Twitter

During public readings and presentations, the reader always runs the risk of losing the audience on Twitter. Your audience could be misquoting you or posting negative comments while you write.

New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary found an ingenious solution, actually tweeting her points as she mentioned them during a presentation. The Nieman Journalism Lab has all the details and digital tools she used to perform this seemingly miraculous feat.

Check it out: “The night before the talk, O’Leary tried to configure a simple script for Apple’s Keynote that would fire a tweet as soon as a slide slid. Wrap the desired tweet inside a [twitter] tag in the presenter’s notes and voilà. But the hotel wifi was shaky and she couldn’t get it to work. (Actually, the problem was probably this.) So she pre-wrote all of her tweets and handed them off to a couple of friends in the audience, who fired off each one when the corresponding slide appeared.”

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Designer Tom Scott has created Klouchebag, a Twitter app mocking the Internet’s obsession over Klout scores.

Check it out: ” Don’t take it personally. This is about as scientific as Klout’s own measurements — which is to say, it’s pretty much a crapshoot … Klouchebag uses the ARSE rating system. Anger: profanity and rage. Retweets: “please RT”s, no or constant retweeting, and old-style. Social Apps: every useless checkin on foursquare or its horrible brethren. And English Usage: if you use EXCLAMATION MARKS OMG!!! or no capitals at all, this’ll be quite high.”

Below, we’ve found the scores for some of our favorite Twitter pages. What’s your Klouchebag score?

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We are building a new directory linking to the Best Digital Publishers on Twitter. Add your favorite digital book publisher (or yourself) to the growing list. We will constantly update the directory, just like our Best of eBook News on Twitter, Best Book Reviewers on Twitter directory, the Best Editors Twitter list, and the Best Book Publicity and Marketing Pros on Twitter directory.

Most importantly, our feeble list IS NOT COMPREHENSIVE–yet. Add your favorite eBook journalists in the comments section–let’s connect eBookNewser readers with the best content. Read more

This morning, an author living in Japan tweeted about another earthquake: “So a 6 quake in Shizuoka, specifically Fujinomiya, and lesser magnitude farther out over Japan. Think it was a/b 4/5 where I am. Not bad.” Writer Ashley Thompson added: “I’m all right! We just had a biggish quake here in Shizuoka – but not too bad.”

As the world shares its support with Japan after a devastating earthquake and tsunami, Twitter has become a powerful tool for reading personal stories on the ground and collecting donations.

Over at GalleyCat, we are creating a Twitter list of all the writers living in Japan. If you have anyone to add, put them in the comments–we’ll keep updating the directory. If you want to help, the Authors for Japan site just launched yesterday, as writers and publishing professionals have donated some great prizes to raise funds for earthquake and tsunami relief in Japan.

Twitter has launched a new translation center to help people communicate around the globe.

The Twitter blog explains more: “The Translation Center allows us to crowdsource translations from our passionate users in order to more quickly launch Twitter in additional languages. Translators will be translating the product itself, not the Tweets. If you go to the settings page on Twitter.com and change your language, you’ll see what we mean.”

The service is currently available  in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Indonesian, Russian and Turkish will be next, with more languages coming throughout the year, including Portuguese.

Twitter first began crowdsourcing translations in beta in October, 2009. This new system was designed based on feedback from translators.

Author Margaret Atwood is a Taste Maker on Twitter. At least according to Klout.com, a site that measures social influence on Twitter.

Here is what Klout has to say about Atwood: “You know what you like and your audience likes it too. You know what’s trending, but you do more than just follow the crowd. You have your own opinion that earns respect from your network.” Atwood’s overall Klout score is 71, an impressive number. She reaches 13,000 people and her messages get an amplification score of 52 based on retweets and mentions.

Want to know the Klout score for your favorite authors and publishers, or your own Twitter handle? Follow this link.

The Internet appears to be completely shut down in Egypt, but a new tool will let Egyptian writers tweet stories via telephone.

Twitter, Google and SayNow have created a new tool to help Egyptian voices be heard–Speak2Tweet. Thousands of readers are already following the inspiring voicemail messages. Check out this voicemail tweet from a 26-year-old software engineer to see how the service works. Alive in Egypt is translating some of the messages, an invaluable service.

Here’s more from our sibling blog, WebNewser: “The embattled Egyptian government may have shut down Internet access, but engineers from Twitter, Google, and voice-application provider SayNow teamed up on Speak2Tweet, which allows people in Egypt to leave voice mails at international phone numbers +16504194196, +390662207294, or +97316199855, which will then be converted to Tweets with the #egypt hashtag.”

Twitter can have a lot of power when it comes to reviving an old book. Author Sarah Salway learned this when her book Something Beginning With, which was originally published in 2004, was republished by the Friday Project this past November.

After catching the eyes of some influential Twitter users, this buried book managed to make its way up the Kindle charts.

Publishing Talk reports: “When Something Beginning With became available again as part of the Friday Project’s “Library of Lost Books”, publisher Scott Pack blogged about it on The Bookseller site, and Sarah Salway blogged about how lucky she felt to get a second chance. Then author Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) tweeted about it to his 1.5m followers, pushing it up to 500 in the Kindle charts. Another tweeter called @GreatDismal – otherwise known as the author William Gibson – said he was taking it and another of Sarah’s books on holiday with him. Other tweeters picked up on this, including @gardenmonkey and @Danoosha.”

If you want the same to happen for your book, it helps to be on the radar of influential Twitter users. We have a number of Twitter feeds lists including the best eReader Twitter feeds, the best editor Twitter feeds and the best book review feeds.

Kindle and Twitter are two popular topics among our readers. Now you can use them both at the same time with the elegant KindleTwit program.

Lifehacker describes the simple interface: “You can post through a simple text input box, read your Twitter stream, and check out your replies. You’ll have to write direct messages the old-school way (“d username Hey there …”), and forget about media previews. But if you’re going Kindle-only on a trip, and can’t stay away from the blue beast, this looks like a convenient way to indulge.”

What do you think? Will Twitter corrupt your reading experience? Or would you rather stayed tuned into your Twitter friends while reading a good eBook?

What’s your eBook resolution for the New Year?

We’ve started the #litresolution hashtag on Twitter to collect your literary resolutions for 2011. As the holidays continue, we’ll share resolutions from other writers. Post your resolutions in the comments section or on Twitter.

To get things started, this eBook editor has a deceptively simple goal: he hopes to find a better way to catalog all the notes he writes in his digital book collection.