This is my first blog on this newly launched website – finally everything is in one place. My main complaint with the blogger setup, which I experimented with briefly last year, was that it couldn’t be properly integrated into another website.

One of the new additions to this site is the integration of my Twitter feed, displayed to the right. I was sceptical about Twitter when I first looked at it last summer, however, I am now well and truly converted. Many of you will have seen Stephen Fry on the news talking about the joys of ‘tweeting’ or Jonathan Ross inserting the word ‘salad’ into his BAFTA speech after asking his Twitter followers for a suggestion of a bizarre word to throw into the proceedings. It is fantastically accessible, easy to use and has yet to become a huge sprawling monster of a website – a fate that has befallen other social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

It is, in essence, a micro-blogging site. In 140 characters or less (including spaces) one describes what one is doing or what is on one’s mind. Often people will ‘tweet’ about a news story and provide a link to it or illustrate their point with a photograph. Recently, especially in the United States, news stories have broken on Twitter before they hit the major news networks – this was the case when Captain Chesley Sullenberger heroically landed US Airlines flight 1549 in the Hudson River. More locally (and admittedly much less impressively) I was tweeting from the opening of the Cattle Market development using my iPhone; I was able to comment and post pictures on Twitter before any of the journalists and photographers had left the launch. It really has revolutionised how news breaks and spreads.

I could explain more about how Twitter works but there are other websites that give a far better explanation than I could ever manage. For something so simple it is very difficult to sum up succinctly.

My tweets will continue to stream on this site but it really is worth joining Twitter and giving it a try – I can’t recommend it highly enough. Not everything I tweet about is politics or council related, it would be awfully dull if it was, and occasionally I may bore you with what I am doing for dinner or what havoc my dog, Rufus, has just caused. For this I make no apologies – it is part and parcel of Twitter and makes it a much more diverse experience.

I tend to Tweet when I am on a way to a meeting or going through an agenda – feel free to send me an @reply if you have any questions or if you wish to put a point across about an upcoming issue.