Several of us in the Nashville local-ish blogging community have been using Twitter lately and there has been a lot of recent conversation among the group about it. I am going to take the easy way out here and copy/paste my previous input in one of those many conversations with the Nashville blogging community about what’s the use of it all:

I kind of tend to use Twitter as a “mini-blog” more than a conversation tool - like when I was on my out of town trips, Twittering away about what was going on - but I think there are benefits to using it both ways.

Certainly, for me, I was still kinda “ehhhh” about Twitter until my mother said how glad she was to be able to see my Twittering when I was on the Chicago trip and know I’d gotten there and everything was okay and etc., etc. So that was a big turning point for me towards the pro-Twitter side.

By the way, that last part was also very beneficial on my L.A. trip a few days later (oops - sorry Neil! - it was a last minute decision and I was only in L.A. for about 12.5 hours total though, EXTREMELY short trip and I need to write a blog post about it soon). That whole experience of it being really easy for family to see you’re OK really won me over; plus I think I would have given an arm and a leg, when I worked down in the Medical Center, if the surgeons I worked for would have used something like this so I could quickly see what they were doing, where they were, if they were busy, etc. (Granted, getting bosses and such to USE something like that and update it as they should would be the biggest hurdle.)

I think one of the most stunning things in my experience with it is that one of the bloggers who was very much against it and thought it was stupid in the beginning is now one of the more active Twitterers (Twitters?) in our community, and I’ve seen some more start to use it that I didn’t expect to see.

We all differ a little though on how we use it. Many of my peers use it more as a communication tool between/among themselves, whereas I and some others use it more as a “mini-blog”. I have found that especially cool during days or periods of days when I just really didn’t have time or inclination to sit down and write a whole blog post, or was otherwise occupied. My Twitter posting was how most our blogging community here initially found out about my car wreck a few weeks ago, and that made a Twitter believer out of one of them.

I also like being able to text message my Twitter posts (Twits? heh). That’s fun for things like when you’re sitting in a restaurant with a crappy waiter taking forever and feel like sharing some sarcastic snarky thought with the world, and things like that.

Much of our community also adopted MyBlogLog early on, but I think most of us soon lost much interest in it. I think it’s something that has good potential, but it has some definite problems (like right now, I can’t even get into my account because the system won’t recognize my password changes), and I also think it’s sort of falling victim to the global spam machine. If I can ever get back into my account, I plan on checking on how things are going because it’s been a while, but I think for the most part we’ve all been less than impressed with MyBlogLog. Other than having the option to have photos/avatar and a list of who your last several visitors were is kind of neat.

OK, my $0.04 there.

and how many times can i use that in a sentence?

Also, I hate you and love you for this post. Now I have all these toys to check out!