DigiActive.org

Tools: Twittering Crisis News in Mumbai

Tool Description: Most of the time, people use Twitter, a phone-based micro-blogging service, to tell their friends what they doing (“walking 2 store w/ dog”), but following the terrorists attacks in Mumbai on November 26th, Twitter became a platform for participative news gathering and dissemination.

Activist Application: Following the terrorist attacks, residents of Mumbai used their mobile phones to “tweet” live updates of the crisis. By using the tag #mumbai, tweets from individual users were aggregated into a single channel (see below), which people interested in getting the latest updates could follow. In this way, news collection and dissemination became participative. People acted as citizen journalists by tweeting what they saw, and the aggregation function of the tag “#mumbai”allowed for automatic broadcast of that news back to the public.

Ease of Use: Very easy. You can create a free account at https://twitter.com/signup. Then you can post short messages via mobile in the USA (short code: 40404) and India (short code: 5566511) and via the web in other countries. Your messages will automatically be displayed on your Twitter homepage, where a “follow” button below your profile picture allows other users to subscribe to your tweets.

Hat-tip: Patrick Meier on iRevolution