It takes a tragedy to bring other messages home. My thoughts and prayers are with those who lost their loved ones in Mumbai, as also those whose family or friends were injured.
This is what the news looks like on Twitter, using Tweet Grid:
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of reporters. Many tweeting live. Many with original material. Many retweeting (RT-ing) others’ tweets, passing the news on at incredible speed. Sharing news of loved ones’ safety. Broadcasting contact numbers, cries for help, requests for resources ranging from contact information to blood. All at a speed that nothing else can match.
This, as Allen Searls once described it, is the World Live Web. A writable web.
As opposed to this:
It’s barely changed in the last hour or so. It’s glacial in comparison with the antlike fury of twitter. BTW, while writing this post, which took me a few minutes, there have been 339 updates to twitter related to #mumbai.
This site is an example of how the blogosphere responds to such a crisis:
You can see what it looks like now here. The speed of response of the tools we now have is quite amazing.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Quite the contrast. However, I do find the Guardian’s live blog useful for more filtered news and as a supplement to the granular tweets. http://www.ragsgupta.com/weblog/2008/11/giving-thanks-mumbai-twitter.html
You’ve illustrated your point very well. I talked to year 7 boys about this very thing yesterday, and the teacher nervously added that twitter news was not necessarily authoritative. I had to say, neither was the newspaper necessarily. Then there’s the immediacy and the detail that microblogging brings to breaking news. And why would someone deliberately provide incorrect information?