Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 19:15:47 -0400 From: Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> Subject: [Air-L] Twitter the Newspaper of Me To: aoir list <air-l@aoir.org>

Just tweeted this:

For some of us, Twitter is becoming the oft-foreold "Newspaper of Me" -- that is if you follow the links.

Twitter, of course, is what you make of it.

Happy Canada Day!

Barry Wellman

I understand, Barry. But that's mainly fwding existing news of the mainstream news industries. The Iran case showed that Twitter also had the potential to become a news source in its own right. This time it remained modest in scale, and the event itself faded away (it's too early to say it 'failed'). In this case the "Twitter Revolution' was hyped up by US American techno evangelists like Shirkey and Jarvis. Easy to deconstruct but that's not all of it. If Twitter is all about people communicating with each other, then why all this forwarding of major websites URLs that people are already visiting anyway? Geert