... part of the technology for communities project,

started off by the authors of [Digital Habitats], Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith.

Definition / description

Microblogging involves short individual posts that have been popularized by Twitter.

Microblogging for communities of practice

Use a "hashtag" during a synchronous event to share public notes, retrieving them on http://search.twitter.com (see this example)
Announce synchronous events or blog postings
Microblog readership may not correspond exactly to community membership.

Microblogging usually exists in combination with other tools such as blogs, social bookmarks, email, and text messaging.

Together/apart, Synch/Asynch: Twitter postings are short, intended to be highly perishable, so it feels likes a mostly synchronous tool
Interaction/publication: Twitter posts are declarative so they can feel like an on-the-spot publishing tool, but their cumulative effect is to give the feeling of interaction with others in a kind of indirect way even though a twitter post can be directed at one individual
Individual/group: Twitter postings are written for anybody who "follows you" so they are usually written with a group in mind (although the tool makes you construct groups one individual at at time) so it's half-way between an individual and a group tool

There is an extensive ecology of tools that work with twitter:

Various services exist to make it easy to link to photos uploaded to related websites.

Group use is typical, but there are no "group norms" that have to be negotiated or that can be enforced
To collect questions in a face-to-face session, ask the participants to post them to Twitter with a hashtag, then organize them for response or later reference.
A Twitter stream with a hashtag can be projected on a screen at a conference, on a Webinar page, or accessed by people who can't attend physically.