Here's some of the Canadian news organizations with twitter feeds:

CBC (the leader in terms of followers, with 1,514 as of this writing)

But some new ones appear to have sprung up recently:

Maclean's (119 followers)

TheStar.com (86 followers)

Globeandmail.com politics (10 followers)

My thoughts?

I think the idea of niche Twitter feeds makes sense. So better something from globeandmail.com politics than a generalized news feed from the Star or CBC. I'm finding I'm getting too much of stuff I don't want from the CBC.

But another problem is all those outlets are just using Twitter as another type of RSS feed, which is a practice I disagree with. Twitter feeds that are all repurposing, all the time aren't helpful.

To me, a great tweet should be something that doesn't need to be said in more than 140 characters -- and shouldn't be. And it's something that should be of the moment.

That being said, here's how twittering could be done better. Look at one sample tweet from the Globe:

Liberals failing to draw women voters: While the Tories are more popular with men, the NDP, Bloc an.. http://tinyurl.com/3zma3h

Blah, blah, blah. Ah, the downside of automated feeds.

A suggestion, folks:

Liberals failing to draw women voters - http://tinyurl.com/3zma3h

Just flow the headline in and you'll be better off. If you could have written a Twitter-specific headline like 'Liberals failing to draw women voters: poll', even better. BTW, here's the original:

Liberals failing to draw women voters1

While the Tories are more popular with men, the NDP, Bloc and Greens are splitting off female vote

Someone who's got a flair for catchy blog headlines is Kady O'Malley of macleans.ca (a personal favourite: Do you think it's easy to secure e-mail lists?). But I'm guessing her stuff also gets automatically fed into Twitter. Otherwise, how would you explain a mess like this?

For some reason, her stuff looks cleaner on the main Maclean's feed. But again, just using Twitter to pimp one's blog or news is underutilizing the medium.

If you want to see how the pros do it ...

Actually, I should say that Susan Ormiston (of CBC's Ormiston Online) has a somewhat clean feed, but there's duplicate postings in it -- and no conversation.

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