It is no secret that journalists have a crush on Twitter.
Ad Age recently reported that, by their measurement, the media had given the value of
$48 million in coverage to Twitter in a single month.
Geotagging tweets lies at the core of some very innovative journalism projects centered on live event coverage and crowd sourcing. Last year, long before Twitter's super skyrocket to popularity took off,
twittervotereport.com devised methods of geotagging tweets to follow citizen reports of voting irregularity around the country. The next step came with
inaugurationreport.com, which culled tens of thousands of citizen reports posted in Washington, D.C., and around the nation and successfully mapped them all in real time (disclaimer: I was involved in this project).
Dave Troy, founder of
twittervision.com, was a key player in both projects. While Dave's work has been creating solutions to geotag information fromTwitter and map it, he welcomes Twitter's move to build geotagging into its core service. "I have been talking with Twitter about implementing features along these lines since March 2007," he commented via e-mail. "They have long agreed it was something they were interested in implementing but it was not as high a priority as service reliability or search."
The Washington Post's
TimeSpace platform is a mainstream media example of using geography to add dimension and context to news and reporting. On a global or local level, displaying dispatches in location as pop-up windows in real time creates a new visualization method for communicating news and information. Doing it in near or real time taps into the critical culture or "the state of now," as founder of the 140 Characters conference and social media expert
Jeff Pulver champions it.
But, fellow tidbitter and super social mediaista Tish Grier voices concerns. "This is really kind of creepy, and could have some negative implications for women, who are often targets of stalkers. Twitter isn't necessarily geotagging just information, it's essentially geotagging people, which is how most Twitter users view their twitter streams."
For a celebrity journalist like Ann Curry, Katie Couric or David Gregory, or a journalist who is working on a controversial beat, giving a geotagged 411 could put them in harm's way.
Andy Carvin of the Social Media Desk at NPR, and one of the prime movers in the award-winning vote and inauguration report projects, sees huge potential for journalism. "Geotagging tweets with latitude and longitude will definitely help with determining the precise location of tweets, as compared to the use of city names or ZIP codes, for example. For large-scale mobcasting projects such as Vote Report and Inauguration Report, this would've been invaluable, as a ZIP code didn't necessarily equal the location of a polling station," he said by e-mail.
But in the next breath, he also reminds us all that the core of using social media is all about personal comfort zones and setting limits.
"Users will have to think before geotagging their tweets. For example, if they tweet from home, are they comfortable geotagging the location of their house for all to see? Or if you're a reporter interviewing someone on a sensitive topic, it wouldn't be prudent to tweet about it with a geotag of their location. So while there are times where high-resolution geolocation can be very useful, at other times it carries certain risks. You just have to be smart about it."
