After the last class I was still unclear what to think about Twitter and social medias as a way to report news. I was not a big Twitter user and this class made me use it more. I was curious to investigate more and see how good Twitter was to report on some heated subjects where having someone on the ground could be either difficult or could bring significant value and truth. After searching a few hashtags, I found it was virtually impossible to take anything for true unless methodically searching for clues on the veracity of the tweet. Also, many tweets were a vessel for articles and pictures and opening each content was sometime a mess. I thought through a few actions that could be useful to curate tweets and get a larger picture and tried to build that into a simple tool.
This is still more of an example on what could be done than something ready for daily usage but I tried to get a sense of what a curated twitter feed could look like. Being able to search for a subject, get translation (non-latin characters are still an issue in my tool), get attached pictures and article right at the same place, get past tweets of the same user, know his location if available and do a reverse query on attached image to know if it was already present on the web.
The work in progress can be found HERE, let me know what you think and I will continue to improve it as the time constraint didn’t allow me for more advanced features and a bug-proof solution yet.
Great. You are working in the right direction. Curating a story from Twitter is hard. Did you consider adding the time dimension, which is an important element of the journalistic story. Also, when you load the page, after search request, you could select the first tweet as default tweet for tabbed content.
Thanks for the feedback, I’ll try to think of a way to add a time dimension to see how the story unfold.