In case you were in any doubt, last night's dramatic plane crash-landing in the Hudson River in New York provided yet more proof about how interconnected we all are in the internet age.
The major media outlets in New York responded quickly and on the whole they did a good job of reporting the news of the so-called "miracle on the Hudson".
Yet the most immediate and compelling reports and images came from citizens. Even if you had the most rapid response system in the world, reporters were not able to teleport themselves to the scene – not to mention the fact that the on-the-ground location changed as the plane floated downstream.
By contrast, news was all over microblogging website Twitter within minutes. One of the early reports came from New Yorker Janis Krum who wrote: "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy." Krum also uploaded this pic of the plane floating in the river. Krum was interviewed by MSNBC later yesterday and his pic had more than 100,000 views on TwitPic by this morning.
I didn't follow Krum at the time but within about 10 minutes of first hearing about the plane crash, my Twitter friends were sending me messages pointing me to Krum's post. It's possible that either people who followed Krum already were repeating (or retweeting) his posts, or that they'd found his post by searching on a service such as Summize. Either way, it was impressively fast – and it was great hearing about it first-hand at a point in time when we weren't sure if everyone had survived.
Although I did some of my own browsing on my favourite news websites to try to figure out what was going on, again Twitter proved itself as an excellent news aggregator, pointing me to links to the best media coverage. I particularly appreciated the live video streaming on CNN.com and MSNBC.com among others.
