Lesson 6 Microblogging part 2: A specific news channel

To be honest, for many years I did not understand the value of Twitter. But in August 2010 I was in big trouble -  then Twitter came and helped me out showing what a useful service it can be.

I was in the deep woods of eastern Finland. Can you believe there are areas in Finland with no Internet? Not even with a mobile data modem? Yes, there are such areas, even entire villages without the Internet.

Normally I can survive some time without the Net, but now Hull City had a very important game, and I just had to be able to follow the match in real time. But no chance to listen to Radio BBC Humberside match commentary over the Net in Möhkö, Ilomantsi.

Möhkö is the most eastern spot of continental EU.
(Funny that Finland, the most eastern part of EU
is said to belong to Western Europe)

In my desperation I had to try any means, so I tested Twitter over SMS. The hashtag to follow Hull City news is #hcafc. I followed the Twitter stream created by a number of Hull City friends at the stadium and I could imagine I was there with them watching the game.

Amazing. Fantastic! Spectacular!! 
Now I understood the genius of a service like Twitter: from the magnitude of streams on the Net, from the babel of billion voices I could filter only the most valuable for me at the moment.

I could create my own news channel which focused on the one and only important news stream for the moment.

Searches with or without #, saving and choosing what to see

Above you can see results of a search I made with hash tag and the search term; #eurovision. The result is a list of entries where the user has printed the # before the search term thus highlighting the importance of Eurovision in her/his tweet.

Note that you can choose between seeing all tweets or only the most important ones, and that Twitter offers you the option of saving the search.

The search above is made without the #. You can see that the result shows all tweets containing the word "eurovision", with or without the hash tag. What do you think: can it be useful to know and utilize the difference?

Other search options

Below you can find the result of another topical search this morning:

On the left side of the picture please find advanced search options:

• Everything is the basic search showing all tweets.
• People restricts the search to entries made by users having "ebola" in their name or user name.
• Photos show only a list of photos attached/linked to "ebola" tweets.
• Videos show only a list of videos attached/linked to search term tweets.
• News shows tweets about the topic by news services.
• Advanced search enables more search options like countries, languages, time etc.

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The lesson about Twitter, parts 1-5:
1. A general news channel (lists) published on April 7
2. A specific news channel (basic searches, using #) (this story)
3. A better search engine than Google? (upcoming)
4. A massive database (upcoming)
5. Teleportation machine and collaborative notebook (upcoming)