Saturday, 7 February 2009

Scooped! director in today's Sun newspaper


Here is the unedited article in full ..

Former Sun man James McIvor is a self-confessed twitter addict. He joined early last year primarily to promote his company Scooped! Spoof Newspapers but has since launched the world's first online twitter newspaper, The All Tweet Journal. You can follow James at @makingthenews and @alltweetjournal or visit his websites www.makingthenews.co.uk or thealltweetjournal.com

Here is his take on twitter ...

I JOINED twitter at the same time as I was signing up to loads of other social network sites - myspace, bebo and Facebook to name just three.
All these sites served their purpose of helping to promote my business but, for me at least, twitter has raced ahead of the game.
Its great strength is its simplicity - anyone can use twitter without having to work out how to use fancy applications, although they are available for the geeks.
Around 1,000 people follow my tweets each day and twitter allows me to inform them of our new spoof newspaper front pages, offer Valentine's Day discounts or ask their advice on new ideas.
The easiest way to build up a following is to follow followers of followers, if you follow me.
But it's not all about business, it's great being able to share ideas with people of all different backgrounds, share newspaper or blog articles or just find out how people are passing their day.
Since I signed up the number of people using twitter has increased by 1000% and I read the other day there are now 35million users so it has become a very powerful site.
Twitter scooped the world with the first picture of the Hudson River plane crash - the pic was on twitter within a few moments and I replied to the original tweet to say it was a spoof. A couple of hours later it was on the BBC News at 10.
Celebs are now getting into twitter, presumably because - as you only have 140 characters to play with - they can let their fans know what they're doing very easily and very quickly.
Jonathan Ross announced on twitter that he was hosting the Baftas and the next day every national newspaper ran the story.
I like that I can scan twitter - there are 20 tweets per page - and if anything grabs my attention I'll go straight to that page. It saves the hassle of visiting all your favourite sites - if you follow the right people they do it for you - and it is a very quick and immediate way to keep up to speed with the news.
Earlier this month I launched The All Tweet Journal, an online twitter newspaper that will allow people who use twitter regularly to share their news with a wider audience. I have taken the twitter format and put it onto a regular looking newspaper.
It's early days but the feedback has been great so far and the plan is to go from a weekly newspaper to a daily.
If you are only interested in following your favourite celeb then before signing up to twitter first of all visit valebrity.com to check that it really is them - there a plenty of fakes out there.
So, if you are not already on twitter, twit are you waiting for?

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