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Archive for 12th May 2008
And you thought Twitter was just a fad
It started with a flurry of short messages. “I felt an earthquake” came one message from peanutbrittle25. “EARTH QUAKE in Beijing?? Yup” came a reply from dtan.
Short messages like these spread across the world and for the rest of today people were glued to their screens to watch what was happening. With updates direct from the scene. But these weren’t traditional news outlets. The messages spread through Twitter.
Social networking works because I connect with my friends and then they connect with their friends. This pattern continues and means that messages can travel very quickly between people - one person tells everybody they know; all of these people then tell everybody they know. And so on.
This is what happened today with twitter and the earthquake in China. It became a “crowd-sourced” reporting tool with people on the ground being able to report what’s happening, what it’s really like, where they were when it happened, what happened next. All the questions people want to know when events are unfolding, and the kind of details that traditional journalists would hunt out to report the next day. With twitter we can, and could, get this information in real-time and well-connected people could act as nodes, receiving and transmitting the updates.
Innovation in news has often been about reducing the time between an eye-witness reporting on an event and it getting to the reader. The Crimean War was a big step forward as the extension of railways and telegraph networks across Europe let reports come back in just a few days - ‘real-time’ reporting as it felt in the 19th Century. Today we can reduce this time to practically nothing. Somebody can witness an event, text twitter and the network effect on the web spreads the message around the world. Now that’s a rather exciting development!
Of course, this doesn’t mean the end of professional journalism; peanutbrittle25 works for the BBC in Beijing, as a journalist!
