Twitter and the earthquake in China

Much excitement among new media types this morning at the ability of Twitter to provide up-to-the-minute information on the Chinese earthquake.

Earlier in the day, Rory-Cellan Jones, technology correspondent at the BBC, described twitter as an 'amazing way of tracking Chinese quake news'. In fact, he thought his discovery that the tool was not merely a 'fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives' was worth a quick blog post.

Paul Bradshaw has an excellent summary post on how Twitter can be used for newsgathering with links to various other places. He suggests that this sort of crowdsourcing is far superior to some of the more traditional methods of journalism:

'How quickly would a journalist have found someone who speaks English and was affected by the quake? Or an image? '

If you really want to take advantage of this resource you'll also need:

• Tweestscan, allowing you to search 'tweets' for key words like 'earthquake'

• Twitterlocal, enabling you to track down tweets from China, (especially useful with a dose of Google translation)

• Tweetburner, which means you can track what other tweeters are linking to. (Alpha Twitter does a similar job.)
  

By all accounts, following self-confessed 'tech geek blogger', Robert Scoble, on Twitter also helps.