We are going to start experimenting with Twitter. I’m not sure how we’re going to use it, but our handle is baselinescene and you can find it here. Simon and I are sharing one account and, if we remember, will put our initials at the end of updates so you can tell who is who. We will probably use it to announce new posts (but probably not all of them, since right now I don’t know how to do it automatically), link to articles we find interesting but don’t have time to blog about, and broadcast random thoughts about the economy. (Don’t expect to find what we ate for lunch – unless it’s really good.) If this doesn’t turn into something useful, we’ll stop using it.
I’m not going to explain what Twitter is and how to use it, because I don’t really know. If you don’t know and you’re curious, ask someone under the age of 30.
Update: Thanks to the reader who pointed out twitterfeed, our new blog posts are now automatically added to our Twitter updates.
Also, for those who may be worried: If you ignore Twitter, you won’t be losing out on anything important; there’s nothing we do on the blog today that we are moving to Twitter.
Email updates
Several people have pointed out that our automated email updates do not include the name of the author for each post. This is a problem with Feedburner (the service we use to generate and send these updates) and there is no known solution.* So we have decided to start manually adding our names at the end of posts from now on. Since this is manual, we may forget from time to time; you can always find out who the author is by visiting the post itself on the web.
* We can’t use FeedFlares because we use WordPress.com, which doesn’t allow Javascript.
By James Kwak
The Baseline Scenario 
If you do want to automatically Twitter each new blog post, this plugin has worked well for me:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/
I can normally make out who wrote the post just by reading the first two lines, sometimes, just the title.
I don’t think you should start using Twitter unless you can explain clearly what it adds or what problem it solves.
I really hate twitter, but I like this blog so I guess I’ll put up with it…
Twitter: Please don’t. I’ve experimented with it via Planet Money, and honestly I just don’t care what you or anyone else is doing on an hourly basis. (no offense intended)
If President Obama posted to Twitter I would ignore it.
Check out Jim Nelson’s funny “Letter From the Editor” in this month’s GQ for Twitter related commentary.
Excited you guys are on twitter! Will be nice to now when there is a new post (if you integrate with your blog with a plugin), and shorter items that you are thinking about that may not warrant a blog post.
good luck using and I hope you find the experience useful…I am excited you guys have this feature.
I use Google reader to read your posts through RSS feed. Works well and I know who wrote the piece.
reader.google.com