Jumping on the Twitter Bandwagon

I’ve officially jumped on the Twitter Bandwagon.

I held off for a while, but now I’m in.

Check out my page and feel free to follow me.

While I may or may not be following Brooklyn Decker, my plan is not to tweet about the endless daily minutiae of my life as I assume you all have daily minutiae in your own lives that takes precedence.

I will post links to news on ZAGSBLOG, but mostly I will follow a slew of college basketball coaches and recruits because, like it or not, this is now a legitimate source of news.

Taking a page out of Gary Parrish’s book, if you’re a college coach and wish to be followed but aren’t on this list below, please shoot me an email at zagoria@hotmail.com so I can add you to my list.

*John Calipari (Kentucky)

*Stan Heath (South Florida)

*Jim Engles (NJIT)

*Kyrie Irving (St. Patrick)*Jim Larranaga (George Mason)

*Tubby Smith (Minnesota)

*Gary Williams (Maryland)

*Donnie Jones (Marshall)

*Bruce Pearl (Tennessee)

*Matt Doherty (SMU)

*Travis Ford (Oklahoma State)

*Jeff Capel (Oklahoma)

*Jamie Dixon (Pitt)

*Keno Davis (Providence)

*Tom Crean (Indiana)

*Scott Drew (Baylor)

*Fred Hill (Rutgers)

*Darren Savino (Rutgers)

*Mike Brey (Notre Dame)

*Rick Pitino (Louisville)

The most interesting thing I’ve seen so far in my brief Twittering existence?

Coach Capel of Oklahoma posted an update directed solely at the 6-foot-2 Irving, one of the top prospects in the Class fo 2010.

Hey man, this is coach Capel head coach at the Univ of Oklahoma. Good luck at the NBA camp! Do work

So college coaches can reach out and issue comments directly to recruits on Twitter?

Text messaging and instant messaging recruits is off limits to coaches.

But apparently the NCAA considers correspondence on social networking sites to fall under the same rules as email, meaning they basically can be unlimited in nature.

Pretty sweet if you’re a college coach looking to establish a rapport with a kid.

“You have to stay up with the times to be competitive,” Clemson football recruiting coordinator Jeff Scott told Rivals.com.

Jeff Capel follows 10 people and, you guessed it, Kyrie Irving is one of them.

In a day and age when many college coaches — including those who aren’t big fans of blogs and bloggers — have a Twitter account (Can you be pro-Twitter and anti-blog at the same time?), it is fascinating to think how far technology has come.

Back in the 1950s, sportswriters tossed their articles from a moving train to a waiting telegrapher and then prayed the stories would appear in the next day’s paper.

Dave Anderson wrote about it in a great story called ‘The Romance of Teams Traveling by Train‘ that includes a great anecdote along those lines.

How far have we come in half a century?

Sportswriters are now called on to Blog, Tweet, do online video pieces…oh, and write newspaper articles, too.

Of course, the same technology that has moved us forward has also worked to put newspapers on the brink of irrelevance.

Overall newspaper sales are down 7 percent from last year and every paper in the Top 25 in circulation is down except the Wall Street Journal.

The New York Post is down 20.6 percent.

Need any more proof that times are a-changin’?

Just ask the three Baltimore Sun writers who were recently let go.

In the middle of an Orioles game. Over the phone.

Or check out the carnage that occurred last week at the Bergen Record.

It’s a new world…and news is coming directly from the horses’ mouths more and more these days.

So I figured, if you can’t beat ’em…Jump on the Bandwagon.

If it’s good enough for Brooklyn, it’s good enough for me.