Saturday, June 20, 2009

Blogger 1 Twitter 0

Touted as the 'first draft of history', Twitter is also a tower of babel built on 140 characters at a time. Twitter might be a useful tool to break stories, it is useless to make sense as the story develops, because the activity on Twitter deteriorates into tweets, retweets, rants and it becomes a virtual dust-storm of sorts.

It takes human intervention to guide users through that storm of data, through careful curation. In context of the election controversy in Iran, The Economist magazine praises the work of select bloggers who monitored the internet and helped readers make sense of what is happening in Iran.

The Economist writes,

Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English.
So much so for the demise of blogging, we were being forced to believe.

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