MuniLand

Yesterday I attended the always great municipal finance conference held by Bloomberg:

The Bloomberg State & Municipal Finance conference will convene public sector policy makers, labor leaders, pension fund managers, institutional investors and issuers for a full-day program covering current issues central to state and municipal finance and evaluate opportunities for investors and participants in the municipal bond market.

If you are not familiar with Twitter, this might give you a better idea of how it works. This micro-blogging format fit the form of the conference, which had 3-4 speakers on each of its fifteen panels. I tweeted from several of them:

The emcee, William Glasgall, Managing Editor of States and Municipalities for Bloomberg News opens the conference:

BBG managing editor Bill Glasgall opens conf describing #muniland as a cross between “Singing in the rain” and “Psycho” #bbmuni

Now that muniland has a great presence on Twitter, the platform has become an excellent source for news stories, reports, trade reports, curve data, links out to official statements and material disclosures. There is no other public platform that aggregates muni market information the way Twitter does, and it’s just in its infancy. I get a lot of questions about whom to follow on Twitter, and I thought it would be helpful to compile a list of muniland tweeters. This list is also an attempt to encourage my Reuters muni colleagues to take the plunge and sign up for Twitter as I’ve been urging them to do. When you join, make sure you send me a tweet at @cate_long, and I’ll retweet it out for all my followers to see.

An easy way to see a lot of municipal content is to follow the hashtag #muniland when you become a more proficient user.

Here is a great YouTube video of how to get started using Twitter. A much richer platform to tweet from is Tweetdeck, an app that runs outside of the browser. I encourage anyone who doesn’t have firewall restrictions to migrate to Tweetdeck as soon as possible.