It’s a small, though clever, effort, and I appreciate being called among a select group of people locally highlighted as worth following on Twitter.

It’s a diverse group that is still changing, but the list is an interesting way to curate a list of people following, sharing and commenting on the goings-on of the city. I’ve always hoped to offer real value online and plan to keep doing just that.

It also helps that it’s a built-in community of people with communities online to share and drive traffic, audience and, perhaps, action.

On the 20 portion of its site, NBC 10 will use tweets from the list members to add perspective to local events, yes, like my amusement at the national conference of the International Cat Association. I’ll strive to offer some relatively more valuable information too.

I appreciate greatly the notoriety and impressive company.

Check the archived chat here.

Below check out the Storify, I put together highlighting some of the more interesting responses to the series of questions put out by the facilitator. As host, I was meant to drive conversation, outreach and use any expertise I had on the subject.

Below the Storify, I put the answers to the Lightning Round questions for me below in HTML. The lightning round kicked off the night, which ran from 8pm to about 9:30pm, and introduced me to the dozens of participants, who were from around the country.

My answers to the Lightning Round that kicked off the night:

1. In a tweet, describe your organization, companies: @wjchat Co-founder of content strategy shop @technicallyM and our flagship, a popular local technology news site @technicallyPHL #wjchat
2. What is the first step to go from reporter to journalism entrepreneur? @wjchat Desperation? A community in need of help coming together, lotsa time and desire to steal and implement every good idea you find #wjchat
3. What tip would you give someone starting up his/her own news org? @wjchat Pick a niche you care about, spend no money on tech to start and plan for funding that doesn’t rhyme with “schmadvertising” #wjchat
4. What have you learned now, that you wish you knew when you first launched? @wjchat Business 101 like profit per staff hour and admin basics like payroll, invoicing #wjchat
5. What is success for you? How do you know you’ve reached it? @wjchat Sustainability. When we bring on a full-time editor with something of a freelance budget and cover tech in Philly, then @technicallyPHL has won #wjchat
6. Are you profitable? @wjchat Yup. No outside investment and three full-time staffers, we pay ourselves $40k, a meaningful salary for young journalist. Revenue (1) events, (2) foundation projects (3) consulting #wjchat
7. Divide up your time: Reporter vs. businessman vs. Web developer vs. designer. Well, across the three of us @technicallyPHL 30 percent reporter, 40 percent business, 20 percent web dev, 10 percent deisgn #wjchat
8. What’s been the lowest point in this venture? What’s been the highest? Low=selling ads out of mice-ridden apt in 09, High=hosting big @PhillyTechWeek last April w/ impact, community & revenue #wjchat

I tried out the Tweroid service. [Updated: I also tried the service for @TechnicallyPHL]

The value proposition is to sign in, wait an hour or so, get an assessment of when your followers are most active online. The ask might be to then starting tweeting at those times to have the biggest impact.

So, according to this, for maximum audience, I should be tweeting at noon and in the 4pm hour on weekdays

I’m left wondering if that’s the value of social media — directing your gaze to the biggest crowd, or if it should be more spontaneously. As metrics can continue to deploy

1. Signing off initials — If you have multiple people using your organization’s account, sign off with initials for transparency, personal connection and ease.
2. Do create regular content — Part of my schtick is having a lunchtime regular feature, like Noontime Number for Technically Philly and Running News at Noon for Back on My Feet. It’s something followers come to expect and helps you be sure to fill content.
3. Do take the RSS feed from your blog and then do a second (or third) tweet later for ifferent audience — It helps feed the beast, but also means your next tweet will hit for a new audience. Note, though, that some feel Twitter should be all engagement, so sending an RSS feed is somewhat looked down on. Still, I think as long as an RSS feed doesn’t dominate your Twitter conversation, it’s an added value.
4. Do tweet your content more than once — Yes, as a follow up to the item above, keep in mind that Twitter users tend to focus in at different times, from the morning to lunch to the evening or something like it, so by tweeting a story a few times (without getting spammy), you have a better chance of hitting an interested party.
5. Do use CoTweet to manage multiple accounts with multiple user — the former central Pennsylvania startup has a lot of good features for archiving messages, assigning followup and forward posting tweets.
6. Instead of just responding, RT a meaningful message — When you reply to someone, RT her message and add your own when space allows. This gets other people into the conversation. If no one is interested, then take it to DM or email.
7. Do more often have a call to action — (usually a link) but don’t be afraid to offer meaning in words. It’s a push media, so what are you pushing? Don’t take that to mean you should always be pushing your stuff, but conversation, engagement, sharing, linking, etc. are all good calls to action.
8. Do be able to share a specific point in those 140 characters — So, ‘Man speaks at classroom’ is a whole lot less effective than ‘this is how we can make homework suck less, man says,’ which can inspire conversation or thought or response or, even better, a click.
9. Tweet strong quotes or (even better) hard numbers – I’ve always found pushing clear information and statistics travels better than something less actionable or more vague.
10. Break quick news on Twitter — When you’re reporting on something, feed good, interesting, independent content on Twitter. When possible, sure, having a link of yours can help you capture the clicks, but ultimately, you’re trying to create an audience and you do that with content, so Twitter needs its own material.

(AP Photo/Rahimullah Yousafzai)

So last night President Obama announced that the U.S. military had killed and reclaimed the body of al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, accused of masterminding the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Around 10:20 p.m., I was culling through Twitter following Philly Tech Week when I saw a stream of tweets referencing an upcoming Obama national address. Rumors were flying and news began coming it: the conference wasn’t about Libya, then it was said it would be about bin Laden.

From there, Twitter took off and after 11 p.m., the President made his address.

I thought I’d share some of my favorite tweets of the night, considering it was how i followed the news, though my housemate and I watched the address online via streaming White House video:

1. My money is on Bin Laden capture. @bydanielvictor (I think that means he owes me money)
2. So, can we talk about what the hell we do with Osama bin Laden’s body now? I wanted to know
3. “Oh, God, Obama. I was THIS close to proofing A1. THIS CLOSE. For once on a Sunday night, I was finished with time to spare. *falls over*” @MegsLeigh
4. Yes people it’s not just FOX. “Usama” is just as “correct” as “Osama.” Newsflash: Arabic is not a Latinate language. Sheesh! @uogbuji
5. Amazing fact vis Brian Ross: years ago US subpoenaed brain from deceased Bin Laden sister…in order to make DNA match when necessary @johnsberman
6. Obama said in his remarks that “there’s no doubt that al-Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us” despite OBL’s death. @markknoller
7. We are actually debating whether to bring the kid down to watch this. I’m uncomfortable teaching him to celebrate death, even of enemies. @AmyZQuinn
8. For all of you newspaper folks nearing deadline for tomorrow’s print edition, you have my sympathies. @CraigSilverman
9. Video of the Phillies fans’ USA chant. Complete with Philly.com cameo! http://bit.ly/mxG4KV @bydanielvictor
10. While I’m not sad, I wonder if Muslim world might view crowd at White House the way we view flag burning protests. @Digidave

Tracking our Twitter followers from January 2010 to April. Back on My Feet launched a campaign on the Web in January.

Last month marked three months since I started at nonprofit Back on My Feet and launched a concerted effort to share more member stories and help develop a better, broader online relationship with our volunteers, members and supporters.

The first step in that process was to reawaken our social media accounts — the best platforms to create Web communities and ones buttressed by an organizational blog that I hope to more formally announce soon. Because our organization is all about accountability, we wanted to see how we’ve done.

I thought some lessons or benchmarks might be able to be garnered for others interested in social media use by nonprofits or other organizations, so I’ll share our progress below.

It’s important to note that no one was explicitly in my role before I joined, though someone was responsible for social media use. Still, there wasn’t a lot of experience or perhaps even interest in their uses, so, though all of these accounts had started, there is something of a starting from the beginning feeling.

As I mentioned in last week’s post announcing my seeking an intern, social media is really only one of four big roles I’m filling, so I can’t give it as much attention as I’d like, but it’s certainly a priority.

Take what lessons from these figures that you can.

Twitter — Though our organization is developing chapters rapidly, for now, I’ll be maintaining a single Twitter account.

• On Jan. 18, our Twitter account had 335 followers, 99 tweets and was listed 30 times.
• Today, our Twitter account has 770 followers (and we’re following fewer than 150 accounts), 564 tweets and is listed 54 times.

Facebook — I’m using a Back on My Feet organizational Facebook account to then push content to chapter-specific Facebook pages (though we’ll have to transition older groups to pages) and am having a single staff member in each chapter offer more daily updates to those chapter pages.

• On Jan. 18, our Facebook account had 727 friends and was only sporadically active
• Today, our Facebook account has 1,087 friends and updates between three and seven times a day with member updates, running quotes and news and links to our blog.
• On Jan. 18, our Philly chapter Facebook group had 711 fans; our Baltimore chapter group had 311 fans and our DC chapter group had 75 fans.
• Today, our Philly chapter group has 953 members; our Baltimore chapter group has 397 fans and our DC chapter group has 418 fans. All update between one and three times a day.
• On Jan. 18, we didn’t have Facebook pages for our May 24-launching Boston chapter, our fall-launching Chicago chapter or our signature event, the Stroehmann Back on My Feet 20in24.
• Today, the Boston page has 157 fans, the Chicago page has 32 fans and the 20in24 page has 161 fans.

Photos and Video — Youtube is proving nothing more than a repository for our events and member videos. Before I arrived, we had purchased a premium Picasa account, so at the moment all chapters are feeding into a single account for hosting purposes. I may need to transition these to chapter-specific accounts, though I haven’t the foggiest how to best do that.

• On Jan. 18, our Youtube account had 10 videos and 12 subscribers
• Today, our Youtube account has 32 videos and 18 subscribers
• On Jan. 18, our Picasa account was home to 91 photo albums from two chapters
• Today, our Picasa account is home to 130 photo albums four chapters (including Boston happy hour snaps)

What do you think?

Short of taking a trip to the Library of Congress and pouring over the Twitter archives, lots of tweets of value have been lost, particularly for us at Technically Philly.

What we took for granted as testimonials and perspective from many in our community and out, we did a poor job of archiving that public dialogue. To keep that from happening, in addition to pledging to ‘favorite’ more tweets of value or interest, I’m going to keep track of them by updating this post.

There’s value to following the good and bad of what they say about you, of course, to note how it changes and to address your place in a community.

If it’s of any interest, below, see more than a dozen tweets that we did save since June 2009 and some in the Unsolicited Praise portion of our media kit.

• Indy Hall co-founder Alex Hillman watches us build the TP business | 30 Oct 10
• Keith Olbermann responds to one of our stories | 7 Oct 10
• Engadget Editor Ross Miller compliments our ethics policy | 20 Sep 10
• MC Hammer retweets our coverage of his Wharton speech | 26 Feb 10
• Celebrating the day after the anniversary of launching TP | 10 Feb 10
• Our 1,500th Twitter follower | 1 Jan 10
• David Cohn compliments our News Inkubator Knight app | 23 Nov 09
• Ryan Sholin also compliments the separate web app | 23 Nov 09
• Wharton Computing head Tim Allen thanks our ‘efforts’ | 14 Nov 09
• Community organizer Roz Duffy calls us “the f’n bomb.” | 14 Nov 09
• Jeff Jarvis notes TP and our coming to HyperCamp | 23 Aug 09
• We announce our Digital Philadelphia multimedia package | 12 Aug 09
• Former Inquirer Online Editor Chris Krewson says TP is an idea, not a business | 10 Aug 09
• Google Maps links to one of our stories | 30 Jun 09
• Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Jim MacMillan credits our coverage | 7 Apr 09

Updated: July 2, 2009 @ 11:43 p.m. with another app. Updated again: Sept. 16, 2009 @ 10:12 p.m.

The world doesn’t need another Twitter post. But, with the surging number of third-party Twitter applications and posts and stories surrounding the buzz service of the moment, I find it’s easy to get lost.

Admittedly, I’ve done my fair share of Twitter coverage here, as with social networks generally, but I wouldn’t take the title of social media guru if it was gifted me. I just thought it was worth sharing the few services I do find helpful, particularly for those using the tool to grow a Web product.

Because, despite the buzz and the more likely reality that it’s probably a bit more of a tool for the few than for the masses as it’s currently being portrayed, I think it has the potential to be one of the most valuable social media tools.

The conversation and link-sharing employed by those whom I most like to follow are testaments to what is good about Twitter. …And believe me, there is plenty of bad.

Below, peep six Twitter tools that are actually worth your time.

1. Advanced Twitter search — Every news organization should be using the opportunity to find people talking about your region or industry, in order to find new followers. For Technically Philly and NEast Philly, it’s an opportunity to grow our readership. It’s certainly not something I necessarily recommend for individual users because, well, that might come off simply creepy. But, earlier this month, by searching for people near Philadelphia who were tweeting about Billy Joel, I was able to find folks who went to a tribute band concert in Northeast Philadelphia and share our coverage.
2. CoTweet – The Philadelphia-regionally based application affords you the opportunity to tweet from multiple Twitter accounts and forward-post tweets. It’s great for any work use of Twitter.
3. Twitpic — Photos get a lot of traffic, so get yourself a password and e-mail or forward from your mobile device shots of what you’re covering or visiting.
4. Twitter Counter — No one wants to follow too closely the metrics of something as inane as social networks, but if you’re going to do anything, you ought to do it well. Math can help you. Every few weeks, it doesn’t hurt to chart your progress in adding followers compared to others on the twittersphere. The numbers don’t lie. I can also keep track of buddies.
5. Qwitter — I love the concept. You watch your Twitter follower count dip, but you’re not sure who left or why. This service will send you an update when someone leaves. I signed up recently and haven’t gotten a note yet, so, well, either the service is bogus or those followers I’ve lost were simply accounts that Twitter shutdown for being spam.
6. BackTweets — While most who shares links to your work offer an @reply, many don’t, as I’ve found by following the site’s chronicling of those linking back to Technically Philly. This is a great way to follow discourse following your product and finding new followers.
7. Yes, a Seventh: Tweet Effect — This nifty device will show you after what tweets you gained or lost followers, and no, I’ve garnered absolutely no knowledge from it and it still interests me.
8. Yes, an Eighth: Twitter Karma — After growing my following list to several hundred and finding I was losing value in following so many, I wanted to mass clear many. This tool made it easy.
9. Follower Monitor — This is a Twitter user who tracks users who stop following you, doing what I found Qwitter didn’t.

Some reading that might actually teach you something about actual value in the mostly otherwise self-serving and overly fashionable-at-the-moment social network:

• Top 21 most-visited Twitter applications — Tech Crunch
• Kevin Rose: 10 Ways to Increase Twitter followers — Tech Crunch
• How 11 mayors use Twitter
• How Newsrooms Adapt to Twitter — Editor and Publisher
• Newspapers that use Twitter
• Gain more followers for your news organization

The funny thing is that with all their growth, Twitter and Facebook haven’t made a damn dime yet — despite all the hemming and hawing about their influence, most recently in the Iranian post-election dramatics.

With their incredible traffic, there was a time when advertising would seem like a natural choice. Even though they are considered among the most powerful Web products, they seem to be missing monetization possibilities, if not outright ignoring them.  Twitter is trying “innovative” revenue streams like, maybe, TV shows.

Could it be part of the fear that advertising prices could be in trouble?

Because, of course, Facebook should be any marketer’s dream, as the most dramatic example of the power the Web has for data collection.

Recently, Facebook was valued at $10 billion, setting Twitter at $1.7 billion, but, without any real method of making money installed, the Wall Street Journal has questioned the valuation of the company to be, as Business Week reported, more than twice the market cap of the New York Times.

But, it seems it won’t be advertising, or at least that won’t be a primary strategy — something with which I certainly agree. So as they toy with new monetizations, I figure one of two things will happen, an enormous Web 2.0 bubble will burst or these two social networks will help lead us into a post-advertising focused world.

Am I missing anything? Does that make sense? Which is it going to be — will a $10 billion Facebook valuation seem laughable years from now or will this be a point in history where traditional display advertising will only be a secondary revenue stream?

Cartoon from Ohio.com.

Update: We lost.

Grant money in journalism is flowing freely in a tightened economy and a historic juncture in print media.

Seems like an opportunity.

So, my two partners and I, who founded Technically Philly, applied for the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, a $10,000 grant to support new ideas in news. See our submission here.

We thought bringing together two niches — the geography of Philadelphia and the industry of technology and innovation — and diversifying revenue streams — going beyond advertising — was a new enough model that it might catch the eye of a judge or two.

We walked into a meaningful business, social and startup community in a major metro region’s creative economies and began reporting, relying on our interests in social media, community reporting and professional and ethical journalism.

We recently introduced advertising — a small first step in monetization –and feel that a grant for $10,000 could afford the three of us an opportunity to work full time for perhaps as much two months or more. Considering how pleased we are with our traffic growth and the response from the community, we’re thrilled by even the chance at the opportunity to give full time to a project none of us have been able to offer even part time thus far.

Unfortunately and entirely unsurprisingly, there is some stiff competition from the nearly 100 submissions that were entered.  Below I share some of the more interesting submissions I saw and my thoughts on our viability.

Big names

• CNN/Facebook Inauguration Collaboration — CNN.com collaborated with Facebook to create an interactive online experience where viewers shared their experiences of Obama’s inauguration from 8 a.m. till the last inaugural ball. Four anchors provided coverage from the Capitol grounds in DC, while a special report was given from the CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta. Online users could update their Facebook status directly from CNN.com Live video player in real time. On Facebook friends could click the CNN tag and join the live chat on CNN.com. There were 26 million live video streams on CNN.com, 1.3 million concurrent streams, 2 million Facebook status updates, and 1.2 million RSVPs on Facebook before the event. I was confused by another Facebook-related submission that already took place — where is the money meant to go?
• This American Life Live! — This American Life took advantage of HD satellite technology to broadcast a live performance to movie theaters across the U.S. More than 50,000 people gathered in their communities to watch this broadcast. This American Life utilized podcasts and social networking sites to promote the event and survey fans before the event to get feedback. An encore presentation was held due to massive interest.
• Ledger Live — Breaking down the barriers between the newsroom and the community, “LedgerLive” committed to video in the summer of 2008. Using different types of social media, the Star-Ledger’s webcast showcases the newspapers videos, brings viewers into the newsroom, and includes them in some content decisions. Columnists and reporters are guests on the show.
• The AP Economic Stress Index — It combines unemployment, foreclosure, and bankruptcy data down to the county level to create an index of the overall health of the economy. The data are displayed on a clickable map and the data can be mashed up in several ways to dig deep into the numbers.

Social Media

• Tagging Names in Facebook — This facebook application would allow users to tag names in news stories. As tagging photos on Facebook is so popular, the hope is that tagging names will bring a new audience to news articles. This application was developed by ASU engineering and journalism students who are very familiar with facebook. This is set to premiere during varsity sports season, when athletes, coaches and parents are likely to tag.
• Twitter integration — The Des Moines Register used Twitter to help report on Iowa’s gay marriage decision by creating a hashtag, aggregating Twitter users’ tweets using that hashtag on their Web site, and getting live tweets from reporters after the decision. Their hashtag was listed on Twitter’s top trending topics, and they are planning more Twitter reporting projects for the future.
• Video Your Vote — “Video Your Vote” records voters experiences of the 2008 election by providing over 1,000 flip video cameras, using voters cameras, and teaching citizens laws regarding recording and voting. 2,500 videos were received from 50 states and several foreign countries to depict the election moments from different points of view. PBS, the NewsHour and YouTube collaborated to create this project in efforts to share the realities from the day, which gained 300,000 views on YouTube.
• What Is Barack Doing? – What Is Barack Doing? aggregates presidential news from many different sources, from the major networks to social networks. It uses good Web design practices to increase usability and accessibility.

Philadelphia

• Street Level Philadelphia — After working as a photographer for 10 years for the Philadelphia Daily News, Jim MacMillan taught himself how to shoot, edit, and produce video for the Web and created 1-2 minute video reports. He reported, filmed, voiced, edited, and produced the videos alone, and tried to tell the stories of Philadelphia on a personal level.
• PlanPhilly — An organization that reports on and seeks to bring transparency and openness to Philadelphia’s design, development, and planning as an experiment in project-based journalism. It has developed partnerships with some of Philadelphia’s mainstream media outlets, and seen their unique visitors double in the last year.
• Philadelphia Neighborhoods from the Temple University School of Communications Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab class — Temple U. project covered 20 predominantly minority Philadelphia neighborhoods by sending student reporters to do multimedia reporting. The program also trained community residents to use programs like Final Cut Pro, Flash, videography and blogging so residents could tell their own stories. One story about a racist police officer generated enough mainstream media coverage that the officer was fired. (A story written by Shannon McDonald certainly seems to have put the program’s recent incarnation on the map)

Others

• AmherstWire.com — A student-run online magazine, a project of the Journalism program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The site offers a wide array of content, including various beats localizing current events, a video blog that tracks the pulse of campus opinion, and the Global Beat Blog written by students studying abroad. The main section of the site includes periodic, in-depth feature packages that tackle major issues from multiple angles using non-traditional storytelling techniques. Over the course of three semesters, a small group of full-time students were able to produce a high quality, professional news Web site that attracted a worldwide audience with a budget of well under $1,000.
• American Indian online journalism — To interact with readers and to attract a younger audience, The Circle (the sole source of print journalism for the American Indian community in the upper Midwest) has created an enhanced web edition. This allows readers with limited access to transportation to interact with other communities and lets users share their stories on the site. As of June 1, 2009, there are over 350 registered, and 7 bloggers getting ready to go online with Native-specific topics.
• Newspaper Tycoon from Eastern Illinois University — An idea for a video game wherein the gamer is a newspaper mogul responsible for all the aspects (both business and journalistic) of the newspapers he/she controls. The game has not yet been developed so it does not exist. At this point it is just an idea.

I’m personally unsure of proposals dominated by only-citizen contributors — concerns about their stability and where advertising money is going. There are some innovative ideas, but I am happy with our submission. If not the best, I feel like ours is a model that could offer important coverage for other communities and, as I wrote above, I think that $10,000 grand prize could have a far greater impact on our project than many of the others. I also am proud that we are moving ahead with our own monetization, so that money will only help us surge forward toward a truly sustainable product.

Do we have any chance? What are some other submissions you like?