Cardiff.
Leslie-Jean Thornton finishes the session at Future of Journalism by discussing the spread of information on Twitter. She points us to the San Diego fire and the #sandiegofire hashtag, which really was a breakthrough for the use of hashtags on Twitter; this was the first time that hashtags were successfully used for the coordination of discussion around major crisis events.

It is interesting for such breaking news stories to examine the timeline of events on Twitter, of course; this also requires detailed qualitative, even ethnographic work. Early on, journalism on these events hasn’t even emerged yet, so we can study how events are being characterised by the users who just raised them; especially at these early stages, gatewatching and citizen journalism practices may be able to be observed particularly clearly.

Hello, blog – it’s been a while. I’m afraid I’ve been a bit slack in updating this site with recent events, so I’ve just made a number of rather belated additions. I’m about to head off to Europe again soon to present at a number of conferences, too (more on that in a separate post shortly), so expect the usual conference blogging again then; for now, though, let’s catch up on some recent news.

Part of my tardiness here is related to the Mapping Online Publics project, which is incredibly active at the moment. It now combines our major ARC Discovery project with a couple of ATN-DAAD-funded collaborations with researchers at the universities of Münster and Düsseldorf in Germany, as well as a CCI-internal project on Media Ecologies and Methodological Innovation. Much of our recent focus has been on social media in crisis communication, and I’ve now added a number of recent presentations to this blog: