Most people use Twitter to broadcast their daily activities, a term called “lifecasting”

A journalism professor has decided to turn Twitter into a mindcasting tool.

Here is an excerpt from the Los Angeles Time, March 11, 2009 on what he did.

“Mindcasting is where it’s at.

The distinction is courtesy of Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu), a journalism professor and new media analyst at New York University.
For him, Twitter is a new way to conduct a real-time, multi-way dialogue with thousands of his colleagues and fellow netizens.

“Mindcasting came about when I was trying to achieve a very high signal-to noise-ratio,” he explained.
This meant using his Twitter account to send out tweets pointing to the best media news and analysis he could find,
15 or 20 times a day. “I could work on the concept of a Twitter feed as an editorial product of my own.”

As Rosen noted, that product is itself a distillation of the huge stream of input he gets from the nearly 550 journalists,
analysts and news outlets he follows on Twitter. “I’ve hand-built my own tipster network,” he said.
“It’s editing the Web for me in real time.”

Now zoom out and think of Rosen, his hundreds of sources and his 11,000 followers,
each as a kind of individual information amplifier, consuming and passing along the
most interesting stuff that comes their way.

So when the Gazette newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, announced it was re-engineering itself,
with the newspaper as just one container for its news, Rosen saw the news tweeted by Scott Karp,
a Web journalism entrepreneur he follows — and shared the story with his own audience.

It’s people-powered media in action.”

In fact you could be publishing your own mini newspaper from your kitchen table.
Reach out to thousands if not millions of readers at the speed of light.

And it cost you almost nothing, except for a broadband connection and a notebook computer.
In return you could reap handsome financial rewards for your time when you monetise your mini newspaper.