Published April 6, 2009 by

Twittering from tonight’s City Council meeting

In the UK last week, some Guardian and Observer reporters used Twitter from the G20 summit and had their Tweets show up on the newspaper’s web page here. I’m going to try this tonight from the Northfield City Council meeting, using my Twitter account. (Since there’s no wifi at City Hall, I’ll have to use my G1 phone.)  Experimentation time!

I’ll try to pay attention to any comments attached to this blog post but it would be best to use your Twitter account to send me a direct message so that I can re-tweet it if appropriate.

Griff Wigley

Griff Wigley

City

Northfield City Council meeting Twitter

6 Comments

  1. Anthony Pierre said:

    twitter is down now dood. I hope google buys it and makes it good.

    April 6, 2009
  2. Anthony Pierre said:

    Just to clarify… I think this is just the thing twitter is good for. Too bad it is down at the stupidest times.

    April 6, 2009
  3. Griff Wigley said:

    Thanks, Tony… since I was using Scribble Live, it didn’t matter that Twitter was down for those who were following my Tweets here in this blog post.

    I think this worked AOK but a live chat tool using CoverItLive would be best for Council meetings and other events where discussion would be possible. But I can’t easily do that until City Hall provides wi-fi or an Ethernet hook-up.

    Scribble Live would seem to be best for those events where there are several people roaming around reporting live on what’s happening via their mobile devices, eg, Taste of Northfield, DJJD, Winter Walk, Crazy Daze, etc.

    April 6, 2009
  4. Robbie Wigley said:

    Oh no wonder… I couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t anything more after 8:06

    April 6, 2009
  5. Council twit « Betsey Buckheit said:

    […] 9, 2009 by Betsey Buckheit Over at Locally Grown, you can read Griff Wigley’s Twitterage of Monday’s Council meeting.   I cannot imagine a less engaging, less interesting method of getting info about Council […]

    April 9, 2009
  6. Griff Wigley said:

    I posted this comment to Betsey’s blog post reaction titled Council Twit:

    Betsey, as I wrote in a follow-up comment, “I think this worked AOK but a live chat tool using CoverItLive would be best for Council meetings and other events where discussion would be possible. But I can’t easily do that until City Hall provides wi-fi or an Ethernet hook-up. Scribble Live would seem to be best for those events where there are several people roaming around reporting live on what’s happening via their mobile devices, eg, Taste of Northfield, DJJD, Winter Walk, Crazy Daze, etc.”

    So I won’t likely be replicating what I did on Monday for another Council meeting.

    But I think there’s another aspect to ‘live blogging’ and its variants that might be valuable for a council meeting and similar: it’s another way to draw people into the content of the meeting. See the live-blogging that the Uptake is doing on the Franken-Coleman saga.

    I’m wondering if it might serve some of the same purpose as having a TV reporter on the 10 pm news standing outside a council meeting giving a two minute summary plus some ten second clips of a few big arguments.  There’s very little content but it gives people a quick whack about an important issue and one then hopes that it’ll inspire more to follow up and go deeper.  And with live-blogging done via CoverItLive, people can actually engage in discussion while it’s happening.

    April 9, 2009

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