There were several reports coming out today about shootings in Mumbai, India. It appears that this was a series of coordinated attacks throughout the city.
I haven’t been following the story in real time, or even that closely – the truth of the matter is, this is far away from my consciousness – and as such, I can wait for a news summary to gather all of the information and present it to me in a more traditional way.
For others, this is much more time- or proximity- sensitive. And for those people, I found this story to be interesting. It shows how internet tools like Twitter and Flickr allow a distributed user base to quickly broadcast information to the world, events litteraly unfolding right before their eyes. Add in a smartphone and you’ve got mobile reporting like never before.
This is just one great example of ‘web 2.0’ capabilities – taking advantage of the public to generate content. In some cases it means you can get cumulative data to give you an idea of how good a movie is or whether a restaurant is worth trying. In this case it means you can get live unfiltered information much quicker than any news agency can get shoes on the ground and cameras on the air.