Thanks for following the Digital Media and Learning Competition, on Twitter and otherwise!

For those of you who have followed the Twitter account we set up for the Digital Media and Learning Competition, thanks for following! The competition closes today at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time (GMT-4) and then we'll begin the great sort. I was the person behind that Twitter account, and will continue to post occasional updates from it for our 260+ followers. As a one-to-many communication tool, Twitter is right up HASTAC's alley and allowed us to quickly grow an informal network of interested folks.

This was my first foray into Twitter, but I certainly plan to start a personal account and stick with it. Why? As I mentioned in a response tweet to danah boyd in the first days after opening the account, Twitter serves as the ultimate aggregator and abbreviator. To stick the content you want the world to know about into 140 characters ensures that only the main points of the most important things on your mind are going to make it to your followers, and I quite like it. Far from stifling the content I have wanted to share, writing Twitter updates has provided a beneficial (and some may say necessary) filter for the hundreds of web pages, blog posts, widgets, and news items so that the output is manageable and convenient for readers.

Another unexpected advantage of this means of online communication is the ability for one-on-one messaging. As with Facebook, Ning, and every message board I can think of, a private messaging function exists. But more important for me is the @reply function, allowing you to tweet a message to a specific person but allow your other followers to also see it. If your message doesn't need to be private, this has merit because others may benefit from the link or message that you are sharing with your @recipient. Even if that only means finding more Twitterers to follow, this tool is still enabling network building. And it happens right in your update feed, obviating complication of the very simple Twitter interface by adding a Facebook wall or some other tool. Belated kudos to Twitter founder Evan Williams and the Twitter team for this robust tool that I'm proud to add to my Web 2.0 quiver.

As a closing note, I've enjoyed answering your questions and reading your updates for the last 6 weeks. And for those of you who applied for the Digital Media and Learning Competition, best of luck! I'll leave you with the video that launched the competition in the first year, Couture Guerrilla.