[Note to new visitors: You may be interested in this post about Twitter: "The Public Editor Joins the Cocktail Party."]
Updated March 13, 2011. Hello, and thanks for visiting my personal blog, which is mostly about coffee, with a little bit about social media and technology.
It is likely that you arrived at this welcome page by clicking the link on my Twitter profile. This post is my primitive method for tracking traffic from Twitter.
My name is Patrick LaForge. I have been an editor at The New York Times since 1997, after a dozen years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in upstate New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania. I started using Twitter in early 2007, when Sewell Chan and I created the City Room blog for The Times. In May 2009, I left City Room and the metro desk to become the editor in charge of the copy desks.
How I Use Twitter
I generally post updates about Web content I am reading, watching or thinking about, not what I had for lunch. I follow hundreds of people who use Twitter the same way — a collection of active linkers, journalists, bloggers, New Yorkers, Times staffers and readers.
You can see what Twitter looks like to me by viewing my Twitterstream list of the 800 or so accounts I follow and read every day. I find it hard to follow more people than that and read every tweet. If you are interested in a high-signal list that is mostly links and retweets, try my list “Linkers”, the people I rely on to recommend the latest, best content on Twitter and the Web.
I do not automatically return follows, but if you engage with me and provide interesting content, the odds are I will add you to my twitterstream.
And if you are not among the people I follow directly, but you seem nice enough (and not a spammer or commercial bot), I may add you to the few thousand accounts on The Mighty List, when I get a chance. (For some reason, Twitter allows me to go above the 500-account cap on these lists, and I’m not sure why — perhaps it’s a glitch, or perhaps it’s because I was a lists beta-tester or have a verified account.)
If you are relatively new to Twitter, you might be interested in this post, “Basic Twitter Links for Journalists.”
