Toronto City Council is in session today and you can watch the fireworks streamed live on Rogers website. If you don’t want to watch alone, and are a Twitter user, you can participate in the city-wide peanut gallery by hash-tagging your council tweets with #tocouncil (for a quick overview of hash-tagging, see my Twitterramma piece in Eye Weekly). Even if you’re not a Twitterer, you can follow along with the crowd’s comments by going to this Twitter search page. You just click refresh when you want to see the new Tweets. Yesterday even Mayor Miller was making comments to #tocouncil, and even sharing photos he has taken with this Blackberry.
Photo by Sweet One.
4 comments
Excellent work Spacing; you’ve been at the forefront in using new media to interpret and understand urban policy– and this reinforces your unique role in growing the democratic discourse concerning the future of Canada’s largest urban area.
Not sure that Twitter provides much context. Sometimes I think Twitter fans love the immediacy more than the accuracy. I find waiting for considered opinion or reporting is better and saves time in the end.
With that in mind enjoy this clip from Louis CK that is making the rounds:
“Everything is so amazing and nobody is happy”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoGYx35ypus
Scottd agree Twitter skews to immediacy over considered opinion, but not so sure it is any less accurate. Obama’s visit to Ottawa was very accurately tweeted – if you wanted to know where Obama was and what he was doing #Obamawa was *the* place to go, even traditional media were depending on it/contributing to it.
Still, who says we need to choose? I’m happy using Twitter for the play-by-play, and using blogs and print media to interpret it all after it’s in the can.
And if you are the kind of person who enjoys watching council debate anyway, (guilty here) how much better to share your impressions with a like-minded community as you do so?
Ubiquitous broadband video is really what would make a difference although I think one of the basic underlying principals of something like Twitter is that it is for those unable to pay full attention at the time. I wonder if people really need to know information snippets this fast, but I have to admit I have followed Steve Jobs keynotes this way.
Back to the original point, we should be glad that anybody pays attention to Council meetings and if Twitter or any other tech means more are doing so then thats a good thing.