Dave Donohue: nerd-in-residence

Update: Steve just posted the lede: “#bwstory Go ahead and laugh at Twitter. Plenty of trivia. But businesses are coming up with all kinds of ways to harness microblogging…”

As I type this, BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker is about to launch a compelling experiment. He’s writing a story on Twitter – using Twitter. Once per hour, starting with the lede at 2:30 PM ET, he’ll post a 140 character Tweet. For the next hour, everyone who follows him (he’s @stevebaker) can suggest edits to his post, or suggest a new 140 character string of their own. Posts tagged with #bwstory will be aggregated at twemes.com so that we can follow his progress in real-time.

His premise?

“The theme of the story is that Twitter is growing as a business tool and is gaining popularity. But it has growth issues. The questions: Will we be Twittering a year or two from now? If so, as I’ve asked here before, will it be on Twitter? Does the community gathered, both users and developers, tie us to that platform? Or will we be “twittering” on other services?”

This is important for several reasons:

• Twitter coverage in BusinessWeek takes it out of the echo chamber and into the mainstream. The fact that he’s apparently focusing on its business uses emphasizes just how many more people will take interest as this story develops. The finished product should allow many early adopters to finally explain Twitter to their colleagues/bosses/SO’s in English.
• This experiment will illustrate the sheer speed by which ideas take shape and turn into editorial on Twitter. It reminds me of Wired’s editorial wiki experiment from September 2006 (which ultimately frustrated Wired’s Ryan Singel), but this should move at a much faster pace and with greater community involvement.
• How many times in your career can you remember BusinessWeek putting out an open call for content, and then propose that you edit that content? It’s an opportunity for all of us to highlight how Twitter has become an invaluable tool for our clients, our companies, and ourselves.

This will be a lot of fun to follow. The PR community is definitely helping at the start – Justin Kistner gave some helpful points on hashtags when the story was in its infancy and makes some good points here.