I note Sky News are trying something unusual in their coverage from Beijing. All 22 members of the crew departing Osterley for the Olympics will be contributing to an ‘Olympic Twitter Microblog‘. They promise we’ll hear from ‘presenters, reporters, producers, camera operators and engineers: 22 different perspectives, 22 different pairs of eyes & ears, and 22 different experiences of Beijing 2008’ – all via SMS, by the look of it.
It’s an interesting idea, but not without its problems. Of the 22 in question, we might recognise the names of a couple – Chris Skudder, Jeremy Thompson. The rest – no offence, chaps – could be anybody; and I can’t see many people signing up to follow them. There’s a generic SkyNewsOlympics account, but at the moment, it’s little more than a directory of the other 22 accounts.
So the only way to follow the entire group effort is via the page on the Sky website… which may or may not have been a conscious decision. But an idea occurs to me: could you aggregate the 22 accounts back into Twitter from outside, using Twitterfeed, and the 22 individual (outbound) RSS feeds? A bit of a roundabout method, but I’ve done such RSS-cannibalism before, to great effect.
Responses
This is an interesting idea and it really shows you that the industry is moving on when big companies take up common popular web technology.
I wonder if the will make use of Twitters other uses?
PS: Just spotted the reshuffle at Sky News, which sees Steve Bennedik take charge of ‘a new unit called New Technology… to develop the use of new technology across all Sky News platforms’, reporting directly to top man John Ryley. The online staff will move into a unified output team under Executive Editor, Chris Birkett.
Here’s the press release. Shame they missed the email about calling the website ‘skynews.com’ from now on.