

I love Twitter, but it isn't a news source. Just ask Jeff Goldblum. - technologizer
http://technologizer.com/2009/06/25/twitter-the-fastest-way-to-get-informed-or-misinformed/

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tptacek
Is 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.

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ASUmusicMAN
It 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.

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swombat
Funnily 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.

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zacharypinter
Twitter isn't a credible news source, but it is a source of news.

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FluidDjango
I 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 :/

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derefr
To be more specific: Twitter is a _data_ source. Data is not information; it
possesses no metadata informing its credibility ("color".)

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baddox
Actually, 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.

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derefr
I 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.

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joshu
How can we ask him? I heard he died.

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vaksel
twitter is like email or instant messaging, its a method of communication, not
a source.

