Twitter & the news. While online technologies have transformed the media along many dimensions, one of the most important ways of understanding this is in how the news cycle has changed. In the old days news was broken on real-time channels such as radio and TV, reinforced and pushed out to a broader audience through newspapers, discussed again in chat shows, and sometimes had life added to the news with updates or responses. Today, while elements of that cycle remain, much of it has changed. Twitter has had one of biggest impacts on the news cycle, firstly by often being the first media to break news, in offering a discussion forum around mainstream media coverage, and amplifying stories that have appeared in traditional formats. I stumbled across a couple of interesting graphics and analysis by Samuel Degremont at Burson-Marsteller Paris who shows some of these changes visually. Click on the images to see them in full size and read Samuel’s detailed discussion (in French).
La Community Manager d’Air France décrypte le bad buzz du week-end dernier. Des milliers de tweets et de très nombreux posts sur des blogs se sont répandus dimanche, créant ce qu’il faut appeler par son nom: un bad buzz pour Air France. A l’origine de l’emballement, des français à Tokyo cherchent le week-end dernier un billet d’avion pour rentrer en urgence en France et tombent sur des tarifs exorbitants sur la ligne Air France. Ils essaient alors de sensibiliser la compagnie ou de transmettre leur colère via Twitter. Sans réponse via le site de micro-blogging, la situation dégénère. La compagnie est accusée d’avoir augmenté ses tarifs pour profiter de la situation et le community management d’Air France d’être au tennis en pleine crise au lieu de répondre à ses clients. Décryptage vu du côté d’Air France avec Marina Tymen. . « Le samedi, dimanche et le soir nous surveillons nos médias sociaux. J’ai certainement commis l’erreur de ne pas avoir tweeté pour dire que les messages avaient bien été lus ou pris en considération.
Al Jazeera Launches Twitter Dashboard To Track Uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, Libya & Bahrain. Qatar-based news outlet Al Jazeera has launched a Twitter dashboard to illustrate tweets about uprisings and revolutions around the world. The dashboard tallies the daily number of tweets about developments in each listed country (the site is currently tracking Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain) and shows the average number of such tweets per minute for each country. It also graphs the number of such tweets from each country over time and shows a visual representation of the "hashtag distribution for each country getting the most attention in the Twittersphere.
" Al Jazeera has led the world's media coverage of protests and revolutions throughout the Middle East and Africa. Some have called the uprisings the news network's "CNN moment. " (CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War is largely responsible for launching its current popularity, much the same way current events have catapulted Al Jazeera's standing.) China is blocking coverage of Egypt protests on Twitter-like services. China appears to be trying to limit public knowledge of the unrest in Egypt.
Over the weekend, Chinese Twitter-like services run by Sina, Tencent and Sohu blocked the word “Egypt” from being used in microblogging messages passed around by users. A search for “Egypt” on Sina brings up a message saying, “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown.” The country’s censors also deleted comments from the limited online news coverage of the protests in Egypt in an effort to block independent commentary on the events, according to the Wall Street Journal. Sina, Tecent and Sohu have hundreds of millions of users, and clearly, the Chinese government doesn’t want those services to become forums for discussing popular revolts.
The Egyptian government has been trying to stop protests from being organized by shutting down the internet. So far, it hasn’t worked.