Stephanie Romanski

After close to nine months of doing am:gi, a daily morning “conversation” with our readers, we ended the show a little over a week ago. Why? Because it’s time to take what we’ve learned from it and evolve the concept a little.

There was some pressure from above to do something with the show. Either change it up or kill it. We decided to do both. We could not seem to grow our viewer numbers. We needed big numbers to show advertisers to sell it and with the format of am:gi, (90 minutes every weekday, occasional guests, too much free-form conversation) we simply couldn’t get enough participants or replays to entice advertisers. The time involved for the two of us who ran the show every morning was another factor.

So we killed it. We killed it a lot.

But there were some awesome things that came out of having a daily conversation and we are now going to take those awesome things and spin them into four separate things that will be so awesome it might just make you explode with, well,  awesomeness.

First thing’s first: We love Cover it Live. We love it so much, we’re using it in all four new ventures. So big giant HURRAY for Cover it Live.

• Breaking comments. One of the ventures we are implementing right now. As some of you know, we’ve back and forth-ed on commenting for a long time. We simply can’t moderate every single comment as decried by our corporate owners because we simply don’t have the manpower. Also, the commenting system that comes with our software is… antiquated. But we really do want to have some form of commenting available. Our solution? We will embed a Cover it Live ‘chat’ on hot topic stories. The ‘talkers’, if you will. We’ll have one for Breaking stories, of course, but we’ll open up the conversation for severe weather, for example, as well. It will be moderated so we’ll remain in compliance with corporate policies, but we’ll at least be offering some way for our readers to engage and talk about a story.

• Live Coverage. Another “spinoff” of am:gi will be live coverage. Our highest replays ever came from the day George and I went to Husker Harvest Days. George manned am:gi,  I went roving around, sending pics from HHD to Twitter which fed into the show. We learned that the people, they like this! Hopefully with the help of the Verizon MiFi (ohpleaseohpleaseohplease) and Cover it Live, we will continue to be a presence at events such as Black Friday, Expos, and the biggie: the State Fair’s first year in GI next year. The MiFi will let us not have to worry about whether the event has wi-fi and allow us to be pretty flexible. Plus it’s just cool.

• Newsmaker Interviews. “Newsmakers” will be a spinoff of our guest segments from am:gi. We will do simple interviews and Q&A’s with people in our community who are in the news. We’re shooting for two per week. We will solicit questions from the community ahead of time (using email, a submission page, a Google Voice number to leave question) and during the show. The real value for this is in the replays and in the reverse-publishing.

• Ask the Independent. Ask us anything. We’ll find the answer for you. Need to know how to contact a City Council member? We’ll get you numbers. Want to know where the money to move the State Fair came from? We’ll get that info for you. We may not be able to help you find your socks, but we can tell you which color looks best with khaki trousers This show will be once a week and we’ll take questions via email, our Google Voice line, and a submission page on our website – oh and live during the show, time-permitting.

So those are our four spinoffs. The timesuck and manpower is lessened, but we feel the potential for advertisers is a lot bigger than it ever could have been with am:gi.

Don’t get me wrong, we loved am:gi and we met great people and discovered a little about what our community was talking about. But now it’s time to take those lessons and try the next thing. I’m very excited about these ideas.

Adobe AIR is conflicting with my newspaper’s security controls. Currently, I use (and prefer) Twhirl for my desktop client because I really like being able to put the multiple accounts I manage onto my second monitor so I can watch the Twitter streams at a glance when I see new tweets appear. I just work better with Twitter like this:

I like that each Twhirl window is a different account and I don’t have to manually click a button to change between accounts like I do with, ohhhh every other freaking Twitter client out there. It’s why I don’t like Tweetdeck for managing multiple accounts.I want my multiple accounts viewable at-a-glance.

The problem with any AIR app is this:

Every single time each Twhirl window open makes a call to the Twitter API, I get several of these. I have to click them away before I can tweet or read new tweets. I have tried installing the certificate it asks for but it does no good. My IT person here can’t seem to find the solution either.

So, I need another app because using web-based apps like Hootsuite, Brizzly or Seesmic Web aren’t cutting it for me. Here are my limitations:

• Can’t use an AIR app.
• I’m on Windows XP still. (The closest app that looks like it’s what I want is one @ernmander suggested called Blu, but it’s Vista only )
• Obviously security is tight here at the paper, so I cannot (and will not) download an executable installation.
• No IM allowed, so something like Digsby is a no-go. Plus I don’t know what Digsby’s multiple account support is like.

I’m just irritated that developers seem to think we all prefer everything kept in one app like Tweetdeck. I mean, I know a lot of people do and I’m probably in the minority here, but I feel a bit lost now that I’m unable to quickly dip into and out of my work and professional accounts quickly. Clicking over to them and waiting for each account to load in one app seems slow to me and harder to monitor.

So am I just not finding the right app? Or is there just not one out there that suits me which means I’ll have to *shudder* adapt to change Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

So I’m frustrated by certain things when it comes to trying to convince some of my coworkers and small business folks to embrace the Power of Twitter. I wrote about that yesterday but in the comments, someone said that he is not finding very much of value when he uses his personal Twitter account. I’ll quote him:

Recently it seems more that I’m following a handful of famous people who interest me and it basically acts like another facebook status news feed, except for people who are too famous to be my friends on FB. I’m quite happy to accept that I’m doing it wrong, but I don’t really know how to do it right.

So, I thought I’d write about how I use Twitter – personally. I’ve talked about it benefits my newspaper, and I’ve gone on and on about how it can be a marvelous tool for any business. But I guess I haven’t really talked about how it can be used for fun as well.

Bear in mind, not everyone’s going to use it the way I do. Not everyone’s going to ever see any benefit to Twitter. Twitter is what you make of it. That’s my mantra. Twitter is what you make of it. But here are some ideas of how to make something fun and/or beneficial for anyone.

First, I have a lot of Twitter accounts. I mean, I have more than what is probably normal:

• @UKMelia – My Twitter account that is all for me to do with and mold how I please. I follow only those who interest me (several celebs, fan accounts from books/movies/shows I like etc.), family, and friends there, as well as people I work with on the Buffy/Angel Between the Lines audio dramas I participate in. The majority of my tweets here are also mostly to my boyfriend and my daughter. I don’t follow a ton of people here and I don’t have a big follower list either but this account is tailored exactly to what I like. I also keep this account locked because I am not interested in huge follower/following counts, and I can tweet what I like.
• @stephromanski – This is my professional account. I follow hundreds of smart, savvy journalists and news sources, some social media folk (I’m a bit choosy when it comes to that. I tend to prefer Social Media folk who work in my field, not the Marketing “Guru” folk because I’m not interested much in that.) I learn a lot from the people I follow here and it has been incredibly beneficial to me for sharing ideas, has expanded my interests and allowed me to network and meet others who enjoy the stuff I enjoy at work. The reason I keep separate personal/professional accounts is that this account is the one where no one gives a crap what I had for breakfast but on my UK account, my best friend might want the recipe for my awesome French Toast.
• @CherryPop and @LiamTheZombie – These are character accounts for a book I’m trying to write. I’m using Twitter to expand the ‘verse my characters inhabit. The project waxes and wanes, but I’m gearing up for NaNoWriMo with these guys so there will be more activity soon.
• @Doodurls – My pride and joy. My boyfriend and I created a website that solicits people Doodles, via Twitter mostly, and we run this account and the site together. These days, I think it’s almost essential that every venture like this  should have a Twitter account and facebook fan page associated with it to help grow the audience.
• And then I have about 7 or 8 accounts for the paper that I manage.

When Twitter was still in the early stages, the idea for it was to allow a quick way for the cell phone generation to send quick messages to friends and family to stay connected, to allow them to answer the ‘What are you doing?’ question knowing only family and friends would be interested in that. Some people have turned their personal feeds into something humourous. They’ll post one-liners, or @shitmydadsays, or quirky observations. Some tweet inspirational messages. Some will actually tweet every minute detail of their lives not caring who wants to read that sort of thing. And believe it or not, there are people on Twitter who aren’t after huge follower numbers.

I’ll give an example of how I came to grok Twitter. Year and years ago I used to be an admin on a telnet MUD called The Chatting Zone. The admin had their own special channel to talk on and basically it became a place to spit out random thoughts in our heads. Anything from, “Good lord who told Posh Spice she should be wearing THAT outfit??” (Hey, I said this was years ago) to, “Well I’m about to cook spaghetti for dinner.” Lots of times even the most mundane, random stuff would become conversation starters. When Twitter came along, I immediately thought how similar it was to my old TCZ admin days and I discovered I kind of missed the random ramblings of my fellow admin.

It might be hard to not view Twitter as a stripped down version of the Facebook status updates. And for my commenter, Twitter might not ever be useful for him personally. I think, for personal accounts, it’s too subjective to say Twitter is superior to Facebook or vice versa. Twitter is what you make of it. Tailor your account to follow who interests you, throw in some friends and family, use trends and searches to jump into conversations that matter to you and you’ll meet more people.

And who knows, maybe you’ll care about what some of them had for breakfast.