Join me for a Twitter interview with Shel Israel, author of "Twitterville"

I've been very impressed with Shel Israel's new book "Twitterville." Shel practically initiated the study of corporate social media with his book "Naked Conversations," coauthored with Robert Scoble. Now he's done it again, with a highly readable, thoughtful analysis of strategies for Twitter.

I like to interview authors and other thinkers for the Groundswell blog, but this time we'll do it a little differently. We'll do it on Twitter.

This Friday, 16 October, I'll begin Twittering questions to @shelisrael, and he'll respond to @jbernoff . The interview will start at 12:00 eastern time, 9:00 pacific time.

You can follow the conversation even if you're not a Twitter user. Just go to this address and watch at the appropriate time:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=jbernoff+shelisrael

We'll also be using the hashtag #tville to identify our tweets.

I'll also be posting an edited transcript after the interview is over, so if you miss it, just watch this space.

One more thing. Because Twitter allows anybody to address anybody, some of you may wish to join in this conversation, but to avoid chaos and improve the experience, I'm going to concentrate on the thread of my interview from 12:00 to 12:30 ET. That is, while you can of course tweet at me or Shel during that time, don't be surprised if I don't respond to your tweets as they happen.

Think of this as you would a panel at a conference. We’ll be talking mostly to each other, at least for the first half hour. You can Twitter notes to us and talk amongst yourselves, but we’ll only be answering those if they go along with the thread of what we’re talking about. At 12:30, we’ll take more questions from the “audience” -- that is, we'll look more closely at the tweets from the rest of you and respond to some of them.

I'm looking forward to seeing if this experiment works -- and regardless, with Shel on the line we'll all learn something interesting about Twitter.

Comments

[Whitney Johnson]

Clever idea. I won't be able to chirp along with you, bu I'll look forward to your Re-Tweet!

[Home Business Leads]

This is a great idea! Hope the experiment works. I'll be watching this space though.

[davidjason]

Cool. I will check this out. Any idea how many Twitter fans he has? lol. Who has the most..
Two Voices | Two Guys

[Josh Bernoff]

@davidjason I have 7500+. He has twice that many.