Matt Forsythe

I just set up a Twitter account. In case you’re new like me, Twitter is a blogging application for your mobile phone. You receive updates on your phone and you can add new posts as well. (21212 for Canadians). I used to work as a developer for a mobile phone company in the UK, so I have a bit a of a latent SMS fetish.

Anyway, so far, it’s actually a lot of fun – keeping up with what the local tech geeks are doing. “Let’s meet up at Laika for a coffee and talk about tech.” “Playing with the new Ruby libraries from Facebook.” That sort of thing. But after a while, it’s not hard to see the potential for Twitter on a larger scale.

As usual, the big media organizations are slow to get on board. I immediately subscribed to a few New York Times feeds. They’re on the ball. They’re Twittering their headlines. Next, I checked BBC. Yep, they’re Twittering too. But at a second glance, something looked fishy. Sure enough, they’re not Twittering their news feeds themselves – some dude named Menti is. And he’s getting a lot of exposure for himself and his site in the process. Menti explains.

CBC? I’d love to get a CBC Twitter feed. But there is none. Not yet. Where is Canada’s Menti? If I had any free time, I’d hack his Perl script and do it myself. These are the new jobs in journalism. Interns used to listen to the police wires all night. Now, it’s scavenging traffic off Twitter feeds until the mainstream media wise up – and doing the CBC-loving Twitter community a favour in the mean time.