Explosion in Toronto - Twitter is Where the News Happens

by geuis • 18 years ago

8 13 18 years ago

trending.us

alex_c• 18 years ago

"This is probably one of the biggest examples yet of how outdated and antiquated traditional news services are."

For a huge explosion, sure.

I'm not convinced the argument applies for anything more nuanced than "something go big boom".

Andys• 18 years ago

Are traditional news services even good for anything nuanced any more? Seems to be evenly split between 'big boom' and 'big boob' nowadays.

r70002• 18 years ago

The last thing I thought of was to go on twitter. :)

jamesbritt2• 18 years ago

"This is probably one of the biggest examples yet of how outdated and antiquated traditional news services are."

Let's see. I'm on Twitter, follow ~100 people, have not seen a single post about Toronto.

I read Google News main page, see stuff about explosion in Toronto.

Conclusion: Twitter works for breaking news if you are prescient enough to follow people who are going to be where news happens, when it happens, and you check it quite often.

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

Agreed. However, run some simple analytics on the entire Twitter message stream (the "fire hose" as they call it) looking for bursts of keywords from a large number of users, and you'll have a pretty good feed of breaking stories.

Summize/Twitter Search has "trending" keywords which is a good start, but I want a feed that automatically sends me breaking keywords.

jamesbritt2• 18 years ago

Good point. Twitter as a whole may be a good place to data mine current events.

geuis• 18 years ago

@alex_c and @jamesbritt You have valid points, but I think in the wrong context. The magic here starts to happen when you are aggregating many disparate people's twits. Using the summize/twitter search for a particular term or region works very well. In this case, I caught on to what happened in Toronto a few hours ago from a twit I saw. As I looked deeper into it, none of the mainstream news channels were covering it, while there were dozens of twits about it. Some of them linked to several Youtube videos, one of which I included in the post.

I'm not the only one to notice the breaking news Twitter effect in general. Arrington and others have posted about it as well. I just find it disturbing that something that big happens and over 12 hours later, its doesn't even have a blip on the "mainstream" news. God forbid it was something more widespread than this accident. Instead, we get to watch more celebrity coverage, and then 3 hours of talking heads yammering about said-celebrity(s).

tmallen• 18 years ago

Upmodded for the dose of reality provided by the blog post's comments...

henning• 18 years ago

"This is probably one of the biggest examples yet of how outdated and antiquated traditional news services are."

Completely absent from the tweets and videos: what exactly happened? Why? What was the outcome? Any loss of life?

You can take your 140-character instant uninformed man on the street reactions and keep 'em for all I'm concerned.

pdubroy• 18 years ago

I was on my way home when the explosion happened. I live about 12km away, but felt and heard it enough to comment to my friend that it seemed like a big explosion. About 5 minutes later I saw a helicopter heading in that direction, so I made a mental note to check on things in the morning.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, by the time I woke up (11-ish) the story was all over Google News. And it honestly never occurred to me to check Twitter. The first place I actually checked was blogTO.

So, maybe this demonstrates that the web has changed news, but I'm not sure it says anything about Twitter. Did anyone see stuff on Twitter before other sites?

r70002• 18 years ago

The first place we checked was the radio. The first words we heard were "...if you are in the evacuation zone..." and thought oh-oh what evacuation zone is that? Full details didn't come soon enough so we went to the net: firefox search box "toronto evacuation zone", news results for, right-click a few links from recognized news sources (cbc,bbc,globeandmail)

orib• 18 years ago

Mainstream media is far from the best, but they tend to at least gloss over the cause of the explosions, whether people were hurt, and so on.

The commentary we got from what was posted went something like "Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god."

Twitter isn't really a competitor to the mainstream media, however what it may become -- if the mainstream media catches on -- is an early warning system of sorts. There are lots of eyes on it, and the news channels could possibly keep an eye on it to figure out where to send reporters.

whatusername• 18 years ago

bingo. 140 characters isn't a news service. But If you follow 100 people (frequent tweeters) in every city around the country/world, you may get an early warning of something happening.

I think scoble had a post some time back - making the comparison between "news" and "noise". There is breaking news in the noise - the problem is filtering it out.

Anyone think there's potential in a breaking news stories site? There's probably a 30 minute window where twitter / fb / etc are really the only sources reporting... Enough to build a business model perhaps? (Maybe selling content / targeted adds at journalists)

Explosion in Toronto - Twitter is Where the News Happens

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