Tweets

Follow @pietrosperoni (560 followers)

Categories

How to use social networks in emergencies.

In the article:
Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai
it is explained how twitter, blogs and social networks gave mixed results in during the Mumbai massacre.
I particular it is said:

As Twitter user “naomieve” wrote: “Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.”

But then,

as is the case with such widespread dissemination of information, a vast number of the posts on Twitter amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies.

and finally:

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

Well, this could easily be avoided if we agree to just write the source of the information.
Just write (yourname) if you have seen something yourself.
(cnn) if you are repeating news from cnn, and so on.

Something that permits to track the spread of info to recover the original source could possibly be done directly at the twitter server level.

New dad in town

I made it! After ages of mobbing, veiled suggestions, and unveiled blackmail, I manage to convince my father to make himself a blog. Not just a blog: a wordpress blog, with Creative Common Copyright, threaded comments, feeds, trackback, multiple categories, comment subscriptions and everything else a serious weblogger ought to have to survive in the jungle of the blogsphere.

The guy, a.k.a. Kiddo especially among female collegues (…don’t get me started…), has a certain experience in publishing. He worked for 40 years as a journalist, director of newspaper, and professor of journalist students. Not happy of that he was the ISTAT (Italian Statistical Institute) public relation director, and even worked for *gasp* the World Bank. I know, I know: the black sheep of the family! As you can imagine we don’t always agree on everything, especially if we speak about world economy. Still it makes for some interesting dinner topics.
To be fully honest he already has a weblog, an italian blog, simple and cranky like a home made car. Now he has the technological equivalent of a Ferrari. Yet he intends to write on this in English. Tremble, Brits!
By the way, he too has some dangerous ideas, one of them being that politicians are not worse than normal human being. Not worse than bloggers?! Could you believe that? Now that would be quite revolutionary! Makes you feel humble to think you might not be better than the majority of politicians. But his favorite quote is from Albert Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”, and I have to admit his article where often understandable and comprehensive, also when treating complex topics, chapeau.
So, welcome to the blogsphere, dad,

will never forget you ’til somebody new comes along
Now, lets the show go on.

P.S. I am testing Structured Blogging, so if you see the same post appear more times, it’s normal.