Happy Twitter anniversary to me. I joined Twitter exactly one year ago today. It took a little convincing, but once I figured out how to incorporate it into my freelance business I never looked back.

Earlier today, I tweeted the following lessons learned from my first year on the microblogging service, 17 in honor of joining on Dec. 17, 2008. Every one of them is 140 characters or less.

What I’ve learned:

1 – Be real. People can see through a fake, even online. Therefore, don’t use auto–DMs.

2 – One note may work for a samba, but not online. Don’t tweet on same topic 24/7, even if you’re here for work.

3 – Don’t drink and tweet. But if you do, the next day, delete the tweets. (I got that tip from a Twitterati.)

4 – You don’t have to DM every new follower, esp. once you hit 2,000+. But do DM those you want to know better.

5 – Lists are great organizational tools, but if you follow a lot of people, building them’s a bear.

6 – While good in theory, #FF is hard to keep up, especially if like me, all deadlines seem to fall on Fridays.

7 – Twitter is just a tool. It will not find you customers or make you rich. You do that. All it does is help.

8 – As a writer, Twitter forces me to be concise and use colorful words and phrases. It’s my robo-copydesk.

9 – Twitter is not texting. Some people may be OK with abbreviating everything; for me, that’s too hard to read.

10 – Hashtags and conferences go together. There’s no better way to promote one or report from one. However…

11 – …As recent events have shown, Twitter at meetings can lead to mean-spirited back-channel snark.

12 – Saved Search is handy for tracking subjects you’ll be writing about. I use it like Google News alerts.

13 – Trending Topics is worthless, unless you use it as an obituary tracker. Otherwise, it’s too easy to game.

14 – Spam, porn, phishing, malware, scams: as Twitter’s user base has grown, so has its smarmy underbelly.

15 – Twitter is a conversation, which means you can’t do all the talking. Stop, look, listen, and retweet.

16 – Twitter collapses the space between you and that famous publisher or CEO, but you still gotta make your case.

17 – Blogging and Twitter go together like cheese and crackers: you can have one without the other but it’s not as good.

That’s it. If you’ve used Twitter a year or longer, what wisdom can you share?

By the way, I wrote the first draft of this on Twitter in real time. It was easier than I thought.

When it comes to Twitter, does it feel like the parade’s passing you by?

Don’t let the fact that 50 million people discovered it before you stop you from giving it a whirl. If you have a blog, Twitter is not only a good way to promote your blog, it’s also an idea factory you scan for things to write about, and a virtual hangout you can visit to discuss the latest blogging issues and trends.

Here to make a convincing argument for integrating Twitter into your blogging life is Jane Boursaw, an entertainment industry writer and blogger at TV Squad, Film Gecko and more. If you like what you see, consider taking Jane’s upcoming blogging class, which she mention’s at the end of the post. Hit it Jane:

Blogging and Twitter: The Perfect Match

For better or worse, Twitter seems to be here to stay, and that’s a good thing for bloggers. I manage five Twitter accounts for my various blogs, and get tons of traffic coming from Twitter for each one. Here are five tips and tricks to help you blend Twitter into your blogging life:

1. Feed those blog posts. No, I don’t mean give them grains and veggies. I’m talking about feeding your blog posts automatically into Twitter. There are several programs to do this, including TwitterFeed.com, but my current favorite is RSS2Twitter. The site is clean and simple, it supports multiple Twitter accounts, and once you sign up and set up your Twitter accounts, it starts immediately feeding your posts into Twitter automatically. No muss, no fuss.

2. Access Twitter easily. There are a number of programs to help you keep track of your Twitter followers and traffic, including TweetDeck, TweetGrid, and Tweetie. My favorite is Seesmic.com. Basically, what these do is provide a place to easily update Twitter, manage conversations with @replies and direct messages, stay organized with groups, see what’s trending, and manage multiple Twitter accounts easily.

3. Check out Twitter’s Help section. It’s a little bewildering getting up to speed on all the Twitter-speak like hash-tags, RTs, @names, trending topics, and everything else. Twitter actually has a great Help section that helps to sort it all out. So if you’re ever stumped on anything, that’s a great resource.

4. Build your followers. If your Twitter goal is to help build your brand and niche -– and not just to tell people what you’re having for lunch – the more followers you have, the more you’ll spread the word about your blog. To get followers, follow others, but focus on people and groups within your niche. For example, to build my niche of entertainment and get people clicking through to my blogs, I follow lots of people and groups in the movie, TV and celebrity niche.

5. Include updates that aren’t blog posts. It’s considered bad form (by whomever created the social media rules) to have ONLY blog posts going into your Twitter account. So in addition to your blog posts (which should be automatically feeding into your Twitter account – see Item #1), be sure to include Twitter updates about other fun things in your niche.

For more on Twitter, social media, and all things blogging related, sign up for my online class, Blogging for Passion and Profit. The next six-week session starts Monday, Oct. 26, 2009, but feel free to sign up after Monday, as well, and I’ll get the lessons headed your way. Email me if you have any questions or need more info, jboursaw@charter.net.

Jane Boursaw blogs at TV Squad, Film Gecko, CliqueClack, Ruby Shoes, and ifollo.com. Home base is Reel Life With Jane.

Twitter wants its new Lists feature “to go nuts.”

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams said as much when he talked about the new feature – which the company rolled out in wide beta yesterday – at the recent Online News Association conference in San Francisco.

Twitter has been working behind the scenes on a Lists feature for some time, but this is the first glimpse of it most of its millions of users have had.

The Lists feature lets users organize followers into groups that other Twitter users can see and follow. It’s like the TweetDeck groups function  – only better, because it can be shared.

A Lists tab now appears in the right-hand features column on a Twitter user’s profile page, along with Trending Topics, Saved Searches and Followers.

To create a list, click on the New List link and give the new list you’re creating a name. You can then add followers to it by clicking on a person’s Twitter user name and then on the Lists button that appears at the top of their profile page to the left of the tools button. Clicking on the Lists button opens a drop-down menu that displays every list you’ve created, which allows you to add someone to one or more lists. The List feature also lets you create a new list anytime you pull up someone’s profile page.

Another key feature of the List function: you can can keep lists private or make them public, in which case anyone on the network can see what lists you’ve created and who’s on them. People can also sign up to follow your lists – more on how that could be a good thing for journalists and other writers in a minute.

According to Williams, the potential uses for Twitter lists are huge. “We created a list of people who work at Twitter,” he told a SRO crowd at the  October ONA conference in San Francisco. “You could do a list of funny people, favorite journalists, and as a way to crowdsource. You could have a list of everyone at this conference to see what they were saying. It’s about controlling the information flow.”

Not every Twitter user is going to go to the trouble of creating lists – for one thing, if you’re following hundreds or thousands of people on Twitter, creating lists and then categorizing all those people into one or more of them could take hours (unless somebody designs an app for that though I’m not sure how they’d do that).

But Williams expects that journalists will be among the number that do. “Jouranlists will curate these lists. That would be a value add, just like editing is,” he told the convention audience.

Twitter’s List function is the latest evidence that the service is best thought of as a network, not a destination, Williams says. It’s an underlying technology that other companies will use to build stuff on – like many Twitter app builders already do. “The list content will be available through the API and through widgets that journalists or media organizations can take and put on their site and integrate in interesting ways,” he says. ” That will make it much more powerful.”

Two weeks passed between the time I heard Williams talk at ONA and the Lists feature went into wide beta, giving me plenty of time to think about how I’d start using the service when it came out. At least initially, I’m using it to segment the people and organizations I follow on the network into the following categories, which you can see on MichelleRafter’s Lists:

• Subjects I write about on a regular basis, including tech, finance, small business, workplace issues and media
• Fellow freelance writers
• News people and organizations
• Portland people, places and events
• A feed for this blog

Other journalists, writers and bloggers are using it in different ways. Here are a few examples:

Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, a blog about search engines, set up lists for each of the major search engine providers he writes about, Google and Microsoft, as well as for other subjects he writes about, such as search marketing and social media. If you clicked on any of those links, you’d have discovered they take you right to that list – which means you can share them on blogs like this one, and on Twitter (as in, ‘Hey, check out this cool list Danny Sullivan published called @DannySullivan/Potpourri‘)

Robert Scoble, aka The Scobelizer, the noted Silicon Valley techie blogger and hard-core Twitter user, has already created 20 lists, which is the maximum number any one person can create right now, including one for People I have met – a substitute for keeping sources’ business cards perhaps? – and another for analysts that track subjects he follows. Scoble also follows 20 lists created by other people, including a couple from Danny Sullivan, but also a list of entrepreneurs created by Twitter product designer Vitor Lourenco.

Josh Weinberger, managing editor of CRM magazine, a computer industry trade publication, created a list for conferences and trade shows he’s attended, going to attend or just curious about; PR people he deals with, and The New Yorker, for when he wants to do a little light reading.

These examples are from hard-core tech geeks. But they’re not the only writer types who could benefit from using Twitter lists.

This morning I read Matea Gold’s Los Angeles Times story, Demi v. Perez? See Twitter, on the celebrity feuds taking place on the microblogging network. Gold, the paper’s TV reporter, could easily set up lists to track broadcast and cable TV networks, TV show fan websites, and in the case of today’s story, actress Demi Moore, blogger Perez Hilton and the other celebs mentioned.

Are you using Twitter Lists? If so, I’d love to hear how you’re using them for research, reporting or other writing-related activities.

Newspapers maybe on the way out, but news isn’t.

The shape news takes, not only the way it’s delivered but what actually constitutes news, is changing.

Those were two of the major takeaways from the first day of the the Online News Association 2009 conference going on in San Francisco.

A sold-out crowd of more than 650 reporters and editors from around the world – mostly the U.S. but also from Canada, Colombia, Norway and elsewhere – packed into meeting rooms at the San Francisco Hilton Hotel to heard Twitter CEO Ev Williams, tech radio host Leo LaPorte, essayist Paul Saffo and others share their views of what lies ahead for the news business and the technology that’s used to produce it.

Because whether you like it or not, the news business is turning into the technology business. That was blindly apparent in a lightening-fast 60 minute presentation on tech trends journalists should know about given by media consultant Amy Webb, head of Webbmedia in Washington D.C. Twitter, Facebook, blogs – it’s just the beginning of a landslide of widgets, apps and other tools reporters, editors and Website managers can and are using to better bring information to their constituencies, and vice versa.

Twitter’s Williams didn’t share much about the little company with the big social network the assembled crowd didn’t already know, with a few exceptions. One: think of Twitter as a network, not a destination, Williams said. In the future, services will be built on top of Twitter so people won’t necessarily realize that it’s what they’re using. Another item of interest for anybody who uses Twitter now: the service is beta testing a lists function that will make it easier to segment groups of people you follow. If anyone reading this knows how to get me into that beta, ping me – I will trade 15 minutes of free social media or editorial consulting in return.

LaPorte, the tech radio guy, has been around the tech industry since the early days of the personal computer. He started out as a radio news reader and wound his way through various radio- and tech-related ventures before starting a network of tech radio show podcasts including This Week in Tech. LaPorte’s story should hearten aspiring news entrepreneurs; after years of pitching shows to radio, TV and publishing companies, LaPorte used the advent of relatively cheap podcasting technology to do his own thing, and it’s paying off. He’s currently pulling in approximately $1.5 million a year in advertising for shows that cost $350,00 to produce (which he does with a staff of seven).

Saffo, a Stanford professor who’s spent his career studying and talking about technological innovation, told the crowd to embrace the uncertainty they face as the media business changes. “The waves of creative destruction are tunneling through every corner of your industry,” Saffo said. “The only strategy is to flee into the future as fast as you can, and avoid the mistakes of the incumbents.”

Stay tuned for more from the Online News Association conference.

Tribes, marketing guru Seth Godin’s 2008 book, is all about the groups people identify with. Godin posits that the Internet helps make it easier for individuals to be leaders and form tribes with others who share their interests, be it for work, faith or fun.

It’s got me contemplating my own tribes. There are the obvious ones – my extended family, the parents of children my kids go to school with, friends I went to high school or college with.

Then there are the writing tribes I belong to. When I worked at a daily newspaper, the other reporters were my tribe.

When I went freelance, not only did I lose my full-time paycheck, I lost my tribe. Instead of being part of a pack of 300, suddenly I was on my own – at least that’s what it felt like at the time.

It’s partly the reason journalists – anybody really – feel discombobulated after losing a job. Suddenly the tribe you’ve identified with for as long as you held that job has vanished.

But as Godin points out, the Internet is the perfect tribe-making tool because it makes communicating so easy. First it was through email listservs, then IM and chat rooms on online services like AOL, then the Web, blogs, and now the ultimate tribal circles, social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Ning, LinkedIn and so on and so on.

Today, I’m part of several writing tribes. Knit them together and they’re the buddy system I lost when I left the newsroom. They’ve become intrinsic to my professional identity.

My tribes:

Freelance Success – A subscription-based writer’s community with a weekly newsletter and pay-rate database. For me and many of the hundreds of professional writers who pay the site’s $99 annual fee, the best part is the message boards, which are active, civil and cover topics such as magazines, corporate writing, blogs, travel writing and books.

#EditorChat - A weekly online chat on FriendFeed.com hosted by Motley Fool finance writer Tim Beyers and business feature writer Lydia Dishman that takes on all manner of subjects writers and editors care about. #Editorchat happens Wednesday nights at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. The latest discussion covered the types of work or household tasks freelancers outsource to buy themselves more time to work – or would if they could afford it. Earlier discussions have covered the New York Times’ decision to have columnists teach online classes, writing for content aggregators and hyperlocal news.

Twitter – Writers use Twitter many ways – to connect with sources, promote a story, showcase a blog. Another is to synch up with fellow writers. I follow several hundred writers and editors and am followed by a like number. We use it like a mini-message board, to share tips, answer quick questions or exchange atta boys. If you’re a writer, follow me at
@MichelleRafter and I’ll follow you back.

Portland digital media scene – A collection of writers, bloggers, podcasters, software developers and other media types with one thing in common – living and working here in Portland. This is probably the most loosely defined tribe I’m in. Portland’s media tribe hangs out at the Green Dragon on Fridays for Beer and Blog, goes to WordPress user groups meetings and WordCamp Portland (the next one’s Sept. 19-20 at Webtrends), and congregates at Mediabistro.com cocktail parties (which, BTW, somebody needs to resurrect – Mediabistro, if you read this, I’m happy to volunteer). The area’s digerati coalesced in the biggest way ever when more than 150 locals got together at the Digital Journalism Camp in August to listen to panels on hyperlocal news, new revenue models, podcasting and more.

UPOD – A Yahoo group for experienced freelancers led by Los Angeles freelancer David Hochman that I tune into via email.

Online News Association – This trade group for professional journalists who specialize in digital media has benefited from the demise of traditional (print) media in the past year, witnessed by a major uptick in membership. The group holds an annual convention – this year’s is in San Francisco Oct. 2-4 and I’ll be there – regular online and in-person classes, an online journalism awards competition, member discussion forum and offers other benefits and resources.

These tribes have become the places I look for help, bounce ideas off people, blow off steam when I’m frustrated with a story or editor or visit when I just want to talk.

As more people work freelance – not just writers but all kinds of freelancers – expect to see more tribes. That’s what all the fuss is over social networks, which ones are the best tool for creating tribes. It’s why Facebook and Twitter are such big news, why investors still pour money into social network start ups and everyone from job boards to media outlets are tacking on a community component to their websites – think of it as tribal warfare.

Are you in a tribe?

Social media has made a PR rep’s job harder.

Should you ask before following a reporter on Twitter? Is it OK to respond to a HARO request even though the expert you represent only kinda sorta knows about the issue? Is it ever OK to just pick up the phone and call someone?

No, no and no.

I don’t claim to be the Emily Post of PR-reporter netiquette. But I’ve spent enough time on the news side of that particular fence and been online since the dawn of email to have formed strong opinions as a result, opinions that based on my conversations with other reporters and freelancers, are widely shared.

If you represent a company or organization dealing with news media and wonder how email and social media fit in, here are some pointers:

DO

* Email your press release – But don’t follow up to find out if I got it, read it, like it, want to use it. If I do, I’ll be in touch.

* Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn – So when I am looking for sources you’ll know right away.

* Respond to my tweet, LinkedIn question or HARO request – If the professor, company, non-profit or other source you represent fits my need as I’ve outlined it.

* Cover yourself – If the organization you represent makes a huge announcement and you’re not going to be around to handle reporters’ calls.

* Promptly follow up interviews – With any additional facts or materials your organization’s source promises to get to me.

* Tweet me to pitch a story idea – Or at least to see if I’m interested. Love the 140-character cut off – it keeps pitches from running on and on. If I like it, I’ll ask for more details in an email.

DON’T

* Call me – That’s why email was invented.

* Futz around making press releases arty or pretty – All I need are facts, contact information and links to pertinent websites.

* Ask what I’m working on – Chances are I can’t or won’t tell you.

* Respond to HARO requests with sources that aren’t related to the topic – FAIL. Don’t expect a quick reply either. A single HARO request can elicit dozens of replies. I try to answer all of them, even if it’s just to say thanks but no thanks. But if I’m on deadline I might not have the time. I will, however, save them for the next time I’m writing on that topic.

* Ask me to sign a non-disclosure agreement – Been there, done that, got burned, won’t get burned again.

* Ask me to send you a link to the story when it comes out – I’ll say yes because I’m polite that way, but by the time it does come out I’ll have forgotten or will be on another deadline.

* Invite me for coffee or lunch to hear about what I do – Unless it’s something I’m actively working on I can’t take that much time out of my day. If I want a F2F interview with your client, I’ll let you know. Or go to national or local meetings for the industries or subjects I write about – I’ll be in networking mode and will be happy to meet you and talk about your client.

* Friend me on Facebook – It’s the one social network I reserve for friends and family.

It wasn’t so long ago I was telling anyone who’d listen why I didn’t use Twitter.

Then I started using Twitter.

And never stopped. For the last eight months I’ve tweeted every day, with the occasional weekend off. I tweet eight, 10, 12 times a day: when I put up a new blog post, when one of my stories is published, when I need a source, when a random thought simply needs to be shared – though in hindsight some of those would have been better left unsaid.

Until last week.

I took an honest-to-goodness vacation away from email, blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn and everything connected to being connected.

Guess what?

The sky didn’t fall. The earth stayed on its axis. And the bottom didn’t fall out of my business – I even had a few assignments in my inbox when I got back.

It was easier than I thought to unplug. It helped to be stuck with the middle of nowhere, the only available Internet access whatever could be siphoned off a neighbor’s unsecured wireless connection.

Going without was good for the soul and apparently didn’t hurt my standing on Twitter – I returned to a few dozen new followers.

So how to unplug?

Tell people you’re leaving. If you stop tweeting without explanation, followers may think you’ve given up on Twitter. Give them a head’s up. If you don’t want to broadcast the fact that you’re leaving town for safety reasons, be a bit cagey about what you’re doing. “I’ll be taking a break from here for the next few days” works. So does “Busy elsewhere. See everyone in a week.”

Automate. If you can’t bear going a whole week without saying something, use a tool such as TweetLater or TwitResponse to send tweets at predesignated intervals in your absence.

Go mobile. Leave your laptop home and tweet from your iPhone or BlackBerry using an application like Twitterrific, PocketTweets or TwitterBerry. Twitter’s applications list has a lot more.

Tweet from vacation, sparingly. Who wants to spend their precious downtime tethered to a machine, even if it’s only a cell phone? Limit the number of times you log on. Or allow yourself a specific time of day or amount of time to check in, update your status and upload vacation pics.

Then go play.

Got your own story of going off the social media grid? Share!

I’m putting in one more plug for Digital Journalism Camp, a free, one-day conference covering a variety of writing and new media topics that will take place Saturday, Aug. 1, at the offices of the Oregonian here in Portland.

What is Digital Journalism Camp? According to Abraham Hyatt, a friend and fellow Portland freelancer who’s organizing it:

This isn’t about bloggers vs. reporters, or old media vs. new media. We’re all on the same team. And this conference is about how we, as journalists, are innovating right now — what’s working, what’s not, and how we can get better at what we do.

As of this afternoon, close to 120 reporters, writers and other media types were registered – good for networking!

I’m will be moderating a 10 a.m. panel on hyperlocal news with panelists from The Portland Sentinel, NeighborhoodNotes.com and CapitolHillSeattle. Then at 11 a.m., I’ll be teaching a class on journalism basics, including finding sources, fact checking and making corrections.

Because this is a camp style conference, and because it’s Portland and even the journalists here are tech geeks, there’ll be an unconference going on in one of the rooms all day – which means in the morning, everyone who’s there will collectively decide what topics will be covered in that space.

• Here’s the complete schedule.
• Here’s a list of speakers, panelists and moderators.
• Here’s where to sign up.

If you can’t be there, you can follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #journpdx – I’ll be tweeting from the conference, though not during my own presentations.

You can follow @journopdx now for updates in advance of the conference.

See you there.

Dear Twitter:

There’s not much I don’t love about Twitter. Since another writer convinced me to join last December, I’ve used it almost every day to find sources, do research, track events, report the news and kibbutz with friends.

But over the months, the amount of spam that’s showing up on the network has risen along with the number of new users. And more of that spam is X-rated

Yesterday was a new low. I clicked on the profile of someone who’d just started following me and saw the most graphic pornography I’ve ever encountered on Twitter, a photograph the spammer put up as their profile photo. It was a shock to say the least. And it could have been worse – my eight-year-old was in my office at the time. Good thing he was preoccupied with the TV.

I get that some people go online for porn. I also get that Twitter doesn’t want people to jump through a lot of security hoops to join, all the better for millions more to sign up.

But nobody should have to worry about what they’ll find when they open an email from Twitter notifying them of a new follower, or when they click on their Followers list.

So I’m asking, on my behalf, and for all of the other Twitter users out there who don’t want to be afraid of their inbox – stop the porn spam. Giving people a Twitter account to report spam is a start. Letting people block followers they don’t want to in their Followers list or to see tweets from is also good.

But it’s not enough. Figure out some kind of pre-screening mechanism. Maybe some of the Twitter apps that are out there can already screen for this stuff. For the time being, I’ve turned off email notification so I won’t get messages about new followers, just in case.

I’ve done my share of evangelizing Twitter to coworkers, family and friends. But this is giving me second thoughts. My daughter’s on Twitter – what if she’d gotten that porn spam instead of me?

Come on Twitter, help us out.

How’s your thumb?

Is it sore? Have you been spending more time than usual on Twitter checking out news from Iran or what people are saying in the wake of Michael Jackson’s death?

Is your idea of winding down after a long day at the keyboard picking up your BlackBerry to text all your friends?

If it is, you could be headed for trouble, thumb trouble. Too much typing and texting is leading people to complain of sore thumbs, aching fingers and “iPhone elbow.” Therapists compare today’s era of Twitter-crazed texters with the advent of office computers, which ushered in a major increase in cases of work-related carpal tunnel syndrome and RSI.

It is possible to text to your heart’s content and avoid major injury. Stretching, correct posture and frequent breaks are key. Read all about it in my story just out on IncTechnology.com.