On Sunday, I put away my reporter's notepad and instead stuck a Blackberry in my pocket to report live from the Tour of California event in Santa Rosa.
Using a combination of text messaging and a Twitter account, I roved through the booth-lined streets of downtown Santa Rosa and Rail Road Square and sent out messages I thought might be useful to people.

For anyone not familiar with Twitter, read this previous article because Twitter is pushing an important new form of communication.

My messages went out to anyone following me on twitter:



My messages, called Tweets, were also posted to the PressDemocrat.com's Tour of California page:


The idea was to get people fast news and useful information. A handful of folks told me later they followed my "tweets" on their cell phones or home computers to plan out their time at the event or keep updated on what was happening.

Earlier in the week I had created a new Twitter account, twitter.com/amgenpd (refered to as @amgenpd in the twitter parlance.)
For the @AmgenPD account, I used TwitRSS.com to automatically retweet any messages sent out by some racers, participants, and hashtags:


In the list of tweets pasted below, you can see the "#ATOC" hashtag.
Hashtags are used by people to classify their tweets as relevant to one topic. People can then use www.search.twitter.com to find all the messages where people used that hashtag.

In my case, I used that search function, then took the RSS feed for those search results, fed that URL into TwitRSS.com, and it automatically retweeted (RT) those results on the @AmgenPD Twitter account.



Some parts of this new form of reporting went really well. Other parts need improvement - both on my part and on Twitter's part - before it becomes adequately effective.

What went right:

I quickly reported and got people news and info they could use:



And hopefully I provided some comic relief (although the tweet below raised some editors' eyebrows and prompted @dane to suggest I'd broken Twittiquette as outlined in this NYT article.)



I got good feedback from people following my Twitter account:




@Paperwords is my regular Twitter account. I use it to share info regarding my technology beat, so I didn't want to annoy people who follow @paperwords with Tour of California coverage. So I used @amgenPD to report.

What can be improved:

I should have established two Twitter accounts to cover the race. One would be just the news I reported and Tweeted. The other would retweet racers such as Lance Armstrong, hastags such as #bikeSR and #atoc, and my twitter account. I could have called one @amgenPD and the other @amgenRT.
This would let people more easily track the tidbits I was providing, and also follow all the online chatter. As it was, my tidbits were overwhelmed by the RTs and it probably took a bit of the local feel away for Sonoma County residents who we try to serve.
The downside to this approach is that people would need to follow two accounts, and if they followed both accounts they would see my messages twice. I'll have to brainstorm a work around.

Next are two epic FAILS:

First, I tweeted wrong information:

They arrived at about 4:30, but Levi was not the leader. It was Francisco Mancebo. Major fail on my part. And an example of a major caveat of live reporting, there is almost no fact checking or multiple sources. In this case, I got that information from an Amgen organizer.

Another sad example:



I got that wrong too.

So here is how to improve my failure rate: First, is better adherence to basic journalism principles: prepare, prepare, prepare. The focus of my coverage was initially going to be just random observations from around the event. But when I got out there, I realized people would want race details. I tried to provide that, but was badly prepared. I didn't have access to the right sources:




The Press Democrat had five reporters - including me - and two photographers covering the Tour of California. We should have had the other reporters provide occasional updates on Twitter to fill in basic race and event info. Some of those reporters, such as Eric Branch who was stationed at the Hyatt Hotel's media room, had much better access to race details then me. Other reporter's such as Bob Padecky and Kerry Benefield follow cycling and have better insight than me. I could have provided the bulk of the PD's local Twitter feed about event happendings, but it would have been great if the other reporters had been equipped to provide the occasional tidbit. As it was, I should have taken all their cell phones and made occasional calls to pick their brains and update to Twitter for them.
Finally, we needed someone in our online department to have access to the @amgenPD account so they could tweet links every time we put new race content on our Web site.

The next epic fail is on Twitter (or possibly Verizon. But I'm pretty sure Twitter.) Some of my tweets were delayed by an hour or more. That kind of defeats the purpose. Also, some of my tweets only make sense when read sequentially. The delay put the messages out of sequence.

Here is a mix of Tweets that all posted around the same time, but includes a mix of messages posted an hour after the finish and some, including the "Francisco won" post, that I tweeted during the final minutes of the race. You can see that out of order, some of these make no sense:



The reason I'm fairly confident Twitter is to blame is because near the end of the race it sent me a text message saying I'd gone over my hourly limit: "Wow, that's a lot of Twittering! You have reached your limit of updates for the hour. Try again later."
From my standpoint, that's a fail whale.

On a final note about this experience, I'd say we need better equipment. The Blackberry I was using didn't have a camera, so I couldn't Tweet photos. It also does not have a Twitter app installed on it, and the Internet browsing experience is awful on this older model Blackberry (although I admit to being an amateur Blackberry user.)
Here is my dream setup: I think we would be better off having a communication tablet that could fit into a large fanny pack, with a good-sized keypad, a multi-touch screen for Internet browsing and file manipulation, and could connect via Bluetooth to a camera that geotags photos. It would also be nice if my tweets got geotagged, then you could just click my tweet to see where that Herbalife booth is located.

Bottom line: Mass mini-messaging services (3MS) that limit communiqués to 140 characters (the same as a text message) provide a great tool to send useful information to people. Whether its Twitter or another application, we journalists need to learn how to use the technology and become 3MS masters. (Yeah, I'm shamelessly trying to coin 3MS. If there is already a better, more widely used term, let me know.)

It's now after midnight on Monday morning as I finish this post, and I know I'm missing some pros and cons about my experience. So I'm hoping you'll pick up this conversation and provide some ideas and comments on journalism and tweeting:

This is the inagural "Tapping the Tech Hive." The format might change a bit as I tweak it based on reader/editor/and participant feedback. Also, I want to create space for one question to be submitted by readers. To do that, I'll need to start lining up Q&A participants in advance, so people can submit specific questions via Twitter, email, etc.

Bio: Dane Jasper is co-founder of Sonic.net, a Santa Rosa ISP founded in 1994 that just launched next-gen DSL service in Sonoma County, San Francisco and other Bay Area cities.
Web site: www.sonic.net
Blog: http://corp.sonic.net/ceo
Twitter: @Dane

DailyGeek: What OS do you primarily use?
Jasper: Windows Vista. For most of my work I use just email and a web browser, so the OS isn't very important. It just needs to be reliable and familiar. I used to use Linux, which was far more reliable than Vista, but application support and ease of administration drove me back to something mainstream.

DailyGeek: What search engine do you use?
Jasper: Google, which I love for the integration of search with maps, news and shopping.

DailyGeek: What social network applications do you use?
Jasper: I use Facebook and Twitter.

DailyGeek: What program(s) do you prefer using for Twitter?
Jasper: I use Tweetdeck on the PC, and Tweetie on the iPhone.

DailyGeek: What is your favorite Open Source software program?
Jasper: OpenOffice. It makes no sense to pay for basics like word processing and spreadsheet tools, and OpenOffice does a great job. Every budget conscious enterprise should switch.

DailyGeek: Favorite Web sites?
Jasper: http://www.dslreports.com/
http://xkcd.com/
http://news.google.com/
http://atheistmedia.blogspot.com/
http://nytimes.com/
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/
http://www.sonic.net/ (Home page)

DailyGeek: Favorite way to get news?
Jasper: Aside from picking up things people are talking about on twitter, I visit Google's news, the NY Times, and the PD daily. I also read comics on Chron.com.

DailyGeek: Preferred Internet browser?
Jasper: Currently I'm using Chrome. It's got some real advantages over Firefox, but I'm losing patience because it is missing key features like bookmark synchronization (FoxMarks).

DailyGeek: What type of phone do you use?
Jasper: I use a 2G iPhone. It's the best mobile browser available, supports IMAP for email sync with the desktop, and is fun to use. That said, it crashes frequently. I'm unwilling to upgrade to the new 3G version because I don't like the $10 monthly price hike that comes with it.

DailyGeek: Favorite productivity tech tool?
Jasper: Hiveminder, http://hiveminder.com/

DailyGeek: Favorite piece of technology that is not mainstream?
Jasper: I've got two. First, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 scanner. I convert most paper documents to PDF. The ScanSnap does optical recognition on the text, which Windows Vista then indexes. This allows me to easily find things I've stored, and it's not a complex or proprietary document management system. The second is a Drobo disk array, which I back up daily to using Sonic.net's new online backup service. The Drobo is great because you can add any size disk at any time, growing storage as needed.

DailyGeek: What question should have I asked?
Jasper: How do you access the Internet? Currently I have Sonic.net wireless access at home, but am looking forward to installation of our new carrier based product there.