Bro's browsings

Twitter - best you can get next to being there?

The BBC let me down today. Twitter gave me a new perspective.

Being from Northern Ireland, I have strong feelings about events of the last few days (and indeed some of the ill-informed blogging around the subject - but that's for another post) and wanted to follow the silent protests planned for today.

So I turned to the BBC NI website. It was showing me helicopter footage of the crowds gathering while the protest was actually happening. Where were the, even still, images of the actual event? Broadcasting Hose in Belfast is only a couple of minutes walk from the City Hall and you can see the area of the protest from the BH roof - I know because I used to work there.

While I was looking for useful BBC coverage I received a tweet from someone at the protest which alerted me to the hashtag #silentprotest. A quick search later and I was able to read comments and reaction from those outside the City Hall and see live pictures of the crowds. I couldn't be there but through Twitter I was able at least share some of the feelings and perceptions. Under the circumstances that shared experience was important.

After a while a check back with the BBC revealed little change. Yet it didn't need to do much to give me what I needed - some live blogging, a selection of still images, a short video of the silent part up as soon as possible. Yes there was a report up after a while but it lacked the immediacy and emotion I experienced with Twitter today.

I am a journalist, I understand all the arguments the BBC might make but I think this is an important example of how digital media has changed how we must approach some events.

Unravelling online knits

One of the big questions in my professional life at the moment is what is print good for and what is better online. Printed matter has some very useful properties – it’s portable, browsable and offers the opportunity to easily set different elements, for example pictures, text, diagrams, side by side in a format our eyes can easily take in.

Thinking about this interesting question, I realised that in another area of my life the value of print is very clear despite an increasingly digital presence – believe it or not, knitting.

These days I looks at knitting blogs ranging from people sharing projects to those organising face-to-face events such as I knit london with their marvellous Knifta awards. I use sites to find out about and order yarns, needles and other must have accessories for the obsessive knitter. I’ve never blogged about knitting myself but I do have a related Facebook application and now Tweet project updates.

What doesn’t work online is the humble pattern. Knitting patterns need to be portable, you want to be able to annotate them, you often need text (or coded instructions) alongside both pictures and graphical instructions and when planning you want to be able to compare several side-by-side. Paper works well for these tasks, which is why my collection of knitting books is growing and I subscribe to various magazines.

PDFs only works for free patterns, because to judge a pattern you need to look right through it and if someone let’s me see the whole PDF then they have nothing of value to sell me. A couple of models may present themselves as solutions – high quality content subscription services perhaps, I'm certainly pondering the possibilties.

Then today I received one of the mags I subscribe to and realised there is an urgent need for an interim solution. It contained a 16-page free pattern for a knitted wedding cake. What a waste of paper. So please knitting mag publishers – start offering me a pdf or page turner alternative now.

Death 2.0 – networking our grief

Social media tools and networks have rapidly become central to many of our lives but may be only something unexpected can bring their role in death into focus.

Although I have known someone who blogged her terminal illness, this week I gained a new perspective on social media and the end of a life. Late the other evening I received a direct message through Facebook from a stranger who said she was the niece of “Kildare” and broke the news that he had died suddenly that morning. Within minutes I was in a tornado of Tweets, Facebook exchanges, Yahoogroup posts and straight emails as other friends received the message and sought confirmation and more info, as well as an outlet for shock and sadness.

It was my first experience of an online wake and it certainly gave those involved a new way to share in a time like this. Kildare’s Facebook wall became a place of tribute and memorial. Messages of condolence and even photos from recent night out with Kildare were soon sprouting. It was clearly a helpful, cathartic exercise – and much faster than that kicked off by traditional notification methods.

But death 2.0 raised other issues. The Facebook approach meant that some of Kildare’s closest – but perhaps older or less social media savvy – friends learnt the news second or third hand, in one case almost by accident.

Then there is the unexpected. While Kildare’s Facebook presence lived on in a dynamic way, his Twitter biog – like an unerased answering machine message – remained frozen in time reading, poignantly: “I was born and have not yet died…”

So how do we ensure old media users are not excluded in the era of the online wake? And how long do we leave the online ghosts untouched – or erase or not to erase?

Suddenly these are issues society – or that part in 2.0 world – needs new norms for.