London Earthquake and Twitter

by Jesse Stay — published on February 27th, 2008

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As I was blogging about emergencies yesterday, I saw an amazing thing happen today. I mentioned I am tracking the term, “earthquake” on Twitter. This evening I started receiving a large influx of Twitters on my cellphone, almost non-stop that an earthquake had hit London. It was almost immediate, and turning to the news revealed nothing - Twitter had beat the masses that there was truly a 4.7 earthquake in London.

What’s most amazing is that even the USGS’s “real time earthquake tracker” had not yet updated with the information. Twitter proved an invaluable communication method in the event of a potential disaster, while only 4.7, to let the world know something big was going on.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 12:31 am and is filed under OSS, Politics, Social Media, Social Network Optimization (SNO), Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. .

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Luke 7 months ago 1 point
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you should address how local and worldwide news stations could utilize twitter to track key words for breaking stories

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Jesse Stay 7 months ago 1 point
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I agree Luke - the other day there was a plant explosion south of here, and the news reported, "mass casualties". They then casually signed off, leaving us hanging, saying they'd re-visit it in the morning news. If they had a reporter there on the scene with Twitter, we could have tuned into Twitter and followed the updates there. The news organizations have not embraced this well enough. However, follow @newmediajim and you'll know there are a select few old media guys trying to bring their industries into new media.

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Ontario Emperor 7 months ago 1 point
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I first learned of the earthquake via tweets from @RodrigoMx, who was monitoring English coverage, and lack thereof, of the quake itself. Ironically, BBC was late in the game regarding its coverage, but when my local news radio station in the U.S. started broadcasting the story, they named the BBCas their source. Perhaps my local news radio station should monitor Twitter instead.

P.S. @RodrigoMx is currently reporting that William F. Buckley Jr. has died.

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Mike 7 months ago 1 point
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Jesse, if the news had a reporter on the scene, they could have kept us updated us on TV! They have no interest in helping people stay informed, only in their ratings, which they believe are increased by their "Tune in later for more news" teasers.

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http://semanticlinguine.blogspot.com

Jesse Stay 7 months ago 1 point
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Mike, while I agree with you that they are mostly interested in ratings (I used to work for a media company!), in both cases I list above, reporters *were* on the scene! Traditional old media is clueless when it comes to technologies such as this.

On another note, @newmediajim, a cameraman from NBC News twitters regularly about the places he visits and the news he's covering. Because of that, I generally try to watch the news that he's twittering about. I think if reporters were to get on Twitter, report straight from Twitter, and encourage those following them to watch the details on the news later, News organizations could actually see their ratings *improve*! Twitter is an excellent medium to get people excited, in 140 chars or less about an upcoming media broadcast.

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