Former LaTimes.comer Eric Ulken on Twitter

Former LaTimeser Eric Ulken's got a nice post on Twitter over at his blog.

Here's a couple of his tips for journalists on getting the most out of Twitter:

# Twitter advanced search: Sure, everybody knows about Twitter search, but the advanced search options can be a pretty effective way to cut through the noise. For a simple example, try this: earthquake near:”Los Angeles” within:15mi (The geographic search makes use of the place name that users set in their profiles as a geotag for each of their tweets. Imperfect, but it’s a start.)
# TwitScoop: See what’s trending in real time. In the future, I imagine a local version of this (limited to tweets in a particular geographic area) on a big display on the wall of every newsroom.

When news breaks I use search to find witnesses to interview. When a man caught himself on fire at the University of Washington in October, I was able to find a number of people who saw it or the aftermath using Twitter advanced search.