Kudos to the Star Tribune for sending out “tweets” of its headlines using the microblogging tool Twitter, as it appears to be one of the industry’s earlier adopters of the technology. But Erica Smith of GraphicDesignr wonders if it uses it too much. In her tracking of newspaper sites using the microblogging tool, she writes, “The overkill award goes to the Star Tribune, which sent 2,645 updates in March.” That’s around 500 more updates per month than Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone — and double that of the next biggest newspaper user,  the Asheville Citizen Times (The Pioneer Press doesn’t use the service to push out its news).

Local tech blogger Ed Kohler notes (via Twitter) that the Strib is merely sending out every story, from original reporting to wire stories, on the same feed.  “If you’re going to push something to someone’s phone, it better be consistently relevant,” he writes. “If people could select which stories went to their phone, such as just breaking news, they’d have a much larger following. Check out CNN Breaking’s stats (266 updates and 12,000+ followers).”

Maybe that’s why, despite massive tweet quantity, the paper’s “follows” — at just 44 — are well below those of the top print user, the New York Times (2755 follows) or even, say, Minnesota Monitor and its 68 followers.