tweetmeme | Online Journalism Blog

It’s often said that Twitter’s big advantage over Google is its ability to allow you to conduct ‘real time search’ – if an event is happening right now, you don’t search Google, you search Twitter.

But today Google has announced a series of features that, while still not offering real time search, take it just that bit closer. For me it is the most significant change to Google’s core service in years.

Here’s the video:

This week, while talking to my students about the ability to search by date in Google, the computer assisted reporting blogger Murray Dick mentioned how unreliable the feature was, so I wouldn’t get too excited.

What is new, however, is the ‘recent search’ facility, which brings up results from the past hour or two. Continue reading →

There’s been an earthquake in China, and the Twittersphere is alive with it. I’m going to write a post on this and keep adding to it through the next hour or so. Let me know anything interesting you’ve spotted @paulbradshaw

The first interesting point is Tweetburner: its most-clicked links shared on Twitter are almost entirely about the earthquake, and show some interesting uses:

Here is crowdsourcing without the editorial management. How quickly otherwise would a journalist have thought of using Twitterlocal with a Google translation? And how soon before someone improves it so it only pulls tweets with the word ‘earthquake’, or more specific to the region affected? (It also emphasises the need for newspapers and broadcasters to have programmers on the team who could do this quickly) Continue reading →