Give us today our Daily Twitter

Seen on Twitter first of course, but Mike Butcher wrote it up here:

We already know plenty of journalists are on Twitter and use it to hunt down stories. Hell, I’ve been doing it since 2006.

But the fact that a major news organisation like Sky News has now recognised it needs a dedicated person - Ruth Barnett is now their “Twitter correspondent”, possibly the first for by a 24hr TV news channel - to scour Twitter for potentially breaking news stories, speaks volumes. It also serves as a warning to those who might think that what they say on Twitter “in the clear” (in public) will go unnoticed by the wider world.

Reminds me to an extent of Reuters posting people on 2nd Life in 2006, and its also Middle(wo)manning - ie eventually people will miss them out the value chain unless they do a better job of aggregating manually than one can do with a ranking algorithm and a filter a la Techmeme. But its a clever interim step. I suspect the Guardian will name their own Twitternaut in 24 hours or Sky will be in the "suggested follows" on Twitter, not them

In fact this really points towards the Future of Media as a hybrid manual/automated Filter/Aggregator system. It is not at all hard (albeit non trivial) to build a Daily Twitter and then mash it to pix and vids elsewhere. Probably needs a few people for editorial input (a La Techmeme). Associated Press, watch out.....