Being a Twitter newbie I am still going from “what is the big fuss” to “I would rather die than not have Twitter” (which is apparently my eventual fate ever since setting up my account). So it was fascinating yesterday to see that as the Liberal Party went into meltdown, Twitter was ahead of even the online news services presumably because the same journos that send news back to the online service were tweeting it as well. Being that Twitter is virtually live I guess it bypasses the upload stage at the online media outlet.Thanks to the likes of @leighsales for making us feel like we were there, because I think news is so much more exciting the closer to real time you get. So is this the future of news broadcasting? Virtual real time reporting from multiple sources (that you have chosen) and opinion aplenty to go with it.

Not much later in the day and as the Liberal Party continued to crash and burn, Twitter was again ahead of the pack – this time the ARIAS. I am writing this from Queensland where the sun arrives one hour late every morning during summer, and so I had to shut down Tweedeck during the show as I was finding out who won the “best unintelligible emotional outpour” award way ahead of the TV broadcast – I know thats mostly a function of the daylight saving but even my Brisbane based “tweeps” (see I’m picking it up) were slightly ahead of my TV (how do they do that??) And to top it off Daniel Merriweather read his acceptance speech notes from his mobile phone…