Twittering Your Work

As a general rule I always send an update to Twitter whenever I write a blog post or a piece of my work is published online. After all, like most bloggers, a couple of dozen extra visitors can be a significant proportion of my daily traffic. However equally important is the fact that URL shorteners like bit.ly can provide useful information about the impact of my work.

This was emphasised today when I sent an update about my latest online article: Web 2.0 fails to excite today's researchers. I was surprised to find that it was actually already the subject of a number of tweets (admittedly a couple of them were automated).
However without twittering about the article myself I would never have found some of the comments about the piece: with only 140 characters article titles are often ignored or abbreviated, whilst the use of URL shorteners means that few comments will be identifiable through Yahoo's Site Explorer (which has an uncertain future anyway).

So if you want to know what people are saying about your work on Twitter, you really need to talk about your work on Twitter...or at least create the bit.ly links.