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I love Twitter, but it isn't a news source. Just ask Jeff Goldblum.
- zacharypinter 17y agoTwitter isn't a credible news source, but it is a source of news.
- FluidDjango 17y agoI consider it more a source of hypotheses, especially regarding any topic of potential interest to pop culture. Disclosure: I actually wait for next NPR news hour to see if anything of real importance (to me) happened. ...less distracting than a chronic monitoring of tweets :/
- tptacek 17y agoIs it just me, or is this story completely asinine? Who expected hundreds of thousands of people babbling at each other to aggregate into a reliable news source? Nobody. On the other hand, I get more reliable news from BNO over Twitter than I ever did from CNN. BNO had Michael Jackson something like 30 minutes before it hit the front page; it had Sanford before Talking Points Memo; it has consistently better international coverage than ABC or CNN. Saying Twitter is a bad news source is like saying email is a bad news source.
- ASUmusicMAN 17y agoIt is asinine. I think the multitude of stories about twitter being a "bad news source" are mostly out of frustration after seeing CNN covering tweets rather than doing any real reporting. I think twitter definitely has its place in the news, but as something to supplement the story, not be the source entirely.
- derefr 17y agoTo be more specific: Twitter is a data source. Data is not information; it possesses no metadata informing its credibility ("color".)
- baddox 17y agoActually, data are information. The way I understand the words is: information is simply any communication or part of a communication. Data specifically are units of information that are derived from measurements or calculations, and therefore are generally useful. What Twitter is NOT is a source of FACTS.
- derefr 17y agoI usually go with the semantic web definition: data are just nodes in the graph, raw blobs with no apparent meaning; information is what happens when you "grok" data, expanding and integrating it into edges in the graph. I suppose my data is your information, and my information is your fact.
- vaksel 17y agotwitter is like email or instant messaging, its a method of communication, not a source.
- joshu 17y agoHow can we ask him? I heard he died.
- swombat 17y agoFunnily enough, I was on IRC when someone announced that Michael Jackson had died, rather than on Twitter, and the first thing I did was to go to my Twitter client to see if anyone else had mentioned it. The fact that everyone was talking about MJ dying confirmed that the IRC announcement was not a hoax, or at least not a hoax by the announcer. After that, Twitter was neither more nor less useful than CNN, which waited until they had confirmations signed in triplicate before they announced that yes, MJ was actually dead. On the other hand, Twitter was a lot more fun than CNN, with various bits of irreverence and word-plays on MJ songs popping up here and there on the Twitter-stream... something that traditional media would (rightly) never dare to do. Death is funnier on Twitter.