Not like this.

We had the crazy idea to spend 8 hours a day (barring travel time) each weekday traveling around the town an tweeting what’s happening right now in Grand Island. From pothole repairs in the cold to a trailer fire, our Presentation editor, Jack Sheard,  (also known as the only guy in the office with a smartphone – a Verizon Droid to be exact) will go out and about either with a reporter or photographer, or on his own and cover our town.

And we will feed those tweets into a beachfront spot on the front page of our website

Today is Day One.

What have we learned so far?

• That Yahoo Pipes don’t like it if you send them too many search queries, so we had to remove the twitpic feed.
• That the Twitter account we wanted to use for this, @GIRightNow, won’t feed into Juitter properly and we have no idea why. So Jack is using his own account for this, which works perfectly fine. Go figure. It’s probably some API annoyance with @GIRightNow being a new account or something silly like that.
• That we have “dead air” so to speak while Jack is driving. Although, it seems like dead air to us because we’re watching this closely, but it probably doesn’t to the average, casual reader stopping by the page. Even so, we’re going to use the dead time to point folks to parts of our website that they might not have known existed.
• That filling 8 hours a day in our small-ish city might be quite a task

There will be more lessons learned I am sure and I’ll either update this post or start a new one with those as we go. Here are some questions we’ve had about this experiment:

What’s the point of it? A new way to create stickiness on the website and drive pageviews (we hope).

What happens when the two weeks are up? We hope to show the value of Twitter for our readers and to our newsroom (and possible advertisers) by being able to get the news (the important stuff and the casual ‘why are they fixing potholes in the Winter’ stuff) to our readers and further brand us as the go-to source for local news and information. After we see how this experiment goes, we may decide to find a permanent spot on the website for the latest tweets and incorporate more news that may not make it online or into print there from all of our reporters.

How can you spare the time to do this? We just had to make the time, cover shifts and work as the awesome team we all are to be able to do this. We feel it’s important to experiment. It’s better to try and fail than not try at all. Most of all, we want to improve our readers’ experience when they visit our website.

Keep an eye on us. We’re doing good things.