The team at Common Craft are at it again! They have produced another video that explains a technology tool in plain English - this time its Twitter. Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that fills in that gap between email and a blog post and allows you to have short 140 character conversations with your friends and follow the conversations of those who you find interesting.

Funny enough, I came across the video via a tweet from Mike Sansone of Converstations on Twitter. If you are on Twitter, you can follow me, too.

PS - Have you heard about SOBCon08 yet? It is part conference, part business school for bloggers, and will be the blogging event of the year. Check out the list of speakers they have lined up already - you do not want to miss it! I am competing in the SOBCon contest to go to the event for free - click on any of the SOBCon links (or the cool banner on the right) and help me out. You don’t have to do anything fancy, just click.

I first noticed that CNN was starting to embrace social media when I suddenly started getting traffic from their site after linking to one of their news stories. However, this morning while catching up on the daily news, I noticed something else:

I noticed the WordPress favicon in my browser tabs and started to look at the page much more closely.  Scrolling down the page, I saw many familiar WordPress elements like “posted time”, “filed under”, “permalink”, “add a comment”, “comment policy” and the ever familiar smiley face under the Powered by Wordpress credit at the bottom of the page.

It is great to see traditional media outlets beginning to use our favorite blogging software!  And based on what I have observed from the political race so far, blogging, social media, and technology in general are all tools that will play a major role in the success and/or failure of more than one of the candidates!

More and more I am hearing about people using the online service Twitter, which is a way to communicate with friends, family and associates through short conversations of 140 characters or less.

From what I have been hearing, many of the top bloggers are no longer reading RSS feeds and are getting more out of Twitter. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net must feel like it is worth it - he has posted two excellent Twitter articles this week:

• 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers
• How to Use Twitter - Tips for Bloggers

What I want to know is, do you Twitter and have you found it to be beneficial to your overall networking?

Part of me is dying to try it and part of me feels like it will be one more distraction - so which part of me do I listen to?

UPDATE: I jumped into the Twitter pond! Tweet me.