Why Law Profs & Students Should Care About Twitter

So I've now been using Twitter in earnest for about 5 days now. I'm obsessed. I knew it would be hard to investigate the phenomenon that is Twitter, learn enough about it to understand what it can be used for, and stop the investigation before I got sucked in. And I was right. I overshot "discovery" and sailed straight into "obsession" within about 24 hours.

So I just saw that avid Twitterer Jim Milles has "re-tweeted" a link to a piece about Twitter in Court.

Here's what Jim's tweet (a message on Twitter) looks like: jmilles RT @mrebmann: Twittering and Transparency in the Courtroom http://tinyurl.com/bgewho via @ShareThis

And here's what it means. Jim Milles found information of interest that was in a tweet by Twitter user mrebmann. Jim forwarded this information in his own tweet. The information is on a web site with a predictably-long URL, so it's been shortened using a service called Tiny URL. That short URL (or "tiny URL") goes to the same place as the predictably long URL. And then at the end, it says "via @ShareThis." I have no idea what that means yet. Cut me a little slack. I'm just five days on this new planet.

Why should you care? Why should your students care?

Because the information Jim's tweet refers to is a piece about judges allowing reporters to report on cases from inside the courtroom using Twitter. Twitter, of course, only allows messages of 140 words or less, which is why all of this shorthand has been created. If allowing reports via Twitter becomes routine, look for Twitter shorthand that is law-specific to develop soon. And if you don't know how Twitter works or what those abbreviations mean, you won't be able to keep up with it in real time and decipher whether it's accurate or whether it complies with limit of the court's permission to report via Twitter.

Of course, you could just ignore the whole thing and just hire a 12-year-old to go with you to work every day.