Brief intro: I am interested in how people use and appropriate technology (especially new Web technology). When I read a workshop paper over the summer on Why We Twitter (Java, Song, Finin, and Tseng), I realized that microblogging services like Twitter deserved real attention from the research community. As a light-weight, free, mobile tool for communication that is growing in popularity, it has the potential to greatly change the way we share information, communicate, and interact with each other both online and offline. With the wildfires in San Diego in October 2007, the public news station, KPBS, saw an opportunity to use Twitter to get crucial, timely information out to people when, for example, their web servers couldn’t handle all the traffic. I recently interviewed the folks in the New Media Team at KPBS and learned, from their perspective, how they coordinated the round-the-clock, 5-day Twittering of events related to the fires. Several forums, newspapers, blogs, and others have cited this as a particularly useful appropriation of technology—now I would like gain the perspective (and collect anecdotes) from the folks who actually used the KPBS Twitter feed during the SD wildfires!
Did you follow the KPBS Twitter feed during the San Diego fires? (Please tell me about your experience!)
1. How did you first hear that KPBS was using Twitter for updates?
2. During that week, when did you first hear about this?
3. How did you access/read the feed? Home computer? Cell phone? other?
4. How often did you use the feed? When/where?
5. Did you use any other sources for getting news at the same time?
6. What was your overall impression of the Twitter feed? Was it useful?
7. Was there anything that KPBS could have done differently to help you get important updates at this time?
8. Where were you located during the fires (what part of San Diego)?
9. What kinds of updates did you care most about during the fires? Evacuation orders, road closures, shelters opening up, etc.
10. Had you heard of Twitter before? Had you used Twitter before? (when/how)
11. What is your gender/age (optional demographics)?
3 Comments
Out of curiosity, why are you asking only about KPBS’s Twitter feed?
i assume the previous comment is nate ritter. i actually followed his feed during the fires, and had not heard about the KPBS feed until directed here.
i hope you’ll post your findings! i think the “first responder” aspect of twitter could be huge.
A larger question is obviously how others used Twitter to update people. For the moment, I’m doing a small research project focused only on KPBS’s use of Twitter. A natural extension would be to interview you, Nate, and others. I know Jerry Sheehan at CALIT2 (at UCSD) is interested in the whole disaster response, and I am working with him to collect information about it. In other words, stay tuned !
P.S. I’ll definitely post my findings (soon) ! Jerry’s also building a repository of digital information created during the fires that will eventually become public, as well.
One Trackback
[...] hear from individuals who actually used the Twitter stream for updates. In addition to my posting here, I posted a few questions on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk about how people found and used the [...]