’s good about Twitter?

Dan Santow says the 140-character limit is a good exercise for anyone who thinks of themselves as a writer. “I’m becoming reacquainted with telegraphing information in a tight, focused way to grab readers’ attention. I’d forgotten how hard it is to write so few words but express so much.”

Jennifer Blanchard at Copyblogger suggests using Twitter makes you a better writer, by forcing you to be concise, use your vocabulary and improve your editing.”You have to know exactly what you want to say, and say it in as few words as possible.”

Shel Holtz says, “Far from a collection of short, standalone messages for the attention-challenged (as many see it), Twitter is frequently a gateway to more, deeper content” such as blog posts, breaking news, videos and photos.

And the bad?

Here are all these tweets pointing to interesting, useful, funny places you simply have to go and visit. It takes time, and I’ve noticed it also diverts bloggers from updating their blogs quite as often as they used to. (Ahem.)

Sometimz yr writing does not actually get bettr, becuz U edit this way 2 fit.

Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente laments that “There will soon be no one left with an attention span that exceeds 140 characters at a time.”

Her fellow Globe and Mail writer Ian Brown comments that “The absence of a central filter is what makes Twittering so pleasant and energetic and optimistic in the moment, and what makes it chaotic afterward.”

Well, with six million Twitterers in North America (six times as many as there were a year ago, apparently, although I can’t find where I got that statistic), there’s no denying Twitterville is a place you have to at least visit. You’ll find me on the beach under an umbrella @Sue_Horner.

Everyone is trying to be like the shiny new toy, Twitter.

My Internet service provider, Bell Mail, has launched their new “enhanced” mail service, and it wants me to invite people to join my network and update them on what I’m doing. LinkedIn and Facebook want me to invite people to join my network and update them on what I’m doing. The Air Miles loyalty program just announced a new “community” and invited me to pick my user name and join in, sharing travel and Air Miles reward stories. No doubt, they also want me to invite people to join my network and update them on what I’m doing.

But Twitter is the place everyone seems to want to be.

The thing I’ve noticed lately is that people who are busy Twittering are slowly neglecting other parts of their online life. They aren’t updating their blogs as often, or they’re letting a Twitter feed take the place of posts. Twitter comments (yes, I know they are called tweets) are replacing Facebook status updates.

An article by Michael Learmonth in Advertising Age asks, “Why did Facebook suddenly get so much more Twitter-like?” He notes that Facebook “started emulating key functions of Twitter earlier in March after a redesign made status updates central and immediate,” but that “The tweet is replacing the status update among the digerati.”

Not everyone thinks this is good. I ran across Carpe Media and Emily Sussman’s musings on the back-and-forth Facebook encourages by letting people comment on friends’ status updates. She says:

“Unlike Facebook, micro-blogging on Twitter strikes me as the equivalent of shouting into a vacuum…Essentially, Twitter posts are graffiti while Facebook’s status updates function as a dynamic community bulletin board — the latter succeeds because of its context’s fully interactive interface.”

Twitterer kevinrose asks, “is personal blogging dead? w/my facebook page/twitter, I’m not sure I need a blog anymore.”

Do you agree?

Digital natives won’t be impressed, but it was big news for me when I launched my web site, started a blog, got settled on Facebook and LinkedIn and even downloaded a ringtone (I’m not a big cellphone user). So believe me when I say there is LOTS for me to learn.

I had wondered before how to link my blog posts with my Facebook profile, and today Dan York pointed the way. As he notes, it’s quite simple once you can find the Import tab. Turns out it is cleverly concealed under the little triangle beside Write Note. Of course, he’s got so many possible places to link that he’s sorry it only lets you link one.

Joan Donogh of In Formation Design, who designed my web site, also  revealed that you don’t need to see an RSS button on someone’s blog to subscribe. Just look up, way up, at the line that shows the URL of the page you’re on. If there’s a feed, you’ll see a little blue RSS feed icon. Click on that, and you’ll be able to subscribe.

Of course, YOU knew that, but I did not.

What things have you discovered lately that you’d be somewhat embarrassed to say you did not know before? Chances are, I don’t know them either!

Yesterday was Blog Action Day, where more than 9,000 bloggers had signed up to “raise awareness, initiate action and shake the web” by discussing poverty.

High housing costs often mean a decision between paying the rent and eating properly. In my community, there is a food drive going on this weekend. Volunteers dropped off bags to fill with non-perishable food, and will pick up the donations on Saturday. It could not be any easier to do than that! So far, I have one bag filled and will get a few more things on the next grocery run (not as frequent as usual, with the boys at university!).

Here’s another easy-as-pie thing to do about hunger: visit freerice.com and build your vocabulary, for which sponsors donate grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme. The latest update said visitors donated 147,750,140 grains of rice yesterday. Of course while checking the site, I just had to play; it’s fairly addictive if you’re a word person! I got up to level 48 of 60 and 8,500 grains of rice before I forced myself back to work.

Appropriately enough, today is World Food Day.

A colleague in one of my networking groups, Rob Clark of The Elusive Fish, once likened social media to being at a party. He suggested that just as we would at a party, we need to get out and talk to people.

Jean Gogolin (in her WordTales blog, found through links from other bloggers), suggests basically the same thing when she encourages those of us who lurk on blogs to comment. As she says, comment to learn, to become part of a community, to meet compelling people, to add your point of view and more.

I can’t tell you how many times another blogger has (virtually) introduced me to someone else I have found to be funny, smart, interesting, entertaining and with plenty of wisdom to share. Why wouldn’t we let those people know how much we enjoy their words? Why not let them know their words aren’t wafting silently through cyberspace, unseen and unheard?

I was already following Copyblogger and Seth Godin, two of the blogs Jean cites. But she introduced me to the hilarious Naomi Dunford and her Ittybiz (“Work from home tips to help you stay sane”), where I found and ordered Naomi’s cleverly named How to Become an SEO Ninja. I can’t remember where I heard of Danny Evans’ Dad Gone Mad (“this is your brain on fatherhood”) or Quinn Cummings’ QC Report, or Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist (“advice at the intersection of work and life”), but I thoroughly enjoy all of them.

I’ve probably doubled the number of blogs I follow based on mentions from other bloggers or people commenting on them. That’s both a good thing and sometimes not so good, as in when I get distracted from my appointed tasks by reading, following links and, usually, having a good laugh. However, you could say that’s good, too. What day isn’t enriched by a good laugh? And I’m pretty focused when I have a deadline to meet.

My friend and colleague Donna Papacosta at Trafalgar Communications is always very good at commenting, even when I happen to know she’s crazy busy. So I promise to work on my tendency to lurk and do likewise; comment where I have something to say.

Marketers are going after another supposedly influential group these days: Generation Jones, a term coined by Los Angeles “culture expert” Jonathan Pontell. This is the group within Baby Boomers born between 1954 and 1965. It probably tells you something that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are high-profile Jones members.

The distinction here is not age, but how you use media. Instant messaging? Facebook? web space? music downloads? All mark you as a tech-savvy early adapter. Take this test by Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk to see if you fit the label. I made the grade, although the fact that I hadn’t heard the term before probably docks a couple of points.
The name Jones refers to the group being a “large anonymous generation,” and/or links to the slang term “jonesin’,” the craving felt by this generation of unfulfilled expectations.

Sadly, it appears Generation Jones is responsible for electing George W. Bush in 2004. Politicians are keeping a close eye on the Joneses for the next election.

Today I found Marci Alboher’s New York Times blog Shifting Careers, which highlights “the newfangled ways we are custom-blending careers, and shares tips for doing it better.” Check out the post about the “Web 2.0 resume,” which includes a YouTube video and Googlepages, but do continue on and read the comments.

As some of the commenters note, this may be great for applying for a “Web 2.0″ position (whatever that might be), but the traditional resume is not dead yet. As my colleague and resume guru Martin Buckland says, “If a resume is read by a human [rather than electronically scanned, as is increasingly the case], it is first viewed for less than 30 seconds.” It may be difficult if not impossible to get someone to switch from looking through papers to checking out your video. Sure, have your “social media” version ready if needed, but the more critical step may be to ensure your traditional resume includes links to your blog, web site, LinkedIn profile, and other online presence.

Well, that’s my opinion, but in all fairness you should know that I haven’t had to use a resume for some time.

And thanks to Judy Gombita for the link!

In “I’m done with social media,” Dave Fleet encourages us to write in terms the average person on the street can understand, such as “web site address” instead of “URL”:

“I’ll open up my conversations to people who don’t live in our little bubble and who don’t know our terminology, but who want to know about this stuff.”

I agree that those of us blogging, reading blogs, using Twitter and all the many other “shiny toys” tend to forget that there is a huge slice of the population who don’t, or even more shocking, aren’t even aware these toys are out there. And I’m certainly all for communicating in the simplest, most understandable terms around. Hear, hear!

(I found Dave via Chris Brogan, who I’ve learned from past experience posts so frequently that I’d better check every day or I am 33 posts behind!)

After last week’s concentrated efforts to spin straw into gold (writing like a woman possessed), I surfaced to finally check my feeds. Boy, was I behind! Chris Brogan, bless his prolific blogging self, had 33 posts I had not yet seen. I particularly liked his post comparing social networks to your local pub, where he relates walking past a series of pubs at SuperBowl time:

“I knew that each one of those places had ‘regulars’ and ‘visitors,’ and a sense of what’s okay and what draws disapproving stares. Sounds a bit like social networks, if you squint.”

His good advice: buy others in the pub a drink (in other words, share).

Not having yet drunk the Twitter Kool-Aid, I’m always interested in reading about the experiences others have with this “microblogging platform.” From colleague Joan Patch came a link to an article about building your online profile by AdAge “editor at large” Matt Creamer. He says:

“Success in social media, I quickly discovered, is being comfortable with the proposition that every single waking thought and feeling you have is important enough that other people will want to read it. What else explains Twitter? …Twitter was for me something to be mocked, to be held up and derided as a symbol of a new wave of irrational dot-com exuberance…[but] I realized that I could use Twitter to promote my blog, as well as my writings for Ad Age…In isolation, these sites are kind of a waste of time, but in the aggregate there’s some real utility.”

Meanwhile, on the Black Belt Dojo, Sue Dewhurst writes:

“I must admit, from the little I’ve read about Twitter, I’d dismissed it in my head as some place people went to waste time chatting about nothing in particular…So I was intrigued to see Lee [Hopkins] talking about Twitter as a great way to keep in touch with remote workers who might have no access to a computer but do have mobile phones.”

I’m glad to hear of a solid use, because I have trouble with the idea of everyone simply sharing their every waking thought. I’ve been scolded for “lurking” too much and not commenting on other blogs, but I’m still feeling my way around a bit, deciding when/if I have something to add and wanting to make sure those thoughts are worth the time someone else would spend to read them.

Of course, exasperated rants about “service providers” like Sympatico, Air Canada, etc. fall into a different category!