- I, too, was impressed by the use of Twitter in the Mumbai attacks. But I submit that only organizations devoted to the news tell the story before and after an acute event like Mumbai. It takes source development, travel, and the backing of a company to ensure that professional journalists can get at the “why” of a story. I think a more realistic view of journalism’s future is one that is pro-am, that taps users, crowd-sources, and bloggers but that still pursues journalism in a professional way with professional standards.

John Yemma
Editor,
The Christian Science Monitor (CSMonitor.com)

http://arcticpenguin.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/news-in-the-age-of-web-20/

http://luckyrobot.com/2008/12/03/twitter-is-a-new-medium/

Gerry

Video shot by people that can connect instantly online and share it in a video-based Twitter is where news can originate from, not just be commented on like at Twitter. Twitters few characters per message limit is severely limited – and people that have a message to get across will write 16 twitters in a row to get one long message out – how frustrating is that to read? What if 2700 people are doing that same thing about an event like Mumbai? Let’s skip Twitter – it’s nothing but a bunch of people telling others what they find interesting. Plus, it’s annoying as heck for those of us with ADD/ADHD. Plus Twitter only works if you happen to follow someone living where the event is happening if you want news from an original source.

Yes, print newspapers are dead – and rightly so. You can’t update a newspaper more than once every 24 hours. That’s worthless. How about a newspaper that twits… they write the original article as fast as they can, publish it online. They update it with blue text that they add – varying shades of blue with bright being the latest news… the darker shades of blue, turning toward navy and then eventually black as it too becomes old news?

What about a site that is a map. One clicks on the map to see where are ‘nodes’ that are broadcasting news about anything. In the Mumbai case – we could have picked phones that were broadcasting videos about what was going on. The nodes we see on the map, when blown up in size show us – audio, video, text – and we can choose. Why isn’t Twitter dynamic and nodes geotagged at least? We can choose who to follow for the next 10 minutes, and then once we’re done – move on…? IS Twitter geo-tagged and I”m missing something?

Are there groups put together of twitterers that are by category and I can follow who twits about the latest HP computer news, European football news, etc?

We really need better video and even audio from all over the world available instantly – forget about text – it’s so limited. We’ll take it while we can get it – but I hope it’s not for too long.

And how exactly is Mahalo better than the New York Times? The financial woes of the Times don’t detract from its value as a source of some of the best writing and reporting around. As it stands, Mahalo is simply repurposing content with just enough rejigging / reordering to sneak through the plagiarism turnstile. I’m rarely this blunt, but if anyone is going to Mahalo.com for news instead of reading the NY Times or even CNN, then that’s truly tragic for them and their knowledge of the world.

Furthermore, the “breaking news” approach goes completely against the only really viable business model for Mahalo. They’ll only succeed if they’re a pure SEO play, showing up well in organic search for millions of search terms and generating enough cheap content to drive many millions of page views. If their pages are primarily news aggregation, then they’ll quickly become stale and irrelevant and won’t generate enough visits on an ongoing basis to pay their freight, so to speak.

Sorry for the rant; there’s something about the totally lame sham that is Mahalo that really gets me going.