Several exciting Twitter developments over the past few days as clearly the power of micro-messages continues to sweep the globe. On the oft-dreary newspaper front, The Guardian in London has taken the bold and necessary step to close down it’s printing presses and shift to reporting the news entirely by Tweets. 

There was a great post on the Chronicle’s website today about the use of Twitter by nonprofit organizations. Great quotes from my Social Citizens blog pal Kari Dunnn Saratovsky at the Case Foundation and Beth (of course!)

If you’re contemplating committing time to engaging people on Twitter – and it does take time – you need to ask yourself a bunch of other questions first. 1.      Lay A Solid Online Outreach Foundation The first question you should ask yourself as a fundraiser is, do you have your most basic online outreach in place?

Twitter is the Oxford Dictionary’s 2009 Word of the Year. Not only are good news items coming up, but I’ve also expanded my RSS reader with some blogs I encourage you to get to know: Social Herder : If you don’t know Will Robinson, you might want to. If you’re on Twitter, let’s connect @ socialbttrfly.

Nieman Lab did a six month experiment trying to get nonprofit news in with the Associated Press. Spectacular stories from various nonprofit news outlets on the high incidence of college campus rape, transportation money for cities, the healthcare lobby and more, did not get picked up. Do you have contacts at local TV news stations?

Through web, video and online social media outreach – including Facebook and Twitter as well as with a new We Are One webpage – the grassroots effort calls on all citizens to share how they are one with Central Texas. Lance Armstrong Foundation. Therefore, We Are One is more than just an awareness campaign. Austin Children’s Shelter.

The Foundation Center created an entire web page, Focus On the Economic Crisis , dedicated to the current economic crisis as it relates to raising grants, nonprofits, and others seeking grant money. You are able to follow their economic updates on Twitter. Tags: grant writing resources the economy the foundation center

And here is the great news: There are many programs that you can use to incorporate texting, email, and even social media like Facebook and Twitter into your communications, all delivered from one dashboard. Steve Cebalt, Author, The Communications Handbook for Nonprofits and Foundations -- [link]. Like parents. Grandparents.

Find new friends in this list of the top 100 Social Entreprenuership Tweeple to follow, put together by @ socialedge , a program of the Skoll Foundation. Casey Foundation–whose trial shows a $10 payback on every $1 invested. On someone’s Twitter list and you don’t want to be? Enjoy! Can prevention PROSPER?

You don’t start out with 25,000 Twitter followers.) As one foundation executive recently put it—this is not about doing more with less but doing differently with less. Nonprofits and foundations have been paying lip-service to networking for years, but now it’s time to get seriously intentional and collaborative.