Wednesday, April 16, 2008

More on how this might work

Here's the theory:
  1. Someone creates a Twitter identity for a community of interest;
  2. People follow that Twitter ID;
  3. Use existing free tools (in this case, TweetPeek) to create a live "newswire" of raw inputs from members of the community and export this to multiple formats (as in the widget on this blog, but also a standalone page);
  4. Since the signal-to-noise-ratio on any Twitterstream is likely to be low, create a blog that a team can manage;
  5. When a member of that team detects a breaking news story (or, in the case of a planned event, the event approaches), the blog "wakes up" and begins covering the raw data coming in;
  6. The blog becomes the focal point for organizing efforts (Flickr tags, video channels, etc.);
  7. The blog has an RSS feed;
  8. Members subscribe to it.
In theory, a team curating a raw stream of user-generated inputs could put out a decent newsfeed of updates in multiple media formats within a matter of minutes.

We'd like to test that idea.

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