The big news of the day, judging by his appearances on national radio last night and this morning, is that Darlington has appointed the country's first "Twitterer-in-residence". Mike McTimony, a frequent contributor to this blog's comments' section and a leading light in the town's cycling fraternity, has been appointed to the £140 a year position.
No doubt the usual suspects will line up to mock this appointment, but I think it's great. The power of this sort of communication was seen recently when a huge campaign was generated in a matter of hours against the Daily Mail after its columnist Jan Moir made disparaging remarks about Stephen Gately's lifestyle soon after his death a couple of months ago.
What will Mike tweet about? Will there be any more news along the lines of "Darlington town centre was fairly full today, despite the rain", which had my favourite news presenter, Peter Allen on 5Live, in stitches yesterday? How will Mike maintain a political balance, or will he even bother with politics? Sadly, since I have so far failed to master this thing, having tried unsuccessfully to work out how to follow David "Bumble" Lloyd during this summer's Ashes series, I may never know.
By the way, if you're interested in all this sort of stuff, try logging on here. It's a fun, interactive website about Darlington and well worth shoving into your favourites list.
2 comments:
The 5Live interview wasn't the best of the three radio interviews I did yesterday :)
It's good that there's some focus on the positive uses of social media.
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