If all goes well, this will be the last blog post I write – on my current office computer.

I’ve used this eMachines PC for more years than I care to remember; it’s been at least five, maybe closer to six. A new hard drive and a few other essential upgrades have kept her alive and kicking through hundreds of deadlines, dozens of Twitter chats and four blogathons.

Early in 2011 I started feeling like I was driving a horse and buggy after everyone else had moved on to a Model T. The old PC was slowing down (and yes, I know, that’s a sure sign of imminent hard drive failure). Some mornings I waited minutes – minutes! – for Outlook and Chrome to open. I resolved that before the year was over, I’d upgrade. Besides, I reasoned, how could I sample the software and apps I write about if my computer couldn’t handle them?

Then I got busy with deadlines or vacation or something I had to do for my kids and put it off.

Finally – finally – on Dec. 31, I made good on my promise. After some research, consulting with my in-house tech team (husband and son) and visiting several area computer stores, I bought a new computer and monitor. It’s shiny, super-fast set up I’ll say more about in another post.

Switching computers isn’t as easy as unplugging one machine and plugging in another, at least not for someone like me who hasn’t leaped entirely to using web-based software. Before I can use the new machine, I’ve got to upload Word and other programs I use regularly and transfer hundreds of megabytes worth of data files. But by this time tomorrow or Thursday, I should be all set.

Say what you want about New Year’s resolutions – it’s great to know that even though it took 365 days, I made my goal, and as a result, I’m starting off 2012 at a blistering pace.

Oh, and my resolution for 2012? Not to put things off to the last minute.

What are your resolutions for 2012?

There’s no one answer. Some journalists have cashed in indirectly by using Twitter to find sources for stories, or to find and follow publications or editors who they’ve subsequently pitched story ideas.

There are more direct ways to make money from Twitter too, including getting paid to live tweeting news events, meetings, conferences and other happenings.

I recently got my first assignment to live tweet a meeting, and shared my experience with April Choi, a freelancer for Ebyline, and a fellow Portland, Oregon, writer. In a Q&A that was originally posted earlier this week, Choi and I talk about how it went and how freelancers can get similar gigs. We also discussed Twitter chats and other ways writers can make money from social media.

Here’s the beginning of the Q&A:

You recently got paid to live tweet AARP’s annual conference for SecondAct. How did you get the gig? And how did it go?

I’ve been a regular contributor at SecondAct, Entrepreneur Media’s website for people over 40, since April 2010. I blog twice a week and write features and slideshows. I originally pitched attending the AARP convention, called Life@50+, for material for future blog posts, and my editor liked the idea. A few days before the conference, she offered to pay me to live tweet the conference. The original plan was to write a dozen or so tweets a day. I ended up doing a lot more – and she increased the compensation.

Do you have any advice for other freelancers who are looking to get similar gigs?

Know your way around Twitter. Live tweeting is reporting in real time, you have to have the mechanics of hashtags, RTs, etc., down cold because you’ll be working fast. If you’re tweeting news, follow generally accepted journalism practices. Approach publications you already work with first because they’ll be more familiar with what you’re capable of doing than someone who doesn’t know your work.

Read the entire post here: Freelance journalist Michelle Rafter on Finding “Tweet” Success

Last year was my first ASJA conference, as a member and as a speaker. I moderated a hands-on blogging workshop that was lightly attended – they scheduled us for a Sunday morning on the last day of a three-day event. But the people who showed up loved it so much they stayed three hours, and a dozen absolute beginners left with brand new blogs registered and live online.

At ASJA 2012, I’ll be talking about tech once again. This time, the subject is web-based apps for writing or running a freelance business. The session will take the form of a panel discussion, with experts talking about the latest and greatest for research, writing and getting organized.

Here’s where you come in. To make the panel  as useful as possible, I’d like to find out what web-based software freelancers use now, and what they’d like to use – if they knew enough about it.

Please help me by taking this short poll. If you’ve got suggestions for other apps we should cover in the ASJA panel discussion, please leave them in a comment. Likewise, if you know a tech-savvy journalist or app developer who’d be a welcome addition to the panel, please let me know by leaving a comment.

I’ll share a summary of what people picked in a future post. And I’ll share names of the panelists as we get closer to the conference.

Steve Jobs tribute/Graphic courtesy @gapingvoid

Go be crazy.

The Big Three online networks – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – realize this, and over the past few months have created or beefed up beefed up journalist resource pages on their respective sites.

Here’s a quick look at the journalist resources each offers:

1. Twitter is the last of the big networks to create a journalist resource guide, Twitter for Newsrooms. You can also follow the official Twitter for Newsroom hashtag, #TfN. Twitter for Newsrooms has 4 sections:

• #Report – Includes tips on search, finding sources and using Twitter’s mobile app.
• #Engage – Includes a glossary of common Twitter terms, suggestions for effective tweeting with examples of how some high profile journalists (Katie Couric, Melissa Bell) use the service, and how to customize your profile so you’re easy to find.
• #Publish - Information on Twitter add-ons you can use for a variety of purposes, such as embedding your tweet stream into a WordPress blog; downloadable logos (great for blog posts), and rules for how to display the Twitter logo in print, online or on air.
• #Extra – On deadline, can’t get Twitter to work or need other help? This is the place to come for media, technical and other assistance. It’s also the place media organizations can find third-party Twitter apps to help them do content curation and moderation.

2. Facebook earlier this year hired Mashable’s former community manager Vadim Lavrusik to act as the company’s journalist program manager. Lavrusik has written posts on media industry blogs, including this one on Harvard’s NeimanLab blog about how journalists can better use Facebook. Other resources on the site include:

• Press Room – Includes links to company press releases and the official Facebook blog.
• Contacts – Includes downloadable logos and images; and forms for interview requests and a PR contact email address (press@fb.com), though no names or phone numbers.
• Subscribe to Lavrusik’s Facebook feed – Because he regularly shares tips for using the service, I’d also suggest subscribing to his Facebook feed.

3. LinkedIn has had a journalist resource page for some time – and for a long time shared a post I wrote about how journalists can use LinkedIn. The company reorganized its journalists resource page in recent months, no doubt in anticipation of the additional reporters who started covering the company after it went public. The new LinkedIn Press Center features:

• LinkedIn for Journalists Group – Join this LinkedIn group for journalists to read company news and share tips on using the service with other reporters.
• Resources – LinkedIn’s public relations staff has compiled a list of suggestions for how journalists can use the service to follow trends, find sources including crowdsource, tie their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, follow industry news and more.
• Getting past “No comment.” – Here’s an interesting tip I’d never thought about before, shared by the company’s publicists: “If you’re looking for background info or comment, LinkedIn Company Pages will show you current and former employees and how you’re connected to them. LinkedIn Advanced People Search can also help. Type a name into the “Company” field and select “Past” on the drop down menu underneath.”

You can find out more about how journalists, freelancers and other writers can use LinkedIn in writer Susan Johnston’s new book, LinkedIn and Lovin It, which will be out next week. (I’ll update this post with the link once the book is published.)

Here are other posts I’ve written on how writers can use social networks:

•  New ways to uses LinkedIn to find story sources
• Link your WordPress, Six Apart blogs to your LinkedIn profile
•  How to use Facebook to promote your writing business
•  How not to out yourself on Facebook
• Is it OK to friend your editor on Facebook?
• A writer’s guide to getting the most out of Twitter
• The use and abuse of Twitter to flog your blog
• When one Twitter account isn’t enough (TwiTip guest post)
• 10 keys to hosting a successful Twitter chat

It’s been almost 10 months since I started hosting a monthly Twitter chat.

At first the prospect of leading a group discussion in real time on the popular social network made me more nervous than talking in front of a room full of people: Would anybody show up? Would I run out of questions? Would I be able to keep track of everybody and everything?

All went well, and apart for a few technical glitches here and there, continues to go well many months later. So well, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned.

If you’re thinking of hosting a real-time chat, keep the following in mind:

1. Pick the right hashtag. Research hashtags so you don’t use one that’s already taken. If the chat is related to an annual event, include the year. Keep it short so it takes up as few of those precious 140 characters as possible. WordCount Last Wednesday is a mouthful, so I use #wclw instead.

2. Promote the chat in advance. Let people know about the chat by talking it up in posts on your blog - like this one - Facebook page or Google group, and on Twitter of course. An upcoming chat doesn’t need to be the subject of your every tweet, but it helps build interest to tweet about a chat up to a week before it happens, with more tweets in the days, hours and minutes immediately leading up to it. That said, you never know who’ll show up. My experience has been that a small core group of my blog followers participates every time, some people come because of  pre-chat promos and some people pop in on an impromptu basis after reading tweets during the chat.

3. Time of day is important. Starting out, I set the time of the #wclw chat at 8:30 a.m. Pacific. I thought it’d work well for East Coast writers because it was right before lunch and for West Coast writers because it was at the beginning of the day. Things didn’t work out that way. The time was too early for many West Coasters. A few months ago I switched to 10 a.m. PST and have seen more people participate as a result. Late afternoon and early evening times are popular chat times too, i.e., 5 p.m. or 7 p.m. Eastern (though they don’t work for working parents like me).

4. Pick a theme. Think about subjects people who read your blog, check out your Facebook fan page or buy services from your business are interested in and come up with chat topics that relate. My first chats were virtual “wrap parties” for writers and bloggers who’d made it through the annual WordCount blogathon to talk about what they learned. Since then, I’ve hosted chats onWordPress, Facebook, e-newsletters, ebooks, productivity and other subjects that self-employed writers care about.

5. Guest speakers are big draws, but not necessary. For #wclw chats, I’ve vascillated between having guests and hosting by myself. Certain times of the year are better for going it alone; for example, this April, I’ll host a WordCount Last Wednesday chat to answer questions for writers and bloggers who want to participate in this year’s blogathon, and in May I’ll host the blogathon wrap party. December is a great time to hold a chat with some year-end theme, January for goal setting and March for tax issues. If you mix it up between using guest speakers and doing self-hosted chats you also put less pressure on yourself to find and prep a guest speaker every time.

6. Prepare questions in advance. Whether or not you plan to have a guest speaker, take some time beforehand to decide which aspects of your theme you want to cover in the chat. If you have a guest, schedule a short phone call to discuss what they’ll talk about, and come up with questions that you can ask them. You or your guest can pre-write a few answers to questions in advance – remember that 140 character limit – to buy yourself a little extra time should the chat really get going.

7. Be flexible. Another benefit of advance planning is it allows you to feel more comfortable going with the flow if a chat takes off. You may have a handful of prepared questions on subject X but if everyone’s talking about subject Y go with it – you can get back to it later, or just save it for another chat.

8. Leave plenty of time for questions. Chatters always come up with great questions I never would have thought of, so in an hour-long chat, I try to leave 15 to 20 minutes for questions from the audience.

9. Post a recap. If you have a blog, post a chat recap within a couple days for people who couldn’t make the event. I’ve found that even people who participated like recaps that include highlights of what was covered, especially links to websites, apps, books or other resources that were mentioned during the chat, like this chat recap post I did on SEO basics for writers. I use a Twitter archiving service called TwapperKeeper.com to archive chats because it lets me sort tweets in chronological order, which makes them easier to use as notes when I’m writing recaps.

10. Ask for help. A chat is a community activity, so it’s good to give people what they want. Ask your blog readers, Twitter followers or real-world network what they’d like to find out about in a chat and what guests they’d like to hear from. I make it a rule to run a solicitation at the end of blog posts announcing my monthly chats and also the recaps I run after the fact asking for writing-industry types who might be interested in being guests, and for ideas for future chats.

Haven’t ever participated in a Twitter chat? Check out what it’s like by joining the next #wclw chat on Wednesday, March 30, at 10 a.m. PST, when my guest will be life coach Marla Beck, who will discuss work/life balance for writers.

What are your secrets to holding successful Twitter chats?

I’m more like a late early adopter. LinkedIn already had 5 million users by the time I signed up in September 2007. Twitter had been around close to two years by the time I joined in December 2009. I can’t remember when I signed up for Facebook, but it was definitely after my two oldest kids were experts.

But that was then. Social networks have become vital research and reporting tools for journalists and freelancers, so that when a new one comes along it’s smart to check it out sooner v. later.

That’s why this week found me digging into Google+, Google’s latest effort to beat Facebook at its own game. The online network is still in wide beta testing – meaning you have to get an invitation to try it. But some industry pundits are calculating that close to 10 million people are already on it.

Using Facebook has been a problem for people who wanted to separate their private lives from their work. The only options were either creating a separate fan page for your freelance work or small business or give up and accept friend requests from work colleagues and mix business with pleasure.

Google+ solves that problem by letting users create groups called Circles so they can share work-related updates with work friends, family updates with family, shop talk with fellow hobbyists and the like.

Will Google+ take off? It’s way too soon to tell. Right now the biggest topic of conversation in my Circles is Google+. However, I could definitely see using it for my freelance business to:

• Exchange instant messages instead of email with an editor to tell her I’m finished loading a story into the publication’s content management system
• Hold a video chat with the group of writers I edit
• Track sources
• Read articles in newspapers and magazines
• Do a video chat for the WordCount Blogathon (I just thought of that, now that’s a good idea!)

But a lot of those things would replace social networks and other tech tools I already use. So the big question is, is Google+ good enough to make me change my ways?

See for yourself. Here’s a post I did for SecondAct.com on Google+ – maybe it will help you decide whether to open the invitation that’s sitting in your inbox.

Google+: Testing the Waters

Are you using Google+? If so, I’d love to hear your initial reactions. Please leave a comment, especially if you have tips for how journalists and freelancers could benefit from using it.

On today’s chat, freelance writer and website designer Ron Doyle will talk about:

• The advantages of using WordPress as a blog platform
• What to look for in a WordPress theme
• What to look for in a hosting service
• Must-have WordPress plugins
• Options for moderating comments

The second half of the chat will be devoted to answering questions from the audience.

If you haven’t participated in a Twitter chat before, try using TweetChat.com; it’s a Twitter add-on that filters out everything but the chat you’re attending, and automatically adds the hashtag onto your tweets.

Gee, I wonder what she’s referring to? Of course, it’s LinkedIn, the social network that’s more business than pleasure. Though roughly a seventh of the size of Facebook – 100 million members v. 700 million by some accounts – LinkedIn has long had a lock on the business side of social networking. Now it looks as if Facebook’s after LinkedIn’s piece of the business networking pie. Here’s a post that Monster.com published on its blog yesterday explaining how to use BeKnown.

But LinkedIn hasn’t been standing still. Fueled with cash from a recent initial public stock offering, the company has been furiously adding Facebook and Twitter-style features, all the better to keep users happy and logged on longer.

If it’s been a few months since you last visited LinkedIn, you’re missing out on a boatload of tools and other goodies the online business network has added. Among them are a number that directly or indirectly help independent journalists and other freelance writers find sources, do research and look for work.

I recently recapped LinkedIn’s new features in a story for SecondAct, Entrepreneur Media’s website for people over 40 where I write twice a week. Read the entire post here:

10 new need-to-know features on LinkedIn.

Tune in again tomorrow when I look at new services for journalists that all three major online networks – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – have started or re-engineered in recent weeks.

If it seems like a lot of people are jumping into content curation it’s because they are.

Content curation is a new buzzword for something editors and reporters have done forever – shift through piles of information about what’s happening in a given location or on a given topic at any given time to pick out the most important, interesting, tantalizing, quirky or downright weird to publish it in a form others can see.

In days gone by, editors sent reporters into the field to investigate and write up topics first hand to share in their newspapers or magazines.

That still happens. But today they’re just as likely to publish those first-hand observations along with related material they’ve found elsewhere. That’s the curation model that Huffington Post uses. (It’s also the technique I’m using to write this post.)

But you don’t have to be a newspaper or even HuffPo to curate content. All you really need is Twitter, which according to Steve Buttry, director of community engagement and social media for the Journal Register Co., along with the cell phone is one of the most important tools to happen to journalism in the past 40 years. Buttry talked about content curation in a livestream presentation earlier today that I happened to catch online; I’m not sure that presentation is available as a playback, but if it is, you can watch it here.

In addition to being a great tool for producing instant reporting from almost anywhere, Twitter lets writers become curators, mixing their original reporting – or links to it – with information they find and share from other people they follow.

Curation tools don’t start and end with Twitter. In fact, new curation apps that let people – not just writers and reporters but anybody – collect and publish information are appearing on a regular basis.

If you’re really into this, you’ll be interested to know there’s a new curation chat starting on Twitter called, aptly enough, #curationchat. The first one is June 14. Read more about it in this post from PRNewswire’s Joe Cardillo: Why curation? Why now?

Here are a handful of posts on the trend and some curation tools:

• Tips on curating the community conversation (The Buttry Diary)
• Maria Popova: In a new world of informational abundance content curation is a new kind of authorship (Nieman Labs)
• All About Curation (and Other Social Blog Jots) (Media Bullseye)
• There’s a New Web Curation Tool on the Block – Meet Bundlr (The Next Web)
• 7 Things Human Editors Do That Algorithms Don’t (Yet) (Harvard Business Review)

And a quick list of curation tools:

• BlackbirdPie
• Bublaa
• Bundlr
• Chirpstory
• CuratedBy
• Paper.li
• Pearltrees
• QuoteURL
• ScoopIt
• Storify
• Storyful
• Tumblr

If you’ve used any of these and care to share which ones you like and why, leave a comment.