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San Fran Olympic Torch Relay is a Social Media Extravaganza!

“I then found @SFtorch which was a Twitter profile that was aggregating all of the related tweets – suddenly sitting in my kitchen in London I was party to probably more information than had I been walking the streets of San Francisco. People started tweeting that they didn’t know where the torch was headed (as it had been driven off in a bus) however I was was watching the live feed so I knew where it was going – I quickly tweeted @SFtorch, let them know what I was seeing, they then relayed that to everyone following them and BOOM all of a sudden I providing information to the protesters on the ground – shit – this is the most awesome ARG (except that its real) ever.”

From Grumblemouse Musings. This is a great example how Twitter and similar technologies can be easily used for social action, in this case, or other purposes. Many years ago, when we lived in LA, I remember jumping on the internet to follow an earthquake in Japan. The media had very little news but people posted images and wrote their experiences.

What makes this story much more interesting is that the traditional media was an unwitting participant. People effortlessly adapted social media technologies like Twitter to extend the “scoop” mentality of the news media, their manic drive to get a story first, in this case, using a helicopter to track the actual location of the Olympic torch. I wonder what the editors or corporate owners of NBC think about their involvement.

When someone tells you Twitter is hopelessly narcissistic, think about this protest. There are many ways that instant, bite-sized communications between networks of people can be harnessed in useful ways.

URLs:

http://grumblemouse.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/san-fran-torch-relay-is-a-social-media-extravaganza/

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