Web 3.0 at Work - "Human does it better" for Focussed News

The news broke out about three hours ago during mid morning (around 10:30 am) at the American Civic Association immigration center in Binghamton, New York:

Thirteen people were confirmed dead (including perpetrator), twenty-six wounded, and forty-one were taken hostage by an Asian gunman: 42-year-old Johnson City resident, Jiverly Voong, who later shot himself. Five people, aged from twenty to mid-fifties, were treated for gunshot wounds at Wilson Medical Center in Johnson City. (Wikipedia, Apr 3, 2009 - US)

A search on Google News revealed that among the first reports came from Elmira Star-Gazette with the headline "Shooting at American Civic Association":

Police are responding to reports of a shooting at 131 Front St. this morning, the site of the American Civic Association. They began staging at Oak and Main ...

Immediately, the news was covered by a scores of other news media companies including News 10 Now, The Associated Press and USA Today being among the earliest. Within two hours, over a thousand news sources have covered it, and the count is at over 1,500 as of 3am Malaysia Time (MYT) or 3pm in New York, USA (EST).

However, although the news naturally made it the top-most position in Google News (US Edition), overall news focus was varied to several other topics including "madoff", "obama", "jobs" etc. as the media companies think that people are more concerned about the troubling economy and financial woes with Obama being in Europe (France specifically during G20 stop in London) meeting world's leaders to cook up economy-fixing plans:

But for the millions of Internet users on Twitter, the most revolutionary social media platform to-date (touted the "web 3.0 that people have been waiting for", which is reportedly being actively pursued by media giant Google for final acquisition), the focus topic was unanimous:

It's the mass-shooting and hosting crisis in Binghamton, clearly ahead of all others, similar to previous reportings of the Mumbai raid, several occassional earthquakes and tsunami warnings, possible Google acquisition of Twitter etc.


One of the first tweets on the Binghamton news probably came from BNOnews, a new media service (with over 114,000 followers as of 4th of April 2009) specifically focussed on using Twitter to disseminate breaking news headlines:

BULLETIN -- AT LEAST FOUR PEOPLE SHOT, MORE THAN 40 HOSTAGES INSIDE BINGHAMTON, NEW YORK BUILDING.

Immediately, the original tweet was retweeted by dozens other Twitter users creating ala-MLM chain effect for the news distribution, reaching thousands in the matter of minutes, and could end up to reach a million or so readers in the matter of hours, as observed from the dozens of tweets that continue to be posted every minute to a tune of thousands per hour, or tens of thousands per day!

That's Web 3.0 at work... as they say (ripped off DMOZ Open Directory's campaign), "Human does it (the news) better!"

BTW, our heart and prayers go to family and friends of the victims of the Binghamton shooting...

Read more about the Binghamton shootings at world's biggest and most up-to-date encyclopedia, the Wikipedia.

Theater time, once in a blue moon...

Not to be missed... I feel the need, the need for speed!

How to Trend Twitter - the @ideaShare Way!

1. Get some 70 people or so into one room,
   
   
2. Hook 'em up with the Internet,
   
   
3. Ask each to log in to Twitter.com
   (after creating a new account for the first time, if new user), and
   
   
4. Start tweeting with #ideashare tag!

After some shameless act of self-promotion for twitter names owned/co-owned by facilitators i.e. @cerventus,@myentrepreneurs, @worldisastage, @pieartboy, @michaelteoh, @elevyn_official etc., the not-so-newbies and newbies altogether sent well over 200 tweets with #ideashare tag over the course of over two hours, by which "ideashare" was already trending clearly on Twitter.com and on tag cloud at sites like Twitscoop etc, as observed by below graph, sparking curiosity among twitizens:


There were negative side effects though: The room was so packed with people, that those in the room were suffering internet surfing slowness frustration syndrome (as 20-30 ppl cramping wirelessly the small pipe of 1.5Mbps temporary/dedicated DSL installation at any one time), and to make things worse, the aircond couldn't stand the heat emitted by after-lunch human crowd and broke down, sending the room into the state of microwave and fried most of these brainiacs turning them into crappy tweeters, irritating everyone else in the twitterverse including @kamal, @lukejsmith and @bytebot, among others!

Guess, most of the people in the room hasn't heard about @kevinrose's latest gift to the web 2.0 crowd: @wefollow, ie. http://wefollow.com/tag/ideashare - you don't need to blatantly self-promote your twitter name. Instead, just tag, and you're it!

Need more tag ideas? Try "penang" (or the state you're from, which you can change at a later time) and "malaysia" (we're all Malaysians right? and there's no rooms in twitterspace!)

I'm also surprise why the facilitators were showcasing twitterfall and twitpic websites, when tweetdeck clearly has all of those small gimmicks with growing features like group, search and twitpic. (note: twitpic.com was down at the time of demo!)

The first of the two-day event in conjunction with the MSC Innotech 2009 Interstate - Northern Region event was organized by Kuala Lumpur-based Ureka Labs, and financed by the Cyberjaya-based Technopreneur Development Division of Multimedia Development Corporation (MDEC), custodian for the MSC Malaysia government initiative.

More information is available at the event-centric/local networking site developed by folks at Eureka Labs, http://ideashare.my

Surprisingly(?), not many people, despite having a horde of 60+ participants at the venue yesterday, are following @netbash or @ideashare (ownership questionable), with just thirteen and four followers respectively as of 7 am on the next day.

And folks @ MDEC neither owns @mdec nor @tedd twitter names, which are both registered by others as early as nearly a year ago (30mar08 for "mdec") -- Should I reveal more brandjackable twitter names??


About Twitscoop:

Twitter was built to help thousands of people answer a very simple question: "What are you doing ?"

Twitscoop was built to help you stay on top of twitter's hot topics or discussions.

Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentionned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a Tag Cloud, using the following rule: the hotter, the bigger (no joke here).

Thanks to twitscoop and the continuously growing twitter user base, you will soon realise that "What are you doing ?" can have very different answers, from "I'm standing in a queue of 500 to buy Gta4", to "Was that just an Earthquake ?", through to "Hey, Microsoft just acquired Yahoo" (no this didn't actually happen yet).

As a result, twitscoop enables you to stay on top of things in a matter of seconds, often way before the news actually hits the mainstream information channels !

Twitter & Me! @PenangCity (Sun, 22 MAR 2009)

I'll be talking about Twitter, among others, at the Blog Bash 2009 @ Balik Pulau this coming Sunday, 22 MARCH 2009.

If you've never heard of Twitter, watch the following short presentation... "in plain English":



Learn why Twitter is the best thing on the Internet since Email, or the best for mobile phone, since SMS (text messaging).

Learn why Facebook couldn't even acquire Twitter for nearly RM2-BILLION!

Do you know that Malaysia's Deputy Prime Minister, YAB Dato' Seri Mohd Najib bin Tun Razak @NajibRazak is also using Twitter, although, not exactly how Twitter can be maximized its benefits! And so does YB Dato' Seri Anwar bin Ibrahim @AnwarIbrahim, the popular opposition leader.

On the other hand, President of the United States, Barack Obama use Twitter to first announce his choice for US presidential election running mate just months ago. Today @BarackObama is the most popular person on Twitter, and Facebook too!

Learn how businesses are using Twitter to generate millions of RM in sales.

Join us in Penang!

To attend, RSVP at the official website of Social Entrepreneurs Club of Balik Pulau.

BTW, if you've never heard of the multiple award-winning Rural Internet Centre of Balik Pulau, watch the following video:



See ya in Balik Pulau!