Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Power Outage

This morning, at around 8:30 am, the power went out in Maryville. Luckily, cell phone towers are hardly ever affected by such problems.

The first thing I did was to grab my iPhone and check both Twitter and Facebook. I noticed that two other people had already posted to Facebook that their power was out as well. It indicated to me that it was not just the Northwest Missouri State University campus that was without power, but also the rest of Maryville, or at least, certain areas in Maryville.

I noticed that on twitter none of the news agencies had reported on the outage yet, a very common occurrence. It also shows the power of social media when it comes to timely information. I decided to notify KQ2 in St. Joseph and a few minutes later my post was retweeted to far larger audience than I would be able to reach myself.

Some funny side notes, thanks to this power outage and thanks to social media I now also know way more than I ever wanted to on what people were doing this morning.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Twitter in the morning

One of the first things I do in the morning is check Twitter on my iPhone. Why you ask? Because it's the one place where I can truly get all the important news in a flash. I get both the national news headlines, the international news headlines, but most important, the local news headlines and even the weather.

To give you an example, this morning when I woke up I read about the several sporting events that had taken place the night before.

NodawayNews
MHS Wrestling beat Sabetha, 51-21, and Falls City, 45-36

I also received an update that it is going to be foggy in St. Joe, and even though I won't be driving to St. Joe myself, I have other people in my life who have to on a daily basis who I can update with this information by retweeting. The beauty of the post below is that it includes one of Twitters most powerful features, you can include links to pictures. Sure, what is thick fog? But by clicking on the picture I can actually see how thick the fog is.

kq2
RT @mikebracciano: Fog around St. Joseph thick fog to the south... http://yfrog.com/4anj4aj

And my third major news update came from St. Joe News. Apparently a couple slid of the road and there is an update on the situation. Thanks to Twitter I now don't have to keep checking the website every five minutes to see if there is an update.
stjoenews
News Update: Couple taken to hospital after sliding off the road http://bit.ly/8QUXpG

Now, I know that there is other ways of getting information from the internet in an easy form, but to me Twitter is the first service that actually lets you do this in a fast and convenient way. Instead of checking multiple sites, or reading long RSS feeds, I know exactly what's going on in my area through 140 character updates.

If you are more curious about what Twitter is, check this Twitter guide book on Mashable.com:
http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

How small is small?

On this blog I will be posting about the latest trends in Social Media and how they can benefit small communities. Small is a relative term and I therefor feel I should explain better what I mean by small. I live in the northwest corner of Missouri and I will use this location often as a reference during my post. In the northwest corner Missouri I will mostly be focusing on two cities.
  • The first one is Maryville, with a population of a little over 10,000 and on top of that about 5,000 students. 
  • The second one is Saint Joseph, with a population of a little under 80,000
Both cities have a four year university and that should help with example for Social Media.

I'm looking forward to blogging about this topic and I hope you all are as well!