I wanted to add to your answer to Alex’s quesion, “Must personal branding begin with Twitter?” that personal branding should obviously begin with your own realization of your brand. Then, Twitter, as Jacob said, is just one easy tool to use to get your brand message out there.

However, personal branding must also start with a transfer of your personal brand to your career search outputs, like your resume, cover letter, emails etc. You should also be using LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace to advertise and distribute your personal brand across both professional and social networking channels.

While you may not be able to launch your own blog right away, you can always keep up-to-date on new articles in your areas of interest and contribute with comments and guest posts on other people’s blogs. You can also answer people’s questions on the Answers section of LinkedIn and comment on different threads in related discussion groups.

This can help you get a feel for whether or not you want to try to launch your own, but also gets your name out there as an expert or guru in your area.