February 2008

So, unless you have been asleep all day or are reading this from another country; the main chat of the day has been “did you feel it last night?”.

I am of course referring to the Earthquake/tremor that happened at around 4 minutes to 1 this morning. The epicentre of the event was near Lincoln, which is about 105 miles from where I live - but not far enough that I didn’t feel the earth move and rumble for about 6-8 seconds.

I was just getting to the best part of reformatting my PC at this point (the bit where I realise that XP won’t validate its serial key as genuine again) when I mistook the ground shaking and windows rattling to be a ghost suddenly appearing behind me and tugging at my chair! By the time I had realised what was going on, my wife had jumped out of bed thinking it was a burglar trying to break in through the upstairs window and then rushed into see the kids to make sure they were ok.

We pulled ourselves to our senses, settled the one child that woke and my wife popped back into bed whilst I went back downstairs to see if I could find any information about the tremor on the Internet.

01:03 - My first port of call was the BBC News website. This was totally lacking any information - but bearing in mind it was only just after 1am and a few minutes after the event, I was not surprised that nothing was there.

01:05 - Reuters, Sky News and ITN news were then visited - but again, nothing to be seen.

01:06 - I logged onto my Twitter account and sent the following message:

I then jumped to the Twitter Public Timeline and picked up a message from Chris Alcock:

I did send him a reply, but he never replied to me though. I then saw a message referring to the tracking of tweets with the word “Earthquake” in on the TwitterSearch.com page and headed on over to see a glut of messages from various parts of the world reporting the quake and reflecting on the experiences of the people in the UK. Some poor chap was being sick at the time and missed it all - but he later informed me it was not a self inflicted sickness

01:15 BBC news page shows a “Reports coming in of earth tremor in west midlands area” ticker message but no real story to be seen. Still no word from the other news sites either!

01:16 I followed a link from the TwitterSearch.com list to TwitterVision and kept an eye on the BreakingNewsOn user based in the Netherlands who were providing the most information throughout the evolving news.

01:20 Twitter keeps serving up good links and information from people including the real information about the quake:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2008nyae.php

01:20 An old BBC news story about a UK quake from 2007 makes the top of the “most read” section to the ridicule of Twitter users:

01:25  The BBC post a Breaking News article with basic information about the quake and “more to follow” appears but it is all very vague and information lacking.

Conclusion

Twitter users beat the major news networks on the head last night!  I appreciate that any news story being reported by someone such as the BBC has to be checked, validated and double checked and validated before it even gets anywhere near being reported - but nearly half an hour before anything was put up is pretty poor.  The messages on Twitter were reporting the quake being in different places at different times and strengths, but until quality links were provided to actual data, this is par for the course.

Twitter might not be to everyones tastes, including mine at times, but it was very good at getting information quickly and easily from a large variety of people and services.  Twitter can be good fun if you know people on there but it can also be a lonely place too.

If you want to learn about Twitter, read the excellent guide by Caroline Middlebrook and then follow me!