During Sunday’s class, instead of discussing social bookmarking and tagging, we ended up discussing social media and the election in Iran. Much of the information about the situation in Iran is reaching us via Twitter “tweets,” Facebook postings, and YouTube videos, due to the Iranian government’s crackdown on traditional forms of media.
So what is Twitter? We’ll turn once again to Common Craft to explain:
Another feature of Twitter is the ability to search for particular topics:
As I write this, Iran and #IranElection are trending topics on Twitter, and have been for several days.
Twitter is not the only Web 2.0 service being used to disseminate information about these events. Another major outlet is the video-sharing site, YouTube. Many Iranians have been recording cell phone videos of protests and posting them to the internet. One site following these videos is CitizenTube.
Many of the videos from Iran are graphic and disturbing. The death of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, was captured on two different cell phone videos. You can read about the events in this story from the New York Times.
Later on in Community 2.0 we will discuss these technologies further, but I wanted to post these resources now because of their timeliness.
[...] glad we’ve talked about Twitter and online video earlier than I had originally planned, because the media hub page contains both [...]