Category: technology

Twitter breaks the news of Western Kentucky shooting

Update, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008: Apparently no shots were fired in Wednesday’s incident at Western Kentucky University. WKU defends erroneous reports about shooting.

I first heard about today’s shooting at Western Kentucky University via Twitter. Here’s how the story unfolded for me a few hours ago:

Scanning my Twitter feed, I noticed this post from @steverubel (of Micro Persuasion fame):

//friendfeed.com/breakingnewson'
@steverubel: 'Friendfeed erupts with comments around the university shooting http://friendfeed.com/breakingnewson'

I clicked the friendfeed link in hopes of learning more details about the shooting (such as what college, how many hurt, etc.). But there wasn’t much available yet, only:

“REPORTS: MULTIPLE GUNMEN ON WESTERN KENTUCKY CAMPUS; STUDENTS IN “IMMEDIATE DANGER”; URGED TO TAKE SHELTER. DETAILS SOON.” (link)

This is the third or fourth time I’ve gotten breaking news from my Twitter stream. I see this as a growing trend.

So does Rubel. In a blog post today, he writes that the newsfeed is the future of news.

Newsfeeds elegantly combine peers and pros, algorithms and networks. They know no bounaries. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb agrees. This is why social networks will become the primary theater for PR in five years time.

“The newsfeed metaphor,” writes Rubel, “synergizes commentary, activity, relevance and timeliness and that’s why it’s the beginning of a new era in news.”

Among the 400-plus tweeters I keep an eye on, there are a handful of news organizations. Not one of them fed me the information about this shooting as quickly as Rubel did with his link to BreakingNewsOn’s friendfeed site. BreakingNewsOn, billed as “the breaking news wire,” also has a Twitter account that I am now following.

BreakingNewsOn also is based in the Netherlands, and it broke the news about an event that happened in Kentucky. Only on the Internet.

Uploads to YouTube increase to 1GB

Yesterday I posted about micro-casting website 12seconds.tv. And thanks to Kyle and Ron, I now have my very own 12seconds channel with nothing on it (paging Bruce Springsteen ).

Today, I’m heading in the opposite direction, sharing the latest news from the biggest name in online video.

YouTube announced this week that it users can now upload videos as large as 1 gigabyte. Up till now, users were limited to a measly 100 megabytes for their uploads. The new video uploader is now available to anyone who wants to opt in. It also lets you edit your clip’s metadata during upload.

This is good news to anyone who desires to post longer or higher-quality video to the service.

Thanks to TechCrunch and LifeHacker for the info. As TechCrunch points out, YouTube is actually playing catch-up with some of the other services.

Much of these features were already available from other services, but it indicates that YouTube really does have a view of what’s going on in the market and wants to stay competitive in that space even though it’s still the de facto leader.