What The Heck Is MicroBlogging?

KNBC did indeed carry the LMU Pary House story on Friday night.  You can see a video clip of the story here.

Front and center in the news report is that students communicate with each other about the location of parties through the technology of microblogging.  LMU student Chris Lesinski was featured in the KNBC report because he wrote an article in late August for the Loyolan about using microblogging to find parties.

They use what???

Hang on, geezer (I’m talking to most people over 30 here).  Start with this idea — you are currently reading a “blog” post, or an article posted to a blog (the new name for websites that focus on offering constantly new content).  News websites today all offer blogs.

Microblogging is the same thing, but the posts are super brief — typically between 140-200 characters.  That’s about a paragraph.

By definition, “microblogging is the practice of sending brief posts to a personal blog on a microblogging website.”  Microposts can be made public on the website and/or distributed to a private group of subscribers by either instant message (for desktop computer delivery) or text message (for cell phone delivery).

This means that anyone with a cell phone can send and receive microblog updates anytime, anywhere.  This is what LAPD Senior Lead Officer Tony Ramos was talking about in the KNBC report when he mentioned that he “rolled up” to a party and everybody poured out of the house with their cell phones lighting up.  The phones were lighting up with word that police had arrived on scene.

Microblogging started out as a way for tech savvy people to “chat” with each other, but just as happened with blogging in its infancy, politics is bringing microblogging into the mainstream.  Barack Obama and John Edwards (back in the day) both started microblogging from the campaign trail.  Traditional media organizations, including The New York Times and the BBC, send headlines in microblog posts.

By far, the most popular of the microblogging platforms is twitter, although there are others.

From twitter’s website:

1.1. FAQ

What is it?

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

How do I use it?
Tell us what you’re doing in 140 characters or less!  Send your thoughts, observations, and goings-on in your day. Whether you’re “eating an apple” or “looking foward to the weekend” or “Heading out of town” it’s twitter-worthy.  Join us here.

Do I need anything special to use Twitter?
In order to use Twitter you will need one of these things: an internet connection or a mobile phone.

And just as happened with the uber-popular google, an entire new language has popped up around twitter.  Here are a few samples:

mistweet: a micro-blog post someone regrets. You can delete posts from your Twitter profile page but you can’t edit them or take them back.

tweet: a micro-blog post via Twitter.

Twitterer: one who Twitters.

Twittermob: a group of people who organize a spontaneous real-world gathering via Twitter.

Twitterrhea: sending too many Twitter messages.

Twitterverse or Twitosphere: the universe of Twitter users.

So, in college student speak, a party is “news.”  Is it any big surprise that students are using the latest news technologies to communicate about the only news they care about?

I personally never could bring myself to jump on the twitter bandwagon, but I have to admit that Lesinski makes a good point in his Loyolan article — it can sometimes be more efficient to figure out if you have anything to talk about before you actually start a substantive conversation.  Loosely translated, who has time for social niceties anymore?

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