(More on) Twitter and the Bangalore bomb blasts at the Frontline

Part III on this topic is about whether Twitter 'hypes' the news.

Twitter - I'm going to carry on writing about it. Sorry.

Jemima Kiss, at the Guardian, has just written a post telling people to get over Twitter breaking major news stories and beating other media. I agree. Though I bet there are hundreds of journos out there who have no idea what it is - easy to forget when you're living and working in a digital bubble.

But she does also say that 'the interesting phenomenon is that because this communication is public, it can be used as a source'. Which, I think, has actually been much less explored.

So I've been covering how Twitter might have been used by journalists to cover the Bangalore blasts in a series of posts on the Frontline blog. It's a little case study.

Part One is on the use of Twitter as to find eyewitness accounts and online reportage

Part Two is on verification

Part Three will be coming tomorrow: Does Twitter 'hype' the news?

But if I'm boring you: Stick '"Daniel Bennett" King's College London' into new search engine, Cuil.com, and it'll find you some completely unrelated information about "mating cell integrity". You might find this more interesting than my ramblings about Twitter.

Today's researcher's view

Today, I'm footnoting. This doesn't make a good blog post, nor for particularly interesting post-work conversation, I might add. Instead, I offer you today's researcher's view, which isn't that much more exciting to be honest...

...but please note that the sort of cutting edge digital research I do does involve running wires into my literature, and (apparently) the use of sellotape as one half of an unusual book-holder.

Random thought on blogging 2

"Being a blogger makes you a shameless narcissist, endlessly questing for more and more traffic and links to compensate for your pathetic existence."

Courtesy of Lt Nixon who no doubt will feel slightly better for having another link to his blog.

Twitter and the Bangalore bomb blasts at the Frontline

I was supposed to be finishing off a chapter of the PhD today but events put paid to the plan.

Instead, I've been following the Bangalore bomb blasts on the Frontline blog.

I wanted to track how Twitter could be used for breaking news and compare it with the BBC's coverage. Paul Bradshaw, from the Online Journalism Blog, has already done this for the earthquake in China. But because of the focus of my work - war, terrorism and the BBC - I felt this story might be a good one to follow on the off-chance that it might develop into a useful case study.

For the fruits of the labour (so far) click here.

Identity of popular milblogger LT G revealed

The identity of LT G has been revealed by the press in the United States. I've blogged about it at the Frontline where you will find all the relevant links.

Am I the only who is confused about Karadzic?

Last night, I watched the BBC Ten O'Clock News which seemed to suggest that a few people in Serbia may possibly have known where Karadzic was hiding but that most people were fooled by that exceptional beard. (I was. He could have been anyone under there. In fact, the Serbs can probably count themselves unfortunate that they didn't unearth Mladic and Bin Laden under the same beard. Somebody should check before he shaves it off.)

But anyway, Robin Lustig, of Radio 4's World Tonight programnme paid the guy a visit in 1996. He claims that tracking him down was rather straightforward:

"The fiction in 1996 was that no one knew where he was. The reality was that within a couple of days of arriving in Sarajevo, I'd been handed a piece of paper with a scribbled map on it, showing the precise location of the house where he was living, in Pale, in the hills outside the Bosnian capital.

As I made my way to the house, I stopped several times along the way to ask directions. "Excuse me, is this the way to Radovan Karadzic's house?" Everyone was very kind and gave me directions, even the Ghanaian officers at the UN police post just a couple of hundred metres from the house."

I have two questions then really (not including the title, which you're also more than welcome to answer):

1. How come the narratives of Robin Lustig and the Ten O'Clock seem so out of sync?

2. And did Robin Lustig ever think about passing over the 'scribbled map' to a relevant authority?