Paul Bradshaw slam dunks (sorry listening to another Dan Patrick podcast) the question that a lot of people have been asking recently – What is Twitter ?

This beginner’s guide gives a great introduction to Twitter, and some practical tips on how to get started.

And it’s all right to look through the presentation at work too because it’s part of the materials for his online journalism course (he’s a proper lecturer and everything at Birmingham City University) So really you’re expanding your skillset, or training…or something.

PS. I’m not the only one who think’s it a good preso – it was Slideshare’s top Presentation of the Day yesterday

One of the reasons for this blog is to pull together some nuggets of the more useful stuff that I’ve done, add a bit of context and offer them up to whole new audience – UK Freeview watchers will know this as the Dave channel approach. So a few presentations, pictures and highlights of events will pop up here occasionally (don’t worry, no Last of the Summer Wine)

This time last year we ran a workshop with the help of David Wilcox, to help us understand what the next generation of ruralnet|online might look like – (we were also doing that process online). As part of that I did a presentation boldly (possibly foolishly) titled ‘Working 2.0′ where I talked my way through a typical ‘day’ (actually it was pretty close to the mark) of mostly working online, blending scanning comments and feeds, responding to conversations, adding pictures and even using an RSS feed search from eBay to find a replacement bowl I had dropped while while washing up. It’s all still pretty relevant I think, and it’s not just slides, there is audio too (not brilliant quality I’m afraid), but if you’ve got a spare half hour and Red Dwarf isn’t on Dave, have a cup of tea and a watch.

There were a few questions in that session – including “When did you do any work?” but I think I got across the point that with an RSS reader and few other (free) tools, I could do things online that I couldn’t do trapped on my desktop. Oh I didn’t touch my email to do any of it.

Other real outcomes from the day?

Giving Tracey Todhunter the tiniest bit of confidence she needed to take over the Low Carbon blogging world, and meeting a bloke called Dave Briggs – still, you can’t have everything.

PS Well done if you spotted the missing element of ‘Working 2.0′ – the absence of Twitter. The presentation wasn’t about the tools but more what they could do and I’m sure that if I’d been on Twitter then, it would have formed part of the day.

PPS another Social Media/Social Reporting Tip – posting the presentation online and the pictures have meant I could refer to them again now just by pasting in a link or two.  Also there were about 15 people in the room that day, but the presentation (at the time of writing) has been viewed over 400 times, pretty good use of a resource that we had prepared and produced already.

• More pictures from the workshop
• More thoughts on the day