It includes links to all manner of Twitter introductions, tutorials and other resources. Some of his links can help you find people to follow. Others will help you see how Twitter can be engaging and, most importantly, useful.

There’s also some fun stuff near the end, videos, jokes and such.

And, if you want to get on a social media roll, check out this other post by Sreenivasan, which provides tips and primers for all sorts of social networking sites, from Facebook to LinkedIn.

And hey, one more thing: Take a good look at the blog that he’s put up. Sreenivasan is using a blogging service called Tumblr, which provides users with free blogs that are drop-dead simple to use. If you’re looking to start experimenting with blogs, Tumblr might be a good place to start. WordPress.com and Posterous are also good.

As always, if you have any questions about this stuff, stop by any time.

Image from the Flickr Commons

This was among them:

My question is, why didn’t the reporter respond himself? If there’s a policy preventing him from doing so, why does the paper have that policy? Why aren’t reporters engaging with their readers online?

Rehberg is no stranger to social networking. He has a page on Facebook, a pretty active video stream on YouTube and, yes, he’s even on Twitter, where he recently posted about his opinions on the newest health care reform bill.

Jon Tester and Max Baucus are seemingly absent from these social networks. And if they aren’t, they sure haven’t provided a convenient way to find them on social networks through their Web sites.

Thankfully, Twitter has provided a new tool that should help the microblogging service become more useful right off the bat: Twitter Lists.

Lists allow you and everybody else to create lists of Twitter users — area-specific, subject-specific, conference-specific, industry-specific, beat-specific, etc.-specific people.

Finding the right list can be tricky. There may be a way to search public lists, but I haven’t found it yet. (You can make private lists, by the way, that are only visible to you.)

The best way I’ve found so far to find useful lists is to find a Twitter user you trust who has created some. You can also find someone you trust or respect on Twitter, visit his profile and see who has listed that person on which lists. You can then choose to subscribe to those lists, if you like.

Twitter Lists are being rolled out to Twitter users right now. Not everybody has them yet, but everyone soon will. You’ll get a little notification box at the top of your Twitter homepage letting you know when the feature is available for you.

Please take a look at the lists feature. If you’re on the fence about Twitter and having a hard time finding the useful, informative posts on there, this might be a way for you to find a way into Twitter and make it into another tool in your journalism toolbox.

(Oh, and I’m not the only one writing about Twitter lists for use in journalism. If you don’t believe me, believe Poynter.)

A few people in the newsroom have expressed concerns about using Twitter. It’s too much noise and nonsense, too many people posting about what they had for breakfast or what their cats are doing to the curtains.

Certainly, if you look at Twitter as a whole, you’re going to find it to be full of crap. But looking at Twitter as a whole is about as useful as looking at the Internet as a whole. Let me put it another way; you don’t read the Internet for your news. You read CNN.com or Politico.

I can’t put it much better than former journalist and current media strategist Steve Yelvington, who responded thus to a post on Wired Journalists, an online community for reporters working in a digital age.

Social media looks messy and unrewarding if you view it as if it were mass media. But it’s not. That’s not how it’s consumed.

Social media includes social filtering.

For example: I don’t read Twitter. I follow a relatively small, carefully selected group on Twitter.

That group provides me not only with their thoughts, but also links to Web resources (including both social media and mainstream media).

I choose to follow those people because I find their thoughts interesting and because I trust their filtering; if they post nonsense, I stop following them. So the problem is self-correcting; my “friends” become my agents and actually help me decode the broader social media landscape.

Every person has a highly focused and highly individualized experience. This is especially true for users of Facebook and Twitter, but also for those who read blogs with the aid of RSS readers, other aggregators, or even bookmarks. You don’t read Blogger.com. You might read Newsosaur. The former is full of nonsense and even spam; the latter is highly focused.

It is a mistake to look at social media as new; it reflects the way people have been getting their information since the dawn of language in human society. We talk among ourselves. What is different is that the emerging technologies amplify certain aspects of this communication and remove certain boundaries (time and space).

A great way of looking at social media, if you ask me.

Angelotti made five key points about using Twitter successfully for journalism.

• Be human. People appreciate the ability to interact with reporters as real people, not just faceless, lifeless bylines on top of stories.
• Start and continue conversations. Twitter is great for getting people talking about a subject and keeping a finger on the pulse of public opinion. Sure, the sample size is small, but for informal research it can be useful. It’s also great for soliciting comments.
• Use Twitter for crowdsourcing. More than one head is better than one, most of the time. People on the Web can respond to a question you have and help you find the data, links, people and other answers you need. More than that, giving people a mission or goal motivates them, and most of the time they more than glad to help and be a part of the journalism process.
• Use Twitter to get the news to people in a format they want. People these days expect that the news will find them, so it’s better to put the news out through as many media as possible.
• Engage with the audience. Meet new people and see what they are saying about your brand. This almost goes without saying. Any smart company is monitoring these social networks to see what people are saying about them.

Nothing groundbreaking for people like me, who have been thinking and reading about Twitter and journalism for a long time, but for those who are just getting started with Twitter, it was probably pretty instructive.

Angelotti also listed a few useful Web sites that help us learn about Twitter and use Twitter more effectively.

• TwitterSheep — a site that searches the bios of your followers for common words
• WeFollow — a site for finding experts on Twitter
• TwitterCounter — a site for comparing yourself to other Twitter users
• Twitalyzer and TweetStats — sites for doing some analytics on Twitter

It should be noted that the information you get from some of the stats sites like TwitterCounter, Twitalyzer and TweetStats are all to be taken with a grain of salt. Twitter is a big monster and is notoriously hard to track.

I did take a few good ideas out of the webinar. First among those is to once again redesign the wallpaper on the Chronicle’s Twitter page. Right now, it has our logo, but some of the other news sites Angelotti showed did something brilliant with their wallpaper. They filled it with text telling people how to get in touch with the paper through other means. I’ll be doing that to our page shortly.

Another good idea is to sit down and seriously think about what we want to achieve with social media technologies like Twitter. From there, we can develop a plan and then some guidelines for how we should be using the service to our best advantage.

It’s on journalists and news organizations to make it possible for the news to find its audience, which means that journalists need to do more than just dabble in social media, Chen writes. They become leaders in using the technology.

The point of using social media isn’t that Facebook is popular and lots of people, particularly young people, hang out there. The point is the way people find the news today is they expect it to find them. If news organizations want to be valuable to their readers’, they not only need great content and interactive features, they need to to use these features. To me, what that means for news organizations is their staffs need to understand social media better than the readers, so they can lead, rather than follow.