Microblogging and the spread of information
My blog was suspended the other day, together with all the Arabist.Net blogs, after high internet traffic crippled our host server.
Losing my blog however (which should be temporarily, I hope, as we are in the process of moving to a new host) did not mean I lost the ability to disseminate news and information about arrests, detentions, or whatever breaking news I wanted to get to the outside world. How? The answer is simple: Microblogging…
Let’s take the latest case of the arrest of Philip Rizk, part of an Egyptian police crackdown on a pro-Gaza campaign…
In general, I devote my main effort to the blog.. breaking news, important announcements for sure take priority.. The readership of 3arabawy ranges from roughly 18,000 to 40,000 visitors a month, so it makes more sense to post urgent updates on the blog. But besides my blog, I already had set up accounts on Delicious, Jaiku, Twitter.. These are all important social networking tools with millions of users around the world…
As soon as I received the news of the crackdown on Friday, I started bookmarking news about Philip’s arrest, giving the bookmarks the usual tags, like: HumanRights, Egypt, Activism, Gaza, Police.. but I made sure to add a specific tag, which is “6FebProGazaMarch”… This in effect meant that I created a delicious page, devoted to news about Philip and the crackdown…
A page, with a URL address that could be circulated, say, by emails and posted on websites…
A page that also has RSS feed, so you make it easier for people to receive your updated links as soon as they get bookmarked…
I used the TinyURL.com service to shorten the URL address and then sent it out to my contacts on Jaiku…
And I had already set up TwitterFeed which automatically collects the feeds from my jaiku account and posts them on my twitter page.. This meant that the delicious link was sent out to my network of followers on Twitter…
So here you go.. Whether the blog is up or not, breaking news and updates can still be communicated to the rest of the activist community and the media circles…
Bravo!
(fingers crossed for the blog!)
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Nice!
Thanks shabab for the support..