The Ultimate Online Social Experience!
For anyone interested in online social behaviour ,
last 48 hours have been like a live case study.
I have personally been aggressively engaged in tracking the events in Mumbai through twitter, facebook, Wikipedia, flickr , various blogs and not forgetting good old Google.
I have also observed the trending of reactions very closely, which began as news, evolved to provide helplines, and a few live descriptions of events, to now analysis. Along the way a few enthusiastic users just fed TV news on twitter, a few more business minded used the opportunity to promote their blogs or business websites (all in good vain).
The foreign media was clearly restless and clueless. They quickly contacted Indian Bloggers and did quite a few online interviews and telephonic interviews .
I am not sure about the credibility of the news items, because many bloggers where not even in Mumbai, and were acting as ‘human aggregators’ of news across the web.
Having said that, this incident has shown us the way ahead on Citizen journalism and collaborative examples of online social media in the event of disasters. Perhaps this was the first time in India that we saw such an example of social media integrating with a real life situation.
As we discuss, ‘#mumbai’ is perhaps the largest followed topic in Twitter!
