As part of the site revamp we’ve added tweets from onBirmingham to the sidebar, and would like you to join in: Twitter is now pretty much established as the place where news can break most quickly — when news happens it’s becoming more and more likely a Twitterer will be somewhere nearby, or be one of the first to hear it. But unless it’s huge World news whether you hear it quickly is dependant on who you’re following. If you’re not following the ‘newsmaker’ then you’ll wait until someone you do follow mentions it, or until a blog or even a newspaper picks it up (queue the “Twitter is fast at news” news story). Thing is for the more niche or local story that may never happen. Which is where the idea behind onBirmingham comes in. It’s been going for about 18 months and with 300 odd news items it seems to work, but it could do with more people tweeting in. Here’s how it works: The @onBirmingham Twitter account retweets (with attribution) direct messages (DMs) sent to it. It can only get DMs from people that the account is following, so there can’t be any spam. onBirmingham will...
