But I think you might be the filter already. You’ve presented a considered position focussing on a certain aspect of #mumbai in your post here. You filtered.

Like other commenters has said, the idea of filtering Twitter seems dangerous. You can’t filter without censoring. And the most powerful aspects of Twitter are it’s speed and it’s openness. Any filtering would reduce this.

I think there are two sides to this: media production and consumption.

What needs to develop around it is a media ecosystem that fills the gap between Twitter and CNN (or the Guardian or the BBC).

In Twitter we have the base level of unfiltered, unfounded conversation that is fast yet unreliable. I reckon that as blogging becomes faster and more common, we might end up with a middle-layer of media outlet that can filter Tweets, images and videos to create more considered thought-pieces fast. That could solve the production lag between Twitter and CNN, perhaps.

And then to your point, which is more about consumption. We need tools that allow is to filter information better. The same way we choose our newspaper according to our bias. I think this will be a longtime coming but one can imagine a cross between Google Reader and a Twitter client that calculates your interests, biases and provides live filtering of all your streams. Cory Doctorow alludes to such things in Makers.

Good post. I’ll follow it up at some point with a more considered POV.

Nice post and for one I am happy to see at least some people thinking on how to improve the system(Twitter here) rather than basking in the glory of self-proclaimed victory of Social Media over Conventional Media.

I too had a tough time keeping track of relevant tweets on #mumbai and was quick to change to #taj for the want of selected(and less) tweets.

About your proposal of having a selected group of people having more authority than other, I am not too sure if it will be possible/achievable. However an easier solution could be if some people start tagging new and useful information with a different tag #mumbainews or something.

As has been with Twitter’s use to date, I believe that users will determine how it’s used in the future. A peer reviewer system, when you have over 100 tweets a minute, will never work, and it also defeats the purpose and appeal of Twitter.

For users, in Twitter’s present form, I believe the solution to avoiding all the comment noise is using more detailed searches, such as #mumbai and emergency, or #mumbia and emergency and phone.

Unfortunately, I think you will see an increase in twitter feed spam and trolling. Dropping links into your web site within the busy #mumbai feed is a sure way to increase traffic to your web-site, and oddly, I only observed a little of it this week.

Better feed search tools is the answer in my opinion. Twitter could promote subsections of #mumbai for example. Further empower the users, instead of installing regulators.

Do we have a dedicated and recognized group of journalists or news centers delivering the Tweets? Is citizen reporting the answer?

It’s hard to say what the answer is, and sadly until then it looks like we’re stuck with the chaff along with the wheat…

Our tumblr is a log of our work, mixed with markers, timelines, odd bits. It’s not a news source.

Did you see the mumbai timeline we posted? It’s a snapshot of the very beginning of the event. We can’t show everything, but within that screen grab we feel the “trajectory” of the event can be forecast. But it’s not for folks who want all the details. That’s not what we’re aiming at.

Our aim is within the screen grab we posted today – the Wordle Cloud on tweets we posted PRIOR to the 1st tweet within the mumbai event. We’re filtering & tagging the twitter firehose for pre-conscious connections which when combined provide a possible forecast of a major event. Not always bad, but that’s where our world is right now.

Re your idea of worldwide storytellers – love it – so much so we began to code a desktop app called ‘TwitterProbe’ which would allow one to create their own filtering around events and then reblog/retweet as needed. This project is on hold for several reasons: 1) we need the twitter firehose which is not yet available publicly 2) we no longer have funding to support the program. Something may change in the future, but we’ve moved our focus to the forecasting.

hth,

Michael