Obviously this is a marketing / planning blog rather than a political one, but I think it's fairly easy to guess what my thoughts are on the Iranian Presidential elections and what's (at time of writing) currently going on in Tehran.
However taking one step back for a moment, it's once again, just like with the Hudson River plane crash and the Mumbai bombings, an example of Twitter and social networks outflanking the mainstream media in terms of coverage.
Here in the UK, the major news organisations are in Tehran. The BBC news website has been updating its main article every few hours with its foreign editor John Simpson being on the ground...except as far as I can tell, neither the BBC or Channel4 have been using their twitter feed for live updates.
Meanwhile in the States, according to a tweet by journalism professor Jeff Jarvis: "revolution may be breaking out in Iran. But on CNN and Fox: it's US health care. MSNBC: canned crime show. CNBC: infomercial."
The one exception has been US network ABC News which has had its senior foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto in Tehran....constantly sending out live posts on Twitter, including one telling us that the Iranian police had confiscated his camera and tapes and he was now shooting on his cellphone.
In fact, I easily learned more from Twitter in an hour than I did from the normal news gatekeepers in a day - it was by far the best way of conveying the immediacy of the story, with the very few tweeple in Iran (for example Raymond Jahan and Yashar Khazdouzian) able to get the word out, being invaluable sources of information.
It's how for example I came across this amazing Flickr stream about the Tehran protests - the quantity on offer making it easily more impactful than the handful of images you'd usually be served up on news sites.
What's Twitter good for? When it comes to breaking news, it's essential, otherwise you end up missing a great deal.
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- Twitter first to report Hudson crash landing (vator.tv)
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