Earthquake in China
This morning I woke up as I do every morning to the local TV station reading the morning news. I arose around 0615 so I missed the lead story, but I listened to the anchors report on 2,000 acre wildfires near Cocoa Beach. In my stupor, I walked across my house to my office, grabbed my iPhone to see that I had several tweets to read, nearly all of them about the earthquake in China. It was the first I had heard about it. @Scobleizer directed me to http://summize.com (a search engine that summarizes posts on twitter by subject) where tweets about the earthquake were coming in nearly every second as I had to refresh the page on my phone to view the latest one. Many of the tweeters had links that went to major news media outlets. There were tweets from people in China who had not yet heard about the earthquake, even though they were in the region of the earthquake. Many bloggers were stating how twitter was the first to “break” the story. After reading through the tweets and links, the national news came on with the lead story about the earthquake, but I had already learned about the situation on Twitter so I jumped in the shower.
Here are some useful links I found:
- A Google map of the earthquake location
- A BBC blog post about Twitter coverage of the earthquake
- A Twitter user’s tweet about experiencing the earthquake (in Shanghai)
- A Google translation from Chinese to English of tweets from Twitterlocal
- The Earthquake Center’s page on the earthquake
- CNN’s report
- A picture which appears to be capturing the earthquake in an office
- A Summize search for ‘earthquake’
(Source: Online Journalism Blog)
