David Maddox: The day ahead - Holyrood tweets, budget cuts and newspapers

It's pretty clear what subject's going to dominate Holyrood today as it has done for weeks before and will do for months to come - the Budget and the cuts/ efficiency savings to the Scottish block grant.

We are still unclear whether the cut to the previously expected amount for 2010 is £500 million as the SNP say or £367 million as Labour say, but it will be the theme of First ministers' questions today whether Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray likes it or not.

You can follow FMQs on Twitter, assuming goes to plan, by following thesteamie profile where I will try to keep you updated.

I should add that I also put comments on my new Twitter profile DavidPBMaddox, every so often, although not running commentaries from Holyrood debates. I felt that if Labour MSP Lord George Foulkes can be First Lord of the Twittery and Green MSP Patrick Harvie can tweet from Gordon Brown's dinner table then it was time to have a go myself.

One other debate of interest will be a debate on the Scottish newspaper industry put forward by Labour MSP and former journalist David Whitton. We live in interesting times in this industry and whatever you think of the various titles its future will form an important part of holding politicians in councils, Holyrood and Westminster to account.

Kenny Farquharson: Do you Twitter?

The Steamie is now available on Twitter (www.twitter.com/thesteamie).

If you have no idea what that sentence means you are:

a. not in tune with the zeitgeist

b. not paying attention

or

c. a High Court judge

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a micro-blogging site where posts are limited to 140 characters.

Everyone's doing it, from Barack Obama to Gordon Brown to Andy Murray to Stephen Fry to, er, me (www.twitter.com/KENNYFARQ).

There's even a rather good spoof Alex Salmond site www.twitter.com/Alex_Salmond (sample posting from the past few days: "Got to love American portion sizes...")

Get tweeting...

David Maddox: First Lord of the Twittery (aka For Foulkes Sake 6)

He may look like a congenial old(ish) buffer whose idea of modernity may not stretch further than the introduction of the wireless, but the Baron of Cumnock, Lord George Foulkes, MSP for the Lothians, can lay claim to being the most cyber active politician north of Hadrian's Wall.
I gather his lordship has become the first member of the upper house to become a twitter, which has a slight irony considering that many of his opponents have long thought he was that without the last "ter".
It seems having his own Facebook page, Youtube TV channel and blog were not enough for him.
And I'm realiably informed that this is the form of communication that is going to outstrip Facebook in 2009. Apparently twitters tweet, which is to put out lots of quick messages about themselves or whatever interests them of no more than 140 characters.
I understand many politicians have already become twitters, so much so that there is a special tweetminster website - http://www.tweetminster.co.uk/ - where MPs happily tweet to one another.
Whilst we are at it, there is also another new bit of cyber wizardry available for those who want to hold ministers to account.
Visitors to http://www.yoosk.com/ can post a question to anybody and if enough people ask that question of the same person, the website will go and ask the person in question. Not surprisingly it is dominated by political questions and has had responses from UK ministers including Foreign Secretary David Milliband, who sent in video replies. The quality of the answer is then rated by users of the site, just in case the politicians think they can get away with one of their traditional fob offs.
Currently no Scottish ministers have been held to account this way, but one suspects it is only a matter of time before it happens. Take this as a warning Alex Salmond.
By the way, if you wish to tweet or become a twitter go to http://www.twitter.com/.