During Hurricane, er, Tropical Storm Irene, we at Sippican Week found Twitter to be one of our fastest and easiest tools for news gathering on power outages.

It goes to show that just because you only have 140 characters, that doesn't mean you can't trade a lot of information. And with the phenomenal job our intrepid reporter, Erik Fox, has done managing our Twitter since our debut, it was easy to find people throughout Rochester, Mattapoisett and Marion to communicate with about where the damage was, who had lost power and how it felt to have power back when my house was still dark.

We communicated with the town's as well. @mattapoisettpd updated prior to the storm and let us know to beware of potential damage from the storm. We tweeted ORR High School Principal Mike Devoll about whether or not the first day of school would be delayed (the answer was yes, by the way).  We followed the governor to see his updates as well.

Overall, Twitter made covering this storm a breeze.

So make sure to check us out on Twitter sometime and make sure to follow us so that you can be first to hear about breaking news from around Sippican-land. @sippicanweek is our handle and we're attached at the hip to social media in all its forms.  After all, we're nerds, it's just kind of how we roll.

Sippican Week and SippicanVillagesoup update their Twitter feed daily with news headlines and alerts. Check us out on Twitter at @sippicanweek.