You’ve heard about plants that send out tweets when they need water. Now someone has created a power meter that tweets its daily power usage to a Twitter account. This is interesting because it allows you to socially share your household’s power usage, thus perhaps making you a more responsible citizen. Not only would you be encouraged to be more green, it’ll help you cut down your electrical bills.

The only issue is that it might not be so easy for laypeople to pick up the open source schematics and do it up. In the future I’m sure we can all look forward to built-in integration with Twitter or the web for most households or products. Profile for the twittering powermeter –> @tweetawatt

Paul Smith is a guy from Newscastle, UK. He blogs for the Guardian newspaper and recently decided to hitchhike as far as possible around the world by relying on the help of Twitter users. Part publicity stunt, this is an endeavor to raise money for charity:water, a nonprofit that brings clean/safe drinking water to developing nations.

The aim is to travel as far from home (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK) as possible within 30 days. New Zealand is the place closest to the opposite point on the planet to my house, so that should be my intended destination.

Here’s a great article about how Twitter was born from the trials and tribulations of a group of young entrepreneurs. Written by one of the early developers of Twitter, this is inspirational for startups and showcases how an idea can be translated into a worthy web service with some hard work. The picture above shows what the early twitter looks like.

Twitter Venn takes two or three search terms and creates a Venn Diagram showing the rate of tweets containing the search terms in the various combinations. A tag cloud can also be shown for one of the regions.

This is one of the more interesting Twitter visualization tools I’ve seen so far. It tracks the usage of specific words in relation to each other, which quite honestly, is a terrific asset for linguists and people interested in social language. At the bottom of the diagram is a constantly moving stream of tweets which include the words you’ve highlighted and its quite an interesting way to pick up on random opinions featuring specific keyterms.

This interview with Danielle Brigida, an Operations Coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation, gives us a general overview of how non-profits can use Twitter to generate support. She offers a golden piece of advice:

Start slow, listen and understand the space before you jump in. Don’t follow too many people initially–but follow people who share your interests or who are local to your area. Grow organically and be authentic. Talk to people like they are your friends, not like you are trying to advertise. I think the most important thing you can do is be real and ask for help when you need it.

The Washington Post has a story about how the Republican party in America is currently embracing Twitter as a form of reaching voters and supporters.

As the Republican Party rebuilds after its defeat at the polls in November, the discussion has centered not so much on honing its message as on messaging — on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. In previous elections, the GOP often used technology in targeting voters more effectively than Democrats did; now the party is playing catch-up.

Some Republicans worry that all the tech talk is overshadowing more fundamental tasks, like recruiting new candidates and broadening the party’s appeal.

Many publishers like magazines, newspapers and even blogs have produced infographics to explain how certain aspects of how Twitter works. We’ve been scouring the web for them and decided to start a new category featuring Twitter infographics. To start things off, here’s one by David Armano.

Ogilvy has a simple diagram on how twitter can be used as part of a PR strategy. The gist of it is simple: monitor and follow people who are either your target market or people who can influence or affect your business. After which, create tweets which help to fulfill a specific purpose and be sure to interact widely by pro-actively engaging other users via replies or direct messages. Simple enough and it shows the basic framework for how Twitter can and is currently used by savvy businesses.

The public display of emotions has increased in the digital age. It’s all so accelerated nowadays. Words and individual expression come pouring out like water into the ears of anyone who is willing to hear, even when there is no intended audience. Twitter is like blogs on steroids when it comes to sharing of individual feelings on just every topic, no matter how trivial or important.