All right, I admit it: occasionally, I find it really hard to sit down and blog. Some days it’s hard to string one coherent sentence together, let alone a whole paragraph of them.

(Personal note: this seems to have an inversely proportional relationship to the amount of caffeine I’ve had. Further study warranted.)

Fortunately, a guy named Jack Dorsey and a couple of his cohorts came up with a solution for me: Twitter. It’s only been around for about a year and a half, but the concept is so great that it’s taken off like Diablo Cody’s career (who has a Twitter account, by the way). The idea is simple: micro-blogging, or blog posts of 140 characters or less.

It sounded a little dopey to me at first, but SEO guru Matt Bailey finally turned me on to it. The applications are pretty great. With Twitter, you suddenly have the ability to blog 10 times a day without having to give up… well, the whole rest of your life. You can update from text messages on your mobile phone. Shorter updates mean less time for readers to stay updated.

I’ve set up a Black Hills Twitter account as an experiment at www.twitter.com/BlackHills. If you’re still not sure about this whole Twitter thing, don’t sweat it. Go take a look at the Black Hills Twitter page and you’ll get it figured out pretty quickly.

I plan to update at least a couple of times a day with Black Hills travel info – weather updates, special events, news, elk sightings… whatever’s relevant, and probably a few things that aren’t. If you’re planning a trip to the area soon, you can use Twitter to sign up for those updates and receive them by instant messenger or on your cell phone, or you can simply check in to www.twitter.com/BlackHills.