Darlington appoints Twitterer in residence

Twitter bird

A town in County Durham has hired its own dedicated Twitterer to tweet about local news and events.

Darlington has called on the services of teacher Mike McTimoney who will use Twitter to keep the outside world informed of what's going on locally.

"I am really into social media and all the fantastic opportunities the Internet offers - so I thought this would be an interesting thing to do," he said in a statement.

"I think it is great to be the UK's first Twitterer in residence and hope other towns will follow suit. I deal with young people on a daily basis and think this is a great way to get important information to them."

McTimoney will be tweeting under the name of TheDarloBoard as part of the plans formed by the Darlington Partnership. He'll be paid 140 a year for his services.

"More and more people are communicating using digital and social media and we want to reach as many people as possible," said Andy Atkins, a member of the Darlington Partnership, in a statement.

"We are already running the Darlington Experiment 2.0 (Dx2)- which is Europe's biggest social media experiment - and having our very own Twitterer was a natural progression."

Earlier this week, Twitter was crowned as the most popular word of 2009. Click here for our beginner's guide to Twitter for business.

Maggie Holland

Maggie has been a journalist since 1999, starting her career as an editorial assistant on then-weekly magazine Computing, before working her way up to senior reporter level. In 2006, just weeks before ITPro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of ITPro, she was appointed group editor of CloudPro and ITPro in April 2012. She became the editorial director and took responsibility for ChannelPro, in 2016.

Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.