Twitter / redsoxcast

Funny story from yesterday:

I find out from an ESPN breaking news alert (sent via text message) that the Red Sox are boycotting their scheduled Japan trip because the team was mislead about their coaches compensation for the trip.

I immediately start combing through the Boston Globe’s website and ESPN’s site and cannot find any more info on the story.

A little while later, after many more fruitless searches for more details on this juicy news topic, I get an update from someone I follow on Twitter whose handle is “RedSoxCast” that the team will be playing in Japan. Great news. I figure the author was relaying news from ESPN or the Globe, but I go back to those sites and there’s still nothing.

For all I know, he was just watching TV and posting about what he was watching, but it doesn’t matter what his source was, because I needed immediate info on a topic, and for the first time in my life, Twitter was more valuable than ESPN or my local newspaper.

Now, here’s the really ironic part of the story: The whole thing happened on my iPhone while I was sitting in a class called “Management in the Information Age”, and my excellent professor, Andrew McAfee (who has an amazing blog on the topic of Web 2.0 tools in business or Enterprise 2.0), is a huge Sox fan. I mentioned what happened to him after class and he seemed interested both in the news and the medium in which it had presented itself.

It makes me wonder how far off the era of “citizen journalism” really is. My intuition tells me that there will always be a place for professional writers and journalists, but that same intuition would have said that something like Wikipedia would never work.

The really twisted thing is that the case we were discussing was Wikipedia, and how, why, and if it works.