Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Weblog
Explorations of personal and community journalism... Traditional, Alternative, Online... The new TAO of newspapers?
My world-travelling Australian friend Stephen Quinn is blogging from London about new reporting tools, including the short-message bloglike service, Twitter. Here's his collection of links: Twitter for newsgathering. I'll add a few, in case he's watchng...
I've been keeping up on Twitter developments peripherally for more than a year, mostly thanks to Dave Winer, who had a great metaphor for Twitter as a coral reef technology... one that new things could attach to and grow. Dave now has more than 10,000 people "following" his own Twitter feed.
For background, here's Twitter's CEO: It all started with my mother (and a bike-messenger bag, messengers, CB radios...).
As for the coral-reefing in the journalism community, CNet was on the story in April, with a list of users and non-users in technology journalism: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-9912520-60.html
"Why then, do I, and nearly everyone else on Twitter continue to keep
coming back to this infuriatingly unstable platform to connect with our
communities? It's likely because, for now, that's where the people are,
and while most users are getting frustrated with nearly daily outages,
no one is taking that first step toward migration."
I feel so left out, even if it is frustrating (like any new technology sometimes is)... But for now I'm afraid Twitter is going to stay on my "just don't have time for this..." list.
Another thing I didn't have time for recently was the Building a New World conference, right around the corner from my house... a less technological attempt by some folks to build a political coral reef. Tim Jackson of New River Voice filled me in a bit more than the almost-local daily Roanoke Times, where a columnist went off on a tangent about the organizers before the start of the conference. Then, as far as I can tell, the paper never sent a reporter to cover the event itself.
