Scott Baradell and Twitter

I really enjoyed the presentation by Scott Baradell in class on Thursday.  He had a great outlook on digital media and journalism’s trend online.  What I really liked most was his focus on Twitter.  While I realized the Twitter phenomenon is what it is, I never realized there were so many offshoots of Twitter that are reposted on other websites.  Sites like friendfeed.com, twellow.com, tweetlater.com, twitterfeed.com and twittervision.com are all dependent, and exist solely, because of twitter.com.  

The first time I ever noticed Twitter was watching Rick Sanchez on CNN during the hurricane that was heading straight for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (where my parents live — so I had a somewhat vested interest in the topic).  I was a bit confused as to who these people were until he started explaining Twitter.  I immediately signed up for an account on the sole reason of trying to get onto TV and be famous by him reading my online handle.  That didn’t happen but I thought it was interesting that although people didn’t have power, they did still have the ability to keep in touch with the outside world.  The news world was able to use all of this content, for free, on their newscasts.  In fact, it was very easy for them to get content on the air without Rick Sanchez getting knee deep in water.

As far as Twitter in the news in the future, I’m not sure how used it will be.  While it is effective for fast news like finding out about the shootings in Mumbai or planes landing in the Hudson, it is not, and will never be, the same as a story on tv, in the paper or on the web.  The only thing Twitter has going for it journalistically is that it gets on the web fast.  But 120 characters is not enough to get a story out with details.  Another thing that it is useful for is almost live-blogging from events like the inauguration and sporting events.  Sometimes you just want to know what people are thinking and not an 800-word recap.