It was about 6:55 am in California when I took my first sip of coffee and sat down to my computer. That's actually late for me, but it has been a light work week and a lighter week still for social media. As I started to do recently, I turned to Twitter first, before my email and my BBC News Page. For the past couple of days, Twitter has been pretty sparse with most posting about what my friends ate or did on Christmas Day.
The first post I read came from Scotland's Ewan McIntosh. It informed me of the death of Mrs. Bhutto, a woman whose politics I knew a little about and whose courage I admired a great deal. Then Dennis Howlett, a Brit living in Spain, pointed me to his post, which in turn showed me how a few social media folk, particularly Dave Winer were live Tweeting Bhutto news as it came off the TV networks.
This, as Dennis pointed out, is something new taking traditional media content and sharing it, in timely tablespoons, on Twitter. I am certain, I am not alone in getting news from it before I turn to the mainstream. It is not the first time that social media community members in one time zone got the news and gave it to community members elsewhere in the world.
A couple of months ago, I was at a blogger party for Hugh MacLeod when a minor earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area. The socializing stopped for a while, while we watched Twitter on mobile devices delivering commentary so fast that it seemed like the phones might burst into flames. The new of the earthquake's location, that no one was hurt and where it was felt beat the local newspaper's website by 45 minutes, but when the newspaper report came out it had more information, quotes from the National Geographic Center and fewer "wows" and "awesomes" in it.
Today is approximately the third anniversary of the Indonesia tsunami that killed so many people. I learned about it while meeting with Robert Scoble. It was a working session for our book on corporate blogging. He was staring at his phone, then he handed it to me. It was the first I time I earned about what had happened. Later, I would read first hand reports that made me cry from a San Jose-based blogger, Evelyn Rodriguez who had been vacationing in Phuket when the Tsunami hit. Still later I would learn that in Phuket, a friend had been killed by it as her husband and young son watched. I would post about it, and people who had known her joined the conversation, some learning about the memorial service in Tennessee through my blog.
The blogging and Katrina story is also filled with amazing examples of social media's role. Perhaps my favorite was Brian Oberkirch who started the Slidell Hurricane Damage blog so that people from his small, devastated hometown could find each other.
We are all part of the news network now. Twitter makes it a bigger faster network. But social media, time and time again is showing it's value when dramatic and fast-moving news breaks. Too bad it is usually so tragic.
