This story by Dennis Howlett, on how Twitter spread and processed news of the Bhutto assasination, casts light on the continuing birth of The Live Web.
We also saw it a couple months back with coverage of the California fires near San Diego.
And it’s still early. It’s important to remember that. Everything on the Web is still just a prototype.
Thanks Doc, yes, prototype is right. My wish is that the likes of Twitter and Seesmic ‘get’ the enterprise value and work towards adding just a handful of functions that could take them places they will otherwise struggle to reach. If they do, then it starts to get interesting for the likes of Bloomberg/Reuters etc in the world of real time markets.
Yup, the people glued to Twitter found out…what? The same time as the people who were glued to their news shows or radio? After all, the first folks who ‘twittered’ the event were only quoting the same ‘mainstream media’ you seem to think all of this is replacing.
Wow, way to redefine communication.
I do find it sad, though, that this event was reduced to “Oh look how great Twitter is”. I find such to be almost obscene.
What happened, Shelley, was that some blogs were leading the mainstream news while others were quoting them. What mattered was that the news ecosystem got bigger, better and more live, as more people participated.
And not everybody has been glued to Twitter, either. Twitter helped. But it’s not The Answer. It’s proving useful for getting some live information out to some people.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media — especially the local kind — have been scaling back or have been eliminated.
That’s why I’ve been calling for public radio to take up the slack where local “full service” commercial radio (and local newspapers) have failed.
In any case, the point of my post was not to glorify Twitter, but to draw attention to the growing live branch of the Web.
Shelley, the significance of a live web is not whether it portrays the same thing as mainstream media or not.
It is a question of WHO HAS THE POWER to define what information is important, what’s news, what gets produced, presented and distributed to the world. That power is gradually being turned over to the public. It started with the web which undermined the power of newspapers and magazines. The live web grabs power from television which promises to change a lot of things. That’s why the live web is important and interesting.
Twitter is part analog to digital converter, signal booster, repeater station and echo chamber for communications. It enables news and information to spread in near-real time (split seconds after an event occurs, definitely before the wire services have the information) and enhances mainstream media, but also creates feedback loops that help the average citizen to qualify what they might otherwise hear only from biased or not-completely-informed sources such as Fox News or CNN.
Indeed, as Doc says, Twitter is not The Answer, but it certainly serves an important and non-trivial purpose in today’s world.
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