social media

On Sunday evening, noted Bay Area tech blogger Robert Scoble, became one of the first people in the western hemisphere to find out about a large earthquake in China. He reposted a message he received on his Twitter account about the breaking news and within minutes, thousands of people around the world were aware that something had just happened.

Scoble’s Twitter message immediately after the Sichuan earthquake.

Later that evening, Scoble wrote a message on his blog, explaining how Twitter beat the USGS with information about the earthquake and sharing his amazement at learning about news as it happened on Twitter. Rory Cellan-Jones, a technology blogger for the BBC News, even went on to imply that this could mark Twitter’s “coming of age,” and establish its importance in disseminating information about major news events.

Does this really establish Twitter’s importance as a source of news? And how does this compare with the response time and information available from the USGS?

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