With Twitter just being the hottest piece of shit on the shovel at the moment as far as the commentariat are concerned, you can’t listen to a broadcast about the protests over the elections in Iran without hearing an excitable mention of how protesters are Tweeting about the going’s on in Tehran and elsewhere in the country. With reporting restrictions in place, the traditional media are (it is alleged) limited in their coverage. So, with no more than a wet finger-tip in the air, I thought it would be fun to look at how Twitter’s coverage stacks up against two well established internet news sources: the BBC and Google News. I’m not really concerned with accuracy or balance here – just how easily accessible and well organised the information is.
The first thing to note about Twitter is that it lacks any form of channelling. Short of a pretty meagre list of ‘trending topics’, you have to resort to searching for ‘iran protests’. The results are, IMHO, pretty disappointing.
Firstly, who are these people? Is Hermanu99 an Iranian in the thick of it, or just some guy?
Secondly, as all the links are contracted, I can’t see where I’m going to go if I click them – aside from the description.
Thirdly, the 140 character limit means truncated information that tells me nothing in this context.
Finally, just visually this isn’t very appealing. Whether its the weird pidgin-English that the 140 character limit creates, or the use of truncated URLs, it doesn’t scan well or give you any clear idea of what the top development might actually be.
TWITTER SCORES: 3/10
The BBC
The BBC is often held up as the ‘gold standard’ of content delivery on the web, but my search for ‘iran protests’ was a little bit disappointing – although certainly better than Twitter.
The layout it, as you would expect, clear and well categorised but it doesn’t engender much confidence in the results that nearly everything is marked ’1 day ago’. Again, the situation in Tehran is changing by the hour and what happened yesterday might not be relevant to my needs.
Just under these links you see here were a set of results – all of which came from back in 1997-98!
The option here is to click ‘more news’ but even when you click this, the results are ordered by “relevance” rather than date by default, which seems odd on a news channel, and results in only the top 4 results having anything to do with the current events in Iran, although there is a decent list of video and audio content accessible from the side menu at this point. Even so, I still need to refine what I’m after for it to be that much use. A slight hmmm from me.
THE BBC SCORES: 6/10
Google News
Google News isn’t, of course, a news source in the traditional sense. It merely aggregates from various sources, but to my eyes it gave easily the best results.
As well as showing a variety of sources – mostly recognised names like Al Jazeera, The BBC, The Times etc it offers a facility to sort the results by timeframe – the best probably being ‘last hour’, which as I’ve noted can be very important in a situation like this.
Even cleverer, the detailed date choices include key dates in recent Iranian history – 1979 for example being the date of the inception of the current regime (itself formented by protests against the then Shah) and highlighted in the choice of 1978-80 as a date range by Google.
The use of headlines for links also gives me instant context. I know that Mousavi is urging more protests, that I can watch some video content, that the protest have been banned but this is being defied. All of that comes without even clicking on any of the links so I can get a quick overview of what’s going on and go back to my sandwiches within a minute or two if I like.
GOOGLE SCORES: 8/10
Conclusions
This isn’t really a fair test of anything. Each source of news has many different benefits and very definite uses, but at the high level kind of usage that most news probably gets (people looking for a snapshot of what’s going on in the world) then the aggregator model offered by Google is clearly superior to the other options I looked at. Google itself carries none of the content, but where it scores most heavily is the brilliance of its layout and navigation. Where Twitter is confusing and ill-defined, Google is precise and clear. Where the BBC looks surprisingly dated, Google looks up to the minute and fresh.
Now: back to those sandwiches…
A few things I wanted to share with you, some relevant some not.
1) Great blog. I’m jealous. You know I know it. Let’s not harp on about it.
2) Twitter.
a) I’m really not fussed. I mean honestly it’s a proper load of bollocks isn’t it? What am I missing? I’m wary of publicly admitting that I think it’s an utter waste of energy, so I thought I’d say it somewhere where no one is likely to read it…
b) twat v. past participle of the verb “to twitter”
3) I’ve eaten 12 mini scotch eggs tonight.
4) LinkedIn tells me you’re winding down at 9xb; did you sell out to the dark side then?
Evo!
1) You’re right to be jealous. Although you’re thin and have hair, so it’s yin and yang.
2) Twitter is balls. Big, sweaty, unwashed balls.
3) Talking of jealousy, I’m *insanely* jealous of the fact you had mini scotch eggs. I had soup.
3)
I know you’re a member of the Conservative Party so I thought I’d add:
“Too many twits make a twat.”
Your idol said it, so it must be true?