Holy Twitter!

So last night I participated in my first Twitter chat. I guess it's called a Twitter chat, I'm not really sure, but that's what I am going to call it for now. While I have been on Twitter for some time now, I was still a little shaky on the lingo. What does putting # before a word mean? Why are people using the @ sign so much?


Well I can say I have mastered the # and @. Every Wednesday night, there is a chat on Twitter about web journalism (#wjchat). People of all different experience levels participate and answer questions that are posted every five minutes or so. One of the questions I answered was "how do you make your idea have multi-platform potential? Are you thinking outside of HTML? Mobile apps, geolocation, etc."


So, I thought, hmmm multimedia, my new found love of audio plays a role here. I tweeted that everyone brings the video camera with them, what about a high quality recorder? And, who would have thought, someone tweeted at me! Ha! I couldn't believe it. It was great, I felt powerful. Everyone talks about how powerful Twitter is, but at that instant, I truly understood its power. People who have never met, who don't know a single thing about each other, but all share this common interest were all online at the same time, answering great questions and having great conversation about online journalism.


I guess I know what I will be doing on my Wednesday nights this summer. Can't wait.