I have relatives and lifelong friends who live in London. A mate of mine works in the famous Gherkin building, headquarters of Swiss Re and with a perfect view of the mayhem in the streets of London yesterday. He is also a reguler user of the bombed stations so for a few hours last night we were concerned for his safety. Fortunately for him, he was in a conference outside the city all day.
The story broke as the last item on our SBS news at 7PM and we spent the next 3 hours watching the story unfold. From an information perspective it was interesting to watch.
In the first place, the BBC looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. It was stuck in Gleneagles Scotland doing G8 stuff and seemed, for a considerable time to be unable to switch. CNN was taking feeds but the commentary was pretty clueless.
Sky did a good job of stepping up, with a chopper overhead within minutes and the disturbing news that they were being prevented from flying over the scene of the bus bombing; which told us almost as much as if they had been able to get a camera in there.
The formal net was not very useful. Reuters, AP, the Guardian and Indepenedent all had server crashes during the next hour or two and none of them did what the US media did on 911 and put up text only sites. I'd have thought by now that for a major incident like that, a text option would be child's play. With most people running css these days it could be cleanly laid out, all feature content, sports, entertainment and gossip removed and a slot for breaking information ready made. No sign.
The net was also the usual amplifier of dodgy information as people logged into their favourite blogs and retailed the information from the TV which was at best vague and at worst wrong. Its fascinating to see the way accuracy decayed very rapidly as the bombs in the tunnels between stations were reported from both ends and then treated as bombs at the reporting station rather than "in the tunnel between", Suddenly there were multiple blasts from single bombs.
The bus was even more bizarre because at least in a tunnel you know to some degree of accuracy where things are. The Bus was first reported at Russel Square, then Tavistock Square, then Tavistock Place and finally Woburn place. What's more, mobile and ubiquitous communications meant that in short order the same bomb had been reported at least three times. The TV, unable to resist delay, reported them without cross checks and possibly contributed to the confusiuon.
It was about 2 hours before the firrst mention of only 4 bombs made it on air.
One neat moment was when Sky interviewed a young woman about what she had seen and what was happening at that moment. She did as good a job as I ever heard in 20+ years of radio. Clear, together, structured information, keenly observed, just the right ammount of detail, brilliant work. She is 16 and on a work experience programme. There's hope.
On the plus side, mobile phones with cameras proved to be invaluable for reporting, with stills of the bus and later video shot inside the trains as it happened.
Flickr came into its own within minutes although one stream at least was mostly grabs from the TV which has its own archival value but frankly got in the way. For original stuff have a look at Adam Tinworth's set which is both good photography (including a nice one of the pros scrambling for a vantage point) and well captioned. More gritty and obviously from a phone is mlazopoulou's set.
While information architects and librarians will scream that there are many tags for the same thing and no tools for aggregating the tags into a group, there is the pool tool that has instantly created the 7/7 Community (formerly London Bomb Blasts) where members can contribute their pics.
Look at the propagation effects here. Someone on Flickr uploads their pics and creates a pool for others to subscribe. As I write this there are 484 pics there.
By 13:15, 4 and a half hours after the attacks, the Guardian blog throws in another update, linking to a photo on the Flickr Pool which is a screen grab from sky news.
And just to round it out, !Quiplash adds a comment to link users to a directory of London bloggers, sorted by their nearest subway station. The ones for Aldgate East are here where:
- Spanish blogger Ara has postings and a cartoon lifted from El Pais.
- Anna is having more adventure than she likes
- Farting through my Fingertips becomes a part of the networked world
"I'm at home about 200m from the Aldgate East explosion, the first I knew of it was an email from Brisbane. In Australia. Bloody internet." - Saltation talks about Why Terrorism Doesn't Work
- and Mike uses yesterday's headlines as chip wrapping.
"tomorrow, I still expect to be celebrating - if you're reading this to check, the plan remains the same, I'm not going to let a couple of wankers with a fucked up belief system ruin a perfectly good night out. See you there!" - Then Ric pojnts to a football fans website where the loop closes with the subject line my Sons friends parents, 1 killed
That's not where I expected to wind up when I started this thread, but I'm glad that the virtual reconnects with the real if you follow it far enough.
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