May 20th, 2008 by Lloyd Gofton
Reading Jeff Jarvis’ story in the Guardian yesterday shows how pivotal Twitter has become, not just in the digital media sector, we knew that, but in the media sector as a whole. He reveals that developers at the BBC and Reuters are working on applications to monitor Twitter and other social media services such as Facebook and YouTube for news catchwords such as ‘earthquake’ and ‘evacuation’ in the hope of both getting an early tip off on breaking news, and also locating content and potential interviewees on the issue.
This was illustrated perfectly by the Chinese earthquake last week, which according to Robert Scoble was broken on Twitter before the US Geological Survey posted the tremor and an hour before mainstream news sites reported it. Suddenly the BBC and Reuter’s investment makes sense.
Another example of the never ending brilliance of social applications. However, this isn’t the main point of this post…and you thought It was over…short post from Gofton - never!
The real reason for this post is to make a confession…here goes: I’m not the biggest fan of Twitter. Actually, before the great and good of the social media world beat me down with vicious reasoning, let me rephrase that: I’m not the biggest Tweeter. There I said it and for anyone that cares to check, it’s quite an obvious statement! I don’t tweet, post, write comments…that much. However, I am a fan of Twitter and I do regularly monitor and learn from the conversations that i follow, but in truth rarely dip my bill in…sorry bad joke.
I’ve often thought about the whys and wherefores of my apparent lack of willingness to get ‘involved’ and spread my own brand of commentary on Twitter. But that’s exactly the reason I don’t do it. I am put off by the life commentary from the Twitter nation, as so many others are.
Now to be fair not everyone does it, but those that feel the need to share their experience of being on a train, or a bus, or standing in the rain blah, blah, blah has never encouraged me to say: You know what, today is the day when I tell people I’m running late for a meeting.
However, although I am being facetious, in all seriousness a ray of light hit me from Jeff Jarvis’ article, or in fact from a quote he used from UK blogger Leisa Reichelt at disambiguity.com. Lisa has defined this practise as ‘Ambient intimacy’, which she explains as “being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to.” She continues: “There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in ongoing noise. It helps us to get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances.”
Hmmm, that kind of makes sense, it’s the most sense that anyone has made of what I thought was previously inane drivel. It does help to bring through the personality of an individual and it does help me to understand their point of view. Some of it is even amusing.
So has this taught me something? Am I going to change my ways and get involved? No - I won’t be telling you what I had for lunch, but you will be seeing a new vigour in what I classify as useful ‘Tweeting’.
Tags: bbc, Guardian, jeff jarvis, Leisa Reichelt, Reuter's, twitter