FriendFeed Proves its Worth as a Research Tool during South Ossetia Crisis
I don’t blame you if you haven’t heard yet about the military crisis between Georgia and Russia in South Ossetia right now.
I mean, how much attention can one spare when the Beijing 2008 Olympics is all that everyone is talking about?
In fact, it was downright serendipitous that I found out about South Ossetia tonight while watching CNN, since I tune into CNN like once every three months, and coincidentally only while traveling in Thailand.
In any case, the situation there is very real and extremely grave. I wish the Russians and Georgians can stop this mindless aggression immediately. The world has enough wars going on right now as it is, and we certainly don’t need another one.
However, I’m not here to talk about Eastern European politics today. I’m here to talk about FriendFeed.
Like any other information maven, the moment I saw the Georgian-Russian conflict on CNN, I immediately wanted to know more. Yes, I could of waited a couple hours for CNN to do their news recap, or waited a week for CNN to do their Georgia-Russian special report, but I couldn’t wait that long.
So off to the web I went.
Doing a Google web search for “south ossetia” yielded decent results. Google blog search and news search also got me a lot more detailed information to scour through.
However, pages and pages of search results only yielded a lot of facts. What I was looking for is a recap of how did things get to this stage, and some guys’ analysis and commentary on what all this means and why is South Ossetia so important that both Georgia and Russia wants the territory so badly.
So I tried searching on FriendFeed. And voila! The fourth search result – a conspiracy theorist’s take on the South Ossetia conflict – is exactly what I was looking for. And the fifth search result – an article by David Wescott – agrees with the conclusion that I’m about to make:
While the mainstream media and even Wikipedia can provide facts and current reporting, you really need to rely on social media and social content aggregators like FriendFeed to get the entire story quickly. It was through FriendFeed that I found a possible conspiracy theory backing up the war. It was through David’s blog entry that I discovered the Global Voices Online site and their excellent coverage on the South Ossetia crisis.
It was FriendFeed and social media that allowed me to quickly discover new insights and information that is different from the same stories and takes that the mainstream media and traditional information channels feed us all the time.
And like I have said many times before, the importance of social media in offsetting complementing mainstream media coverage is 10x more important in the country where I come from, where our press freedom is ranked 153rd in the world, sandwiched between luminaries such as Iraq and Kyrgyzstan.
FriendFeed – You have graduated to the top spot as one of the first places I will search whenever I am doing research. Congratulations.
