Media140 - Twitter is the Cockroach in the unclear Winter

Thursday, May 21. 2009

Media140 - Twitter is the Cockroach in the unclear Winter

Ushahidi Conflict Map in Gaza from Al Jazeera

Went along yesterday to the Media140 Conference (Schedule and speakers here), about the use of Twitter and other microblogging services in media. It turned out to be a fascinating event. I have got into the habit of taking notes on my iPhone at conferences and using those - so here they are with minor adjustment:

Pat Kane gave the keynote speech, and observed that everybody can be a journalist today, microblogging specifically allows:

- "Beat" reporting
- Early info
- Realtime content
- Traceable sources
- Q & A interaction
- Promo tool
- Folksonomy (labellable with hashtags)
- Expertise archive

Twitter can also be used to point people to longer form content - and can act as a filter/summariser of the info overload problem

But, issues were the same as for other citizen journalism:

-who verifies truth, authority - who do you trust?
-does one break out of 140 char and how
-how collaborative and distributed is this in real life when commercial benefits of secrecy are real

As to "How Media Makes Money" - he reckons its best option is to drive people to scarce stuff. What is scarce in journalism? - it's authority/quality, also weekend papers may be paper, but daily stuff is online.

Next up was a panel on the 140 character media - or 5 Old White Guys, as Bill Thompson (on the panel) noted. Still, they were fairly amusing - my big takeaways were:

- Jon Gripton from Sky noting that Twitter has changed way early news is broken, it's now just another newsfeed used for looking at breaking stories.
- Sky has a Twitter correspondent and Darren Waters noted the BBC UGC desk, now both search blogs, twitter etc for news
- Nick Halstead of TweetMeme noted that distribution was a multi-node spread now, eg retweets @, etc to move the story on
- Huge strategic issue with so much reliance being put on top of 1 platform (Twitter)

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch noted that these new media, though small today, are the cockroaches of the media's nuclear winter. This sector's future is still unclear, and that serves as the strap for this post.

To my mind the most fascinating panel was the next one with several people doing "Frontline" journalism:

Guardian's Kevin Anderson - talking about the realtime covering of events in the USA over 3 weeks, it created both time/geotagged diary and a following

Guy Degen of the Frontline club in Georgia/Azerbaijan - found Twitter, audioboo, qik very useful even in tough locations- a small twitter community so no following possible. Also covered Winnenden shooting in Germany - noted that original media hashtag was #Amoklauf (amok-walk), which had to be toned down latere
Mark Jones of Reuters told their story of how Twitter use went from disbelief to addiction - able to implement as despite some scepticism, people reckoned if they don't do it others will. They also went through the experiences and learnings from various sessions that did,

Moeed Ahmad of Al Jazeera talked about using various types of realtime data capture - it was useful picking up on lots of data on ground as it happened. There Twitterstream big when Twitter's @ev picked it up and 70,000 people following him then picked it up.

They also showed the data maps they used as they gathered it (see picture above)

There was an interesting question on handling disinformation, I got the impression that this hadn't been considered yet (probably not a big issue, but it surely will become it)

It was interesting listening to people talking about what tools they used, and what tools they would like to see:

- Version of tweetdeck that sorts wheat from chaff
- Add video to twt
- Twitter doesn't work for organising stuff when you're interacting with large numbers (can't fix that as Twitter is Pub/Sub, email is a better architecture in my view)

Last session was on Local news, main points I noted (apologies, didn't record who said what) were:

- Twitter has much the same impact on local as on other news

- till 4 years ago journos didn't have to think about distribution, or crowdsourcing of news - cf flashnews - now they do.

- be-local: people very interested in things that are local - key is to let local people connect. Once they meet in real life, get a whole new dynamic too

- How to make money? ( Local porn said one wag ). In past Newscos used to sell audience, not content - need to find new ways of selling the audience, not just Ads.

- Local and niche can do well - "Towcester news" and "Toaster news"

- I can decide what is local for me - adds value

Christian Payne (@documentally) also spoke with Geri Jackson of SW Radio Africa on how to do media when the tech is minimal eg texting to Zimbabwe - apparently people leave mobiles with relatives in Zim to get the news through.

There is also a whole Twitterstream on it over here and Adam Tinworth's more detailed feed is over there

Posted by Alan Patrick in Digital Media Web 2.0 at 07:11 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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great notes, I watched the stream and thought it was spot on. I think twitter and other apps are the phoenix rising from the ashes of web1 and we have to be ready for changes. We also have to ensure the infrastructure is there to cope with this new bird as it matures, we want UKplc to fly, not stay on the ground with clipped wings using an obsolete copper network. I heard one speaker mention it yesterday, but not in the notes from you. I hope people reading this start to wonder where the feed is going to come from in the future as other countries lay fibre and we continue to use the legacy phone network.

#1 cyberdoyle (Homepage) on 2009-05-21 09:45 (Reply)

"Version of tweetdeck that sorts wheat from chaff"

Isn't that called "unfollowing people who post mostly chaff?"

Never ceases to amaze me that people carp about Twitter being noisy - and then you look at them, and they're following thousands of people who they don't know, but have simply blindly auto-followed.

It's almost like they want someone else to take care of selecting interesting things for them. We need a word for that role... what about "editor"?

You never know, there might even be money in it

#2 Ian Betteridge (Homepage) on 2009-05-21 09:49 (Reply)

think tweetdeck is ace, 10 panes for hashtags etc, but would like a facility to only tweet to certain followers, like direct message but to many instead of one to prevent uninterested followers getting it. Certain people follow for certain subjects. multiple twitter accounts too difficult to maintain. Even with twitterfox. Am very picky who I follow, and block people whose interests aren't compatible. I don't see the point in twitter if it is just to rack up a score of followers. Ian is right, there might be money in developing an app that makes it easy.

#3 cyberdoyle (Homepage) on 2009-05-21 10:05 (Reply)

Local News is also transforming from "local geographically" to "local topically" - people can be part of something that looks like a "small local community" that is in fact widely geographically dispersed.
i.e. what created a local newspaper was a common interest in a geographical area. Because of the problems of global distribution, newsprint on small interest groups that are geographically distributed was impractical.
In the new world of blogs & social media geography has no real relevance - a traditional local media has to compete with all the other small interest groups for attention.
PS: Love the idea of new media being the cockroaches of the media's nuclear winter - its happening, we await the outcome.

#4 Andrew C F Wise (Homepage) on 2009-05-21 11:01 (Reply)

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