The 'perils of live text'

From the BBC's live budget coverage today:

1306 Sorry to those of you who have not refreshed the page recently - the estimate of government borrowing for this year is £175bn - NOT £275bn - sorry - the perils of live text!

And a little later on Martin Belam pointed me to this correction issued by Reuters on Twitter:

"CORRECTED - Darling to introduce new tax rate of 50% from next April on incomes over £150k (not 100k) #budget http://r.reuters.com/myb44c"

What do you use Twitter for?

Just been listening to the Guardian's inaugural 'Media Talk USA' podcast featuring some of the usual new media suspects. Thought I'd pull out these thoughts on Twitter by Jay Rosen, author of Press Think. Here's how Jay uses Twitter:

• Twitter allows me to develop a constituency for my work.
• It edits the web for me.
• It's my giant hand-built tipster network. It's a great way to basically have people read the news for you and point out what's important.
• I'm using it to help me blog. I use Twitter to sort and realise what is really important and then I can take the reactions that I've got on Twitter, really think about them and craft a post that I already know is right in the centre of the conversation.

So what do I use Twitter for (in no particular order)?

1. Feeding and promoting my blog posts
2. Networking and contacts
3. Asking for help
4. Helping other people out (First, I enjoy helping people and second, if you are always doing 3. and never do 4. you might find that 3. becomes pretty redundant)
5. Exchanging useful links on media and conflict
6. Retweeting interesting tweets
7. Monitoring (breaking) news
8. Informing people about the progress of the work I am doing
9. Providing updates from talks and conferences (though not too many)
10. Finding blogs
11. Finding people
12. Taming the Web
13. Creating a virtual office
14. Tracking conversations between other people that are also of interest to me

Similar lists to be found at Blog Herald, The Guardian, and in video format on Vimeo.

Bits and pieces on blogging and journalism

• Blogger cleared of misleading South Koreans on the state of the economy. Funnily enough it turned out that Park Dae-Sung's ("Minerva") exaggerated claims of financial turmoil weren't that exaggerated after all.

• Tracing how journalism is changing. Charlie Beckett highlights some useful literature on the history of journalism by Terhi Rantanen.

• BBC online journalist Adam Blenford on the G20 photographers and the blurring of amateur and professional photojournalism.

• Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's Middle East Editor, breached the BBC's guidelines on impartiality according to the BBC Trust in an online article on the 1967 Six Day War. Robert Fisk's typically belligerent commentary defending Bowen is also worth a read.

Blogging about Twitter

Not been much blogging going on here lately.

But you might be interested in my Frontline posts on Moldova (1 and 2) and media coverage of the G20. Though the latter seems like ages ago.

I've been reminiscing lately about the good old days when I used to blog about blogging. These days I only seem to blog about Twitter.

In protest, at my inability to keep on topic, check out the epic policing FAIL at the end of this rather extraordinary little snake story.