Managing a quality blog takes time and effort, so bloggers tend to turn to microblogging tools as it is much easier to update such services regularly. Micro-blogs can provide short messages, commentary or a series of links to any kind of media content.

One of the most popular microblogging services is Twitter, which was launched in July 2006 and has more than 8 million users. On Twitter, users can post SMS-like messages (containing only 140 characters) and can also receive the updates via SMS, RSS, e-mail or through an application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.




The Twitter page of the World Health Organization (twitter.com/whonews)

How to post a message?

Insert your message (up to 140 characters) and click on Update:



If you want to send a message to someone, use the @NAME code. Click on Replies to see who has sent a message to you. If you want to send a private message, choose the Direct Messages function.

Lists of valuable users

• Scientific Twitter Friends (Sciencebase)
• Medical Students (Osler's Node)
• Top 100 Health and Medicine People (Medical Student's Blog)

Following trends with Twitter

The Google Alert version of Twitter is called TweetBeep and it alerts you by e-mail the keyword you flagged for attention is mentioned on Twitter.



With Tweetscan, you can do searches for your keywords and find out what others write about that. You can also create an RSS feed of your query.



You can do searches with the search service of Twitter as well.





Of course, there are different, but less popular microblogging tools such as Jaiku, Pownce, Spoink and Plurk .

Friendfeed, a social aggregator, lets users share messages, videos, images, slideshows, links and any kind of media content. It provides the facility to track online activities.



Friendfeed for microblogging

How to post a message or a link?

First register, then click on Message, insert your text, link, video or image and click on Post.





How to easily share anything on FriendFeed



Friendfeed makes it easier for you to aggregate your online activities (the posts published on your blog, your latest Flickr images, Youtube videos or Twitter messages, etc.) by adding RSS feeds to your account. Choose Import Site, then the service you would like to add.



Insert your RSS feed and you are ready.



You can easily follow rooms where people from the same field of interest can share images, videos and ideas with each other. When you would like to follow a room, click on the Join this room button. A few rooms that you might find interesting:

• Doctors, Students, & Health Care Professionals
• Science 2.0
• Second Life
• The Life Scientists

The Friendfeed room of Doctors and Students (friendfeed.com/rooms/doctors)

Today's blogging platforms are not designed for live blogging. Blogging live from a conference means you have to write, save, and publish and then refresh your blog's page and your readers also have to automatically refresh the page on their own to see the new content.

Covering live events, sessions, conferences becomes easy with tools such as CoverItLive. It is an online software that enables publishing commentary in real time. You can drop polls, videos, pictures, audio clips and links immediately as well. Comments and questions will only appear after your moderation.



It can turn live blogging into an online event. That's what the application would look like on your blog:



According to the New York Times, live blogging can change journalism.

And you can also stream your life with services like Sweetcron which is similar to Friendfeed but it lets users customize the template completely. An example is the blog of YongFook, a freelance web producer based in Tokyo: