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So, cyclone in Burma followed a week later by earthquake in China. Business as usual, I’m afraid – we live in a world of accidents waiting to happen. When an accident does happen, though, how do we know about it?

There’s been a blizzard of coverage in the blogosphere about how Twitter beat the US Geological Survey to the punch with news of the Chengdu Earthquake. Twitterer dtan felt the earth move under his feet in Beijing, and his twitter was picked up by Robert Scoble, one of the world’s best-known technology writers and a man with about 23,000 people following his Twitter stream. On his blog, Scoble explains:

I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. Now there’s lots of info over on Google News. How did I do that? Well, I was watching Twitter on Google Talk. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!! Over the next two hours I pointed at anyone who had info about the quake on my Twitter account.

The result has been a whole discussion about how this shows that Twitter is a force to be reckoned with. The Online Journalism Blog goes link crazy on crowdsourcing without managers, so start reading there and follow the trail. The key indicator for the Twitterers (ironically) is a post on the BBC News dot.life blog:

I was beginning to think Twitter – the micro-blogging service that’s all the rage amongst the technorati – was just another fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives. Until this morning. When I logged on to my desktop Twitter application (sad, I know) it was alive with Tweets about the earthquake in China… Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.

Many of the comments on these posts express their skepticism, particularly about the claim about having the news before the USGS – it’s more likely that the USGS was cross-checking their data before releasing it. This relates back to something I wrote a few weeks ago – there’s no accountability on Twitter, so there’s no requirement for people to check facts.

When the World Trade Centre fell, the reason I knew about it was that my Dad phoned me and told me to turn on the television. This Twitter coverage operates in the same way – as gossip, rather than news. Check out the direction of the conversation on Twitter after the initial news breaks – it falls into three categories:

1. This earthquake is terrible, isn’t it?
2. Here’s a link to a news source with some actual detail about the earthquake.
3. Isn’t Twitter great for breaking this news first?

That doesn’t mean that it’s not valid, useful or interesting – but it does mean that you’re not going to find it that useful as a news source. If you think I’m harshing Twitter’s buzz, then you should try Better Living through Software:

It’s silly in the extreme to act like twitter is somehow breaking news, though. Masses of people within China found out about the earthquake as it was happening via messages from friends on QQ (which is massively more popular than twitter), and CCTV carried the news almost instantly. I suppose it’s cute that some English-speaking expats using echo-chamber technology were able to *also* report the event on twitter, but even the tweetscan example seems a bit lame to me. When I search for tweets with the word “地震”, tweetscan gives me nothing — apparently tweetscan doesn’t care about Chinese.

Ouch, but a fair ouch.

UPDATE: As always, Global Voices Online is the solid antidote to Anglocentrism, while the Frontline Club is much more positive about the whole Twitter ride.