“Deep down, all insecure sluts just want to be loved.”

It’s not the kind of response you’d imagine a bride-to-be would receive after announcing her engagement, but that’s exactly what Jezebel’s Tracie Egan got after she posted about her coming nuptials earlier this month.

“I can’t imagine having the time on my hands to obsess about someone I claim to hate, follow their writing and then going out of my way to try to make them feel bad,” she wrote in her blog this week.

Few people can, though you’d think that with all the stuff that’s constantly going on in this fast-paced place we call the World Wide Web, that most of us would be too busy to waste time being discourteous to other people.

Wrong.

“The technology, which allows its users to inflict pain without being forced to see its effect, also seems to incite a deeper level of meanness,” Amy Harmon wrote in the New York Times four years ago. “Psychologists say the distance between bully and victim on the Internet is leading to an unprecedented—and often unintentional—degree of brutality, especially when combined with a typical adolescent’s lack of impulse control and underdeveloped empathy skills.”

But these aren’t adolescents we’re talking about here. They’re adults and even though the web isn’t as wild as it used to be, we’re still acting without any sense.

JUST STOP READING

My good friend Atherton Bartelby is the one who turned me on to Time Out New York columnist and former Star editor-at-large Julia Allison. Allison, who gained celebrity online thanks largely to media blog Gawker, is a central figure in the microcelebrity wave and a frequent target of random reader hatred.

I got to see the metamorphosis happen first-hand and I still don’t know what happened. Atherton absolutely loved her columns up until some point over the summer, when he became cross with her over nothing in particular and started railing about everything she did with the fire of a thousand trolls.

Neither he nor I know Allison personally (she and I exchanged a couple of e-mails in June and I think may have I freaked her out with a rant about love and Stendhal), but she was so often a topic of Atherton’s rants that he and I actually had a fight about her.

“Why are you so angry?” I asked him one day over the phone, following a tirade about how reading about her at some tech event was giving him angina. “Julia is so pop! Andy Warhol is giggling from the other side. I think you’re jealous.”

He didn’t hang up on me, but I know he wanted to.

Ultimately, we have power over what we read. We can choose to spend our day reading content that inspires and informs us or waste it on blogs we don’t enjoy.

Personally, I don’t think there are any bad bloggers out there. There are bloggers I love and bloggers into whose target demographic I don’t fit. It doesn’t mean they suck, it just means they’re not for me. So I don’t read them. Simple, right?

“Dude, just stop reading her blog.”

But he couldn’t.

WHAT WOULD JACKIE DO?

Dear Emily Post Institute,

I’m greatly enjoying your latest edition of Etiquette and thank you for the time you have put into making available an updated version of such a helpful guide. I must admit, however, that I find the chapter on electronic communication a little lacking. Seeing as most of our interaction in this day and age occurs on the web, I strongly recommend future editions give more space to this matter.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Sincerely,
AV Flox

SUBPRIME FAME

In August, Wired ran a story about internet fame featuring Julia Allison. The article, which was part of Wired’s How-To issue, gave tips for aspiring fameballs: seek photo ops with high-profile people, dress to draw attention, keep your readers guessing, let your minions fight your battles, and be a hot woman with an exhibitionist streak.

It was a fun, light-hearted piece. Most readers hated it.

“Wired is supposed to be a legitimate source for all things technology,” wrote a reader identifying himself as Tomcore, “and helping further propagate a wannabe-celebutant—clarification—wannabe ROFLcon celebutant like Julie [sic] Allison, discredits the source. Don’t waste your time or ours doing reporting on insignificant attention hungry parasites. They’re everywhere and hardly worthy a Wired cover. Or at least if you do—make it someone entertaining—like the Starwars Kid.”

The rest of the web wasn’t far behind. At Valleywag, where Melissa Gira Grant had written a piece on the subject, a commenter whined, “I just cancelled my Wired subscription because of this Julia crap. I’m sorry but she is not a geek, not news worthy, not VC funding worthy. She is a high maintanence [sic] attention whore making a mockery of the industry. There are so many women they could have put on that cover that are intelligent geeks but instead they chose her. It is completely wrong and Wired should be ashamed of themselves for falling for her bullshit.”

At Gawker, the blog that’d made her famous, commenters were busy discussing how badly Photoshopped her legs looked. And on this month’s Wired, a reader graced the Rants section with the following jab, “She’s not worth the pixels she demands on our screens, and if I could find a way to blame her for the current mortgage crisis, I would.”

YOUR TURN

Last week Atherton published a piece featuring the ten most charming and often overlooked places in Hawaii. The piece, which was a final tribute to his time on the islands, took him days. He was so excited, he actually IMd me a link as soon as he wrapped up.

Not even a day later, an anonymous commenter hit his blog: “I find it interesting that on this list of must-dos almost none of the photographs are yours… surely in ten years you’ve actually ‘done’ these places at least once, enough to snap a pic or at least give us something more personal about your recommendation. Fairly or not, this leads one to believe that your recommendations are based not from personal experience but rather a spastic and deliberately obscure aggregation of ‘bests’ from travel blogs or hiking trail sites.”

While we build better blogs with criticism than we do with fawning praise, I’m disappointed that someone would take the time to reply to a carefully put-together blog post simply to scold the writer for not using his own images, insinuate he has never visited any of the specified locations, and attack him for being “deliberately obscure”—isn’t the whole point of the post to bring to light the lesser known wonders of the islands?

I don’t disagree that seeing these places through the blogger’s eyes would have been more interesting, however unprofessional or blurry the picture. A constructive suggestion would have been, “I know a lot of people don’t carry cameras when they hike and if they do, don’t always take the best photos, but this post would have been better if you had shared what you saw of these locations that touched you so deeply, even if they aren’t professional quality.”

There’s an immense difference between helpful critique and hurtful criticism. Critique may not always be easy to take, but those offering it do it with the objective of helping those whose content they enjoy to develop even better content. We do it with firm words but never lose sight of the effort the creators of the content have put forth.

INVISIBLE VANDALISM

“When you’re a victim of a personal attack online, the first thing to remember is this: It’s extremely difficult to put yourself out there on the web, but it’s supremely easy to critique or mock others who do,” wrote Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani a couple of years ago.

Her comments are something that will always stay with me because of how simple and true they are. It’s not easy to put your thoughts and experience out into the world, especially in a culture that believes that they have the right to destroy everything that isn’t hidden or somehow protected.

“Would you graffiti a car in the street just because it wasn’t parked inside a garage?” I asked a friend once.

“That analogy doesn’t even make sense,” she responded. “The car belongs to someone.”

“So do the words used to represent the thoughts this person is expressing. So does that blog. The internet is a space and a post is a person’s property. And by leaving a vicious and useless anonymous comment, you’re vandalizing it.”

She didn’t respond.

“The web is crawling with overcaffeinated surfers who have been staring at a glowing box for hours—not the ideal environment for human interaction,” Trapani explained in her Lifehacker piece. “It’s easy to take out frustrations on someone online because they don’t quite feel real. Talking smack puts people in a position of power, one they want to be in because they feel small and weak in other areas of their lives. The key words here are ‘small’ and ‘weak.’”

FACE-OFF

“I’m really glad it happened,” Atherton told me the following day over coffee. “It’s helped me appreciate Julia Allison on a whole other level.”

Just then an e-mail tumbled into my inbox directly from my blog’s contact page: “Your piece about Philip Noble [sic] is insulting. First Nick Douglas and now this? You’re a male apologist and a cheap male-pleaser and you need to have your va-jay-jay card revoked.”

The e-mail address the commenter had included is telling “not@telling.com”. If a commenter can’t even include a working e-mail address or URL, he is a coward who lacks the courage of his convictions and isn’t worth another thought.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s OK to disagree with people, but always ask yourself if you have something to bring to the table. Personal attacks and assumptions about the people who have expressed their views before you are not valid arguments for anything. If you’re so enraged by what you read that you can’t function, then don’t try! Offending others will not make them more likely to listen to you. In fact, it often has the exact opposite effect.

It’s not that difficult to present an opposing viewpoint in a constructive way. Just follow the rule of the Cs: be civil, clear, concise and constructive. Build, don’t break.

I can’t imagine anyone calling me a misogynist to my face, and neither can I see anyone walking up to Egan and calling her an insecure slut.

In a web 2.0 world, I think we need to change the old saying, “if you can’t say something nice” to “if you wouldn’t say it to my face, then don’t say anything at all.”

If you still can’t play nice, then, to quote Egan, “FAQ you.”

Last week Tuesday The Rocky Mountain News created a stir in the blogosphere after one of their journalists used text messaging to report the funeral of the toddler that was killed when an SUV flew through the window of a Colorado Baskin Robbins.

The story exploded nationally when it was reported that the man responsible for the accident was an illegal immigrant who’d not only never had a license, but had a lengthy rap sheet, including 20 previous arrests.

Following the funeral of the boy, the attention shifted to the media. Berny Morson, a journo for The Rocky Mountain News, used the micro-blogging platform Twitter to take notes at the young boy’s funeral using his cell phone.

Live-tweeting—that is, reporting live using Twitter—is very common. From the Democratic and Republican National Conventions to the season premier of the CW show Gossip Girl, everyone’s doing it.

John Dickerson, who covers the presidential campaign for Slate, told The Washington Post, “If I have a thought that occurs to me, I’ll fire it off. Sometimes it ends up being the lead of a piece, or the notion a piece gets framed around.”

It’s probably not the first time someone has live-tweeted a funeral (heaven knows everything from being fired to giving birth has been live-tweeted since Twitter went live in 2006), but to my knowledge, this is the first time that a newspaper has run the unedited stream of live-tweets from a funeral as a sidebar on a major story.

Cara Degette at The Colorado Independent called it, “utterly, and unforgivingly, inconceivable.”

I asked Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU who’s very active on Twitter, what he thought.

“My opinion is that you need to separate the method—Twittering from a funeral—from the execution; were these the right Tweets?” Rosen responded via an e-mail. “I don’t see anything wrong with the method. The content can be criticized.”

When asked how he would criticize the tweets, the former department chair said he didn’t know the community served by The Rocky Mountain News well enough to offer useful comments.

“Can someone explain the news value of this tweet stream for Rocky Mountain News readers?” Michelle Ferrier asked on the Poynter Institute E-Media Tidbits blog. “I think the glitz of technology has taken over common sense.”

“I think there is a mania to use new technology no matter what and they aren’t thinking,” said John Windrow, night city editor at The Honolulu Advertiser. “It gives newsmen a bad name.”

Samuel Freedman, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author of Letters to a Young Journalist, offered some more insight.

“I think that reporters are often in the uncomfortable position of reporting from settings where people are in great grief,” Freedman told ABCNews.com. “These situations call for the greatest understanding and discretion on the part of the reporter. To be putting real-time notes out there as opposed to waiting until the ceremony is over; there’s an element of pillaging a private moment of grief that I’m uncomfortable with. A memorial service for a murdered—for a slain child—is not a fit subject for play-by-play updates.”

David J. Zucker, the rabbi who officiated at the service, told ABC News that he didn’t think there was anything offensive in Morson’s live-tweeting.

“The way I see it is that it’s somebody sharing to a wider community interested and felt connected to this sad event.”

In the midst of the hullabaloo, John Temple, editor at The Rocky Mountain News went on the record to clarify matters:

As is our custom, we asked the parents of Marten Kudlis whether we could cover his funeral. To be clear: We never enter funeral services to report on them without the family’s permission. Period.

… Most of us couldn’t attend the service. But that doesn’t mean we don’t empathize with the family and don’t want to join in their mourning in some way. Marten was one family’s son before he died. But because of the way he died, his loss was felt by thousands.

One way for a news organization to help a community connect is to send information live from the service, just as we do from events ranging from political conventions to road closings to concerts and parties. We don’t have to wait to publish in the next day’s paper anymore. TV and radio don’t wait, and people seem to value that.

I can imagine some might think live updates during a solemn event might be disruptive. But typically reporters can sit at the very back of a hall, out of the way of mourners.

Ultimately, to me, it’s all about execution. Poorly done, such journalism might very well feel inappropriate. Done well, I don’t think so.

Some criticism of the short blasts our reporter sent may be justified. They can seem cold, even crass. But I am responsible for that failing. It is my job to make sure our staff is trained properly.

Think of such live reporting as someone whispering into a phone directly to a global audience. There is no room for editors. What the reporter writes is what you read almost instantly. That requires special skill. It takes practice.

But to claim there is something inherently wrong with the idea is to make too sweeping a judgment. Everything from services for major public figures like presidents and popes to ceremonies for victims of tragedies like the one at Columbine High School have long been covered by TV and radio.

… We must learn to use the new tools at our disposal. Yes, there are going to be times we make mistakes, just as we do in our newspaper.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try something. It means we need to learn to do it well. That is our mission.

Shortly after composing this piece, I shot Twitter co-founder Evan Williams a DM asking his take. He replied with the following comment:

The concept does seem odd–coming to you “live” from… a funeral. And coming to you live via Twitter probably seems uncomfortable for at least a couple more reasons:

1) As opposed to newspapers, Twitter is in general not perceived as being very serious. Therefore, perhaps reporting a funeral via Twitter make it seem like it’s not being taken seriously.

2) While a reporter covering the funeral is probably taking notes anyway, sending text messages sounds disrespectful and like he/she is not really paying attention. (In reality he/she is probably paying more attention, in order to report.)

I didn’t read the tweets from the event, so I don’t know if any were inappropriate. But as far as whether the idea itself is flawed, I’d have to agree with John Temple: If the family was okay having the event reported on in general, it being covered while it was still happening shouldn’t be that much different. In these types of matters, though, people’s initial reaction may be more important than the logical argument. I do not blame the reporter (or newspaper) for not predicting people would react that way.

My prediction would be that in the future this type of thing does not seem odd, though. Live video coverage will probably also be common (not that we haven’t seen live video of funerals already).

What do you think—did The Rocky Mountain News go too far?

What’s Twitter? Read my piece about the microblogging platform here.

A guy recently stopped talking to me because he didn’t feel he could be friends with my “online persona.”

I’ve always thought that I’m never more myself than when I’m online, especially in unregulated forums like Twitter, the popular microblogging platform, where I spew whatever happens to be on my mind without the kind of filters that I have between myself and the so-called real world where, as a proper Stepford wife, I’d never dream of saying out loud half the things I think.

I knew a man once who lived a double life: in one, he was a proper father and husband, and in the other, he was a tyrannical sex fiend, concerned only with satisfying his deepest and darkest cravings.

He didn’t like the term “double-life,” arguing that it implied that one of the lives he led was false, a cover that allowed him to have the other life without being ostracized by his social circle. There was no cover—he wanted both. He reasoned that any person could easily have conflicting desires and that these, while contradictory, didn’t necessarily cancel each other out.

“I’m sure you are familiar with the particle/wave dual nature of matter,” he told me. “It’s the quantization of personality. See, viewed as a wave, a personality appears to be connected and complete, but when analyzed in separate particles, completely contradictory beliefs, behaviors, and energy levels can exist at separate states.”

I’m no extreme, but the concept makes sense to me: on the one hand, I’m a wife. I wear pearls. I make dinner. I attend fund-raising events. I have dinner parties. I hold babies. I talk about square footage and property values and the It color of paint to put on the walls of your great room.

On the other hand, I lead discussions about sex and technology. I sporadically grace publications with a barely concealed body. I wander darkened alleys, eager to crawl on hands and knees through the underbelly of a city. I interview perfect strangers about how they like sex and how often, whether they have ever had an affair, whether they have ever live-blogged their sexcapades—and I do it for no reason other than my insatiable curiosity about people and, of course, sex.

Like my friend, it’s not that I feel I have to hide this drive under the guise of something socially acceptable. I do want to be married and I enjoy being a wife and having dinner parties and home-styling. But I also love sex and everything that relates to it, from the quickie you just had in the copy room to the thoughts of people who make the pleasure instruments we enjoy today, and while I wouldn’t introduce any such topic at a benefit dinner, the internet provides me with the perfect forum to do it.

And so I do. But like my Stepford self, my blog has its filters. I would never blog about something as transient as how mad I am with someone or something as silly as my new favorite YouTube video. My blog posts suffer from so much analysis and research that if I didn’t talk about myself so much a lot of them could probably qualify as articles.

Now enter Twitter, a micro-blogging platform that only allows you to update 140 characters at a time: I don’t think anything on the internet has so exposed so many particles on my wave. “I’m cooking!” “OMG, I could strangle my husband!” “Read my latest article.” “I love Anthony Bourdain!” “Ugh, you guys, I’m so depressed.” “I’m blogging naked!” “I JUST HAD THE BEST SEX EVER!” “A client is mad at me for charging him for phone calls—where does he live that this isn’t standard?” “Ouch, I stubbed my toe!” “Score—I just bought the hottest thing at Frederick’s!” “It’s 8:00PM, I just woke up!”

A lot can be communicated in 140 characters and even more can be communicated in a stream that runs all day long. If you’re doing Twitter right, you’re giving people a window into your life—the good, the bad and the TMI. Add to that your playlists on Last.fm, the books on your Visual Bookshelf on FaceBook, the song you’ve set on your MySpace profile, your stream on Flickr, your location on BriteKite and you’re basically providing anyone who cares enough with a complete backstage pass into your world. Seriously, one more social media tool and you’d be Nonsociety.

So when this guy told me he couldn’t be friends with my “online persona,” I have to admit I felt a little rejected.

THEY’RE JUST ON THE INTERNET

I hate it when I’m talking to one of my non-webbie friends about someone and they ask, with condescension, “wait, is that one of your little friends online?” Like I’m six and talking about an imaginary friend.

Recently, an older friend of mine confided that she was having an affair on the internet. Well, she didn’t call it that. In her words, “it doesn’t count if it’s online.” I asked my mother, who’s in the same age range, about this and she agreed, “well, it’s not like you are really going to become involved. They’re just on the internet.”

It blows my mind that this erroneous idea about the limitation of internet relationships to transcend pixel somehow continues to survive in the face of ever-mounting evidence to the contrary.

We’re part of a mobile generation—not just in the sense of technology, though that certainly has facilitated matters. I grew up on a little island in the Pacific where it was common for people to come and go. As I got older, I began to come and go myself. Even now that I’m married and settled, my husband and I continue to buzz around the world. We can’t sit still and we’re not the only ones. Where time and geography previously stood in the way, now technology allows us not only to make connections, but foster and enrich them.

I think one of the biggest issues with cruelty on the internet today has to do with this misconception that the people with whom we interact online aren’t really people. The truth of the matter is that some of the deepest, most honest, most meaningful connections I have with people have developed on the internet—both with those I originally met online and those I initially knew offline.

IRL VS. CYBER

“Whether you like it or not, cyberspace has become the new frontier in social relationships. People are making friends, colleagues, lovers, and enemies on the internet,” wrote Dr. John Suler of the Department of Psychology at Rider University. “The critics say it can’t compare to real relationships—and if some people prefer communicating with others via wires and circuits, there must be something wrong with them. They must be addicted. They must fear the challenging intimacy of real relationships. Is this true? Is it true that ‘real’ relationships are intrinsically superior to relationships in cyberspace? Or might relationships in cyberspace in fact be better?”

His treatise, aptly titled The Psychology of Cyberspace, which is readily available online, deals with the question of in-person relationships (IPR) versus cyberspace relationships (CSR).

“Text relationships tend to result in what’s called the online disinhibition effect,” Suler said. “Because they can’t be seen or heard, people may open up and say things that they normally wouldn’t say in-person. Self-disclosure and intimacy may be accelerated.”

Suler admitted that technology has advanced to the point where computer-mediated interaction has transcended text and can and often does engage our senses of sight and sound.

“On the other hand,” Suler was quick to note, “IPR have the advantage of touch, smell, taste, the complex integration of all the five senses, and a more robust potential to ‘do things with’ other people.”

Suler concluded that the disinhibition effect along with the time-stretching and distance-shortening qualities of online interaction make it a wonderful supplement to in-person relationships but that as a substitute, online-only interaction falls flat on its noseless, tongueless face.

“In an ideal world, we could have it both ways,” he closed. “We could develop our relationships in-person and in cyberspace, thereby taking advantage of each realm.”

What a difference a decade makes. His paper on the psychology of the web was published in 1997. The once-solid divide between online life and physical reality has long since been toppled. Nowadays, we largely enjoy both. Though there are exceptions, I wouldn’t spend much energy interacting and getting to know people I wouldn’t want to meet offline and most people I know, whether they use social networks for business or pleasure, want to meet the people with whom they interact and make every effort to do so.

Take the immediacy of the internet, the continuous fragmentation of social networks, the unavoidable stream of overshares, compounded with the inevitable face-to-face and you have the most complete picture of a person’s “wave” that you could ever want.

Which, though convenient, can make for some serious complications in relationships.

Which is why I’m here, exploring how technology, in particular the internet, is continuously affecting how we interact, live and love. I’m no expert beyond my social media whore credentials, and I don’t know that I’ll provide you with any kind of moral lesson, but as an old editor once told me, “you’re crazy enough to maybe be somewhat entertaining.”

I guess I should throw in a note of gratitude to the guy who doesn’t want to be friends with my online persona. He’s the one who got me this gig. Thanks, d00d. I have a feeling you and I will make good fodder for one another for years to come.

At the very least e-stalking you is a great alternative to obsessively looking for new songs for my MySpace profile when I’m on deadline.

This article originally appeared on Gloom Cupboard Magazine.

Less is more, they say, and Twitter takes it to heart. Twitter, the It social networking tool right now, is a micro-blog you can update 140 characters at a time, as many times as your fingers can pump out those 140-characters-or-less tidbits.

“The content that drives Twitter is a relentless stream of real-time personal status postings called tweets,” writes Scott Spanbauer in IT Business Canada. “‘Going out for more batteries,’ or ‘Feeling snacky, I think I’ll have a salad’ are the stuff of Twitter greatness–as long as tracking your friends’ ephemeral actions and mutterings is your cup of tea.”

With Twitter, you can post and receive items via the Twitter page, an application, IM, and text messages. Your tweets are archived on a personal page, they automatically show up on the pages of your friends and they can be routed to other sites like MySpace, Facebook and your blog, thereby allowing you, not only to chronicle what you’re doing, but to show the whole world what you’re up to.

If posting a blog made me feel like starting a conversation with the world, tweeting makes me feel like I’m in the middle of a huge party where everyone is having multiple conversations with everyone else at once. It’s a constant discussion of what people are doing, thinking, reading and planning that you can keep having no matter where you happen to go.

Twitter’s like the midget lovechild of a blog and a chat room. It’s simple enough that any non-techie can use it (including your mom!), it’s versatile, it’s mobile, it’s free and, apparently, in the irrational exuberance surrounding this far faster form of exhibitionism, it is also an ideal location to score n00dz from people you hardly know.*

Twitter has a page devoted to why you should care. It’s modest: “Why? Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely. Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know. Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful. Partying? Your friends may want to join you.”

But I think it’s more than that. When a storm was tearing through the Midwest and my friends lost internet, they were able to let everyone know, with a single text, that they were doing OK. Likewise, updates from organizations like Los Angeles Fire Department, the Red Cross Safe and Well, BreakingNewsOn and What’s Shaking? can be extremely useful in case of an emergency. For those on the go, Commuter Feed uses its Twitter account to collect reports about traffic and then arranges them according to area for easy perusal.

It can be incredibly fun, too. The level of entertainment you achieve on Twitter is in your hands. Some have suggested it’s only fun if all your friends are on there, like Facebook, but I don’t agree. Twitter is that missing link between friend-whoring that goes on at MySpace and the inherent elitism of Facebook. You can follow only people you know, yes, but why not reach out to people who can make you ROTFL with their daily adventures or the innovators in your industry?

There are plenty of sites to amuse you and help you find interesting people: Twittervision, Twitterverse, Twittearth, Twittertale, Twitterbuzz, Tweetmeme, Twittertroll, Twitterholic, Tweeterboard, Hoosgot, Twitstat, Tweetscan, Twitterlinkr, TweetStats, TwitDir, TwitterSearch and Terraminds.

Our species is, more and more, a nomadic, workaholic bunch, prone to moving around too much and working long hours. Twitter is redefining what it means to be “connected.” Its simplicity is what makes it so much more effective than its wordier, bulkier older siblings (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn).

There’s no better way to cut the fat than with a 140 character limit. In fact, I think any journalism student should be forced to spend his or her first year communicating entirely on Twitter.

According to Business Week’s Stephen Baker:

Do I Twitter because I’m lazy? A few times this weekend, I’ve sat down with a laptop and thought ever so briefly about blogging. But then I wonder if the blog post is relevant, interesting enough, perhaps a tad too self-focused…. Twitter, on the other hand, is a breeze. It can be irrelevant, nakedly self-promotional…. Long story short: Blogging feels more like writing a story, and Twittering feels as free as blogging used to.

Whether you’re getting fired or watching your wife give birth, Twitter can bring hundreds of people to the center of the action, often leaving conventional online news media in the dust, as it did when YouTube went down and London was shaken up by a quake. Even NASA missions may be tweeting soon!

In an article for The Guardian, political blogger Patrick Ruffini remarked on the instantaneous nature of Twitter, “Traditional news operated on a 24-hour cycle. Blogs shortened this to minutes and hours. Twitter shortens it further to seconds.” Its immediacy makes it worth its weight in gold. So much so that traditional news organizations have come onboard: NYT, Reuters, CNN Breaking News, BBC News and USA Today all have Twitter accounts.

Twitter can also be used to keep track of your iPhone’s location–or that of an iPhone’s owner, to improve communication and foster relationships in academia, confess your sins, and even to help you remember when to water your plants. Of course, for those of us who’re not that tech-inclined, there’s always Sandy, the electronic personal assistant, who just so happens to have a Twitter account herself where you can easily reach her.

“Some folks use Twitter like a bullhorn, and others use it like a walkie-talkie.” writes Chris Brogran, and it’s true. You can broadcast what you’re having for lunch to the world or, if you use an @ before another user’s name in a tweet, you can direct the message to them.

Of course, everything has its critics. As Andrew Lavallee wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year, “some users are starting to feel ‘too’ connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they’re having for dinner.”

The same article quotes Microsoft blogger and hypertweeter Robert Scroble: “Twitter hate is the new black. Some haters have already come around, but to tell the truth, they do have a good point. Do you really need to know that I’m eating a tuna sandwich for lunch? Probably not, although I’ve had more than one person come over and join me for lunch because I told where I was hanging out.”

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder brushes off the critics: “Everyone says Twitter’s completely useless, I don’t want all this information. We check in later, and they’re complete addicts.”

Despite the optimism, some will never get it. Twitter’s not for everyone. When I enthusiastically told my husband I was following this really neat guy named Ryan Kuder as he was laid off from Yahoo in real time through his tweets, hubby gave an appropriately Corporate American response: 0h n0ez, more ways for employees to waste time and ZOMG, can you SAY serious information weakness?!?1!

To me, a certifiable twit in dire need of a Twittervention (is Twitter down? IS TWITTER DOWN?!), the worst part of Twitter is trying to explain its awesomeness to unimpressed non-users. Like Michelle Slatalla, who wrote a piece in the New York Times about trying to convert her three daughters and husband to Twitter, the resounding answer seems to be that I seriously need to get out more and actually, you know, talk to people.

DO NOT WANT!

I don’t care what they say, Twitter is not the social networking equivalent of crocs!

Want more info? Check out Jennifer Laycock’s step by step metamorphosis from skeptic to avid user (note that the article appears in five parts, all linked at the bottom of piece). You can play catch up with Warren Whitlock and Deborah Micek’s The Twitter Handbook or check out Sue Waters’ useful rush guide to setting up your Twitter account.

If you’re already on Twitter, check out the Twitter Fan Wiki as well as Mashable’s awesome toolbox with over 60 Twitter tools. More resources at Pink is Punk.

Oh, and PS, you’re more than welcome to add me, snooze me, or check my stats at Twitterholic, TweetStats, TwitterCounter, and Twitter.Grader!

Don’t wanna join but wanna know what’s going on? Keep an eye on what I’m talking about and what people are responding via Quotably, what people are liking on Favrd or Favotter, or scope out my tweet cloud! Already addicted? See who just unfollowed you and what the offending tweet was with Qwitter or compare trends on Twist!

* The Breasts of Twitter blog has been removed from Blogger, September 2008.