So for the past few months or so I’ve been using Twitter, which is a strange little mix of instant messenger, blogging, and email. Here’s a great explanation of what exactly it is. You’ve probably heard of Twitter already (I’m hardly on the cutting edge on this one), but when I started using it, I figured I’d punch out a few tweets and give up on it. But somehow, I’ve “tweeted” (that’s what they call it) over 1200 times now, and I’m not giving up anytime soon.

And I’ve discovered something else. I also put my tweets on my Facebook account, where everyone I know can see them, and old friends have come in out of the blue to reply to something I said in my tweets. And even new friends have found something interesting there — they chime in with other opinions on what I’m saying, have kept general tabs on where I’m at (so that the next time they see me, I learn more about them as well), and have even disagreed with me or given different viewpoints on something that, without Twitter, I normally would have kept to myself.

So this weekend I updated mikeschramm.com with the singular plan of putting my Twitter feed here on the blog. You blog readers are probably the most distant people in my life (I have no idea who most of you are), but you’re good folks, and you seem to care about what I’m into as well. Plus, I haven’t been very good at keeping up the links here, and I’ve been sharing a lot of that stuff on Twitter, so while I’ll still linkblog when I see something good, I’ll use Twitter for the same thing.

It’s a work in progress — I’d like to make sure to get the replies out of the mix (because when I say @someone you folks here on the blog will have no idea what I’m talking about), and I’m not sure how to format them — the tweet-to-single post thing looks a little strange, so I’m also trying a daily digest of what I say on Twitter.

Anyway, that’s why you’re going to start seeing little 140 character tweets pop up on here. Some of them might be quite personal (you’ll probably hear when I go out to a new restaurant, and while I’ll try to keep it as relevant as possible, you may hear when I think I’m feeling under the weather), but I figure that if you routinely come to a place called “mikeschramm.com,” you won’t have a problem with knowing a little bit about Mike Schramm.