Here is a little experiment – how would you describe your blog in 120 characters or less?

Now, here is the reasoning behind this experiment – Twitter!

Twitter is forcing people to become more succinct in their communication habits given all you have is 140 characters to post about yourself or to carry on a conversation.

Lets take it one more step – within Twitter you have a concept of a Retweet.  The significance here is lets say you would like to publish a piece of content and hope it becomes ‘viral’ in your community.  You need to post with less than 120 characters so people can repost your thoughts to their community while still giving credit to you.

Here is the crux of this little experiment — > ‘pitch’ your community on why we should read your blog.

Here’s how it’ll work:

• Over the next 5 days use the comment section of this post open for you to give an elevator pitch for your blog.
• To keep the ‘pitches’ short – you have to do it in 120 characters or less.
• Keep it family friendly please so no porn, no mlm, and no garbage.
• Sell your blog to us in any way you like as long as it’s 120 characters. Use humor, tell us what it’s about, tease us… what ever you want.
• Feel free to use your blog’s name in the ‘name’ field in the comments section and to leave the URL in the URL section to help you save on characters.
• Please only pitch one blog to us. If you have multiple blogs just pick your best one.
• After the weekend, I’ll close the comments on this post
• There will be no summary list of all blogs submitted.  However,  a few of my examples of your pitches will be highlighted in the 2nd post.
• If you don’t see your comment come up immediately please be patient. All comments are queued for moderation – we’ll get to it. There’s no need to add a 2nd comment.

Next steps after you submit your comments:

– Subscribe to my feed to be notified when the project ends so you can come back and surf the list!

– Follow me on Twitter so you can check out the RT’s of some of the best examples.

– point people to this experiment and encourage them to surf through the list and find some new blogs to read. Also encourage people to link up to the ones they find and enjoy reading.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how you pitch your blog (I think it’s important to be able to sell your blog in a few words so hopefully this is a useful exercise) but also to discovering some great new blogs!

As a thank you, any blogs I retweet, showcase or talk about – I will donate 50$ on behalf of the blog owner to 12for12k this month.  Also, I will send 50$ iTunes gift card to the blog  owner as a token of appreciation for helping out 12for12k.

Thanks all.

ps.  This is a re-purposed post inspired by Darren Rowse of Problogger.net – who is running his own project now —  31 Days to Build a Better Blog – Join 9100 other Bloggers Today!

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While you may not have heard of Twitter personally, there’s a good chance that one of your friends has and uses it regularly. Or your doctor, optician or even close relative. The truth is, while it’s not quite mainstream yet, Twitter is fast becoming one of the more popular online networks around.

Yet there are still a lot of questions being asked about what Twitter is and why it’s taking off the way it is. This, then, is a layman’s introduction to the service.

It’s Good to Talk

At its most basic, Twitter is a way to let you have a conversation with other users, and keep them updated to your current status. The welcome screen for Twitter even asks, “What are you doing?”

To keep things simple, Twitter only allows you 140 characters to get your message across. While this might seem small, it’s surprisingly effective and makes sure that messages are punchier as a result.

There are two message options on Twitter – public ( tweets) and private (Direct Messages, or DM’s). The public tweets can be seen by either anyone who is following your updates, or people that you have directed the message to, using the @ syntax.

So Why Sign Up?

Although there are no complete figures collected for the numbers using Twitter, guesstimates put it at around 5-6 million users. This is small compared to Facebook’s 150-million plus members, yet for such a relatively new web app, it’s a decent amount. And interest is growing all the time, with celebrities joining every day.

 So why should you be interested?

When you have a SMS text message conversation, or Instant Messenger chat, you know how instant that can be. It offers a quick and simple way to speak to someone and can save the bind of having to wade through emails to remember a topic.

Twitter is the same. Just transplant the SMS or IM conversation into the Twitter stream and you have the same quick and easy way of chatting with people. The difference is here you can potentially chat to another 5-6 million people.

If you need information on something quick, or directions to a place, Twitter users offer that to each other. If there’s an emergency, Twitter users in the area keep others up-to-date with what’s happening.

So it’s not only a great conversation tool for meeting new friends and people that share your views – it’s an information portal for all that’s currently going on in the world. It’s also a great business networking platform, but that’s a topic for another post.

So, to paraphrase Twitter’s own message – “What are you waiting for?”

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TechCrunch is reporting that Twitter has raised more funds, this time with a $250 million valuation. Last fall, Facebook was said to have made an offer to buy Twitter worth as much as $500 million.

That certainly would be a boon for Twitter, which until now has not shown signs of a viable business model to the world.  However, it seems the valuation is certainly based on future potential for monetization of its users and that Twitter has managed to show investors enough of a structure of a business model to loosen up the money.

Robert Scoble put the announcement in perspective “That means that if you are one of the six million people on Twitter that you’re worth $42.”  (Jeremiah Owyang was quick to point out “Assuming all six million are active – the valuation is more like $73).  Kind of rich for an open source platform – unlike Linkedin which sells out premium services that allows users greater access to data/users – Twitter has an API and a whole lot of spin off applications (sponsorships, advertising, friend harvesting have all been mentioned as possible revenue streams).

Congrats to the Twitter team - If you’d like to follow me at Twitter -  www.twitter.com/tmaduri

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