Almost a hundred people are dead and thousands are homeless from the Victorian bushfires as I write this. It is a horrible tragedy and I am thinking good thoughts for everyone.
Wow. Really?
Sure, Twitter is great, but let’s be serious. It is quite a lot more important for Kevin Rudd and his team to actually go to Victoria and do something about it and talk to the mainstream media, all of which I imagine is extremely time-consuming. So maybe we should give the dude a break.
This kind of illustrates something I’ve been learning about this week.
I think it’s fair to say I live in a bit of an echo chamber as regards being well-connected on the Internet. I’ve made the Internet a big part of my life for some years now, and it’s a major part of what pays my wage every month. In fact, I even suggested earlier in the week in a conversation that perhaps most of the visitors to our website (very web focused) already knew about Twitter, to which I received a resounding “hell no way dude.” Needless to say I have been doing quite a bit more research!
So, of course I’m probably prone to overestimate the impact of something like Twitter on the rest of the world. I think I probably don’t overestimate its impact on the real world (as evidenced above), and I don’t tend to believe in its place in the market as much as some people, but the fact that Twitter generally is really quite tiny was quite the eye opener for me.
Let’s take a look, using the above sentiment about this disaster as an example.
- According to Tweetrush, about 424,592 people worldwide were tweeting on Twitter on Saturday.1
- By comparison, Victoria’s population alone is roughly 12 times that number—almost 5.3 million people.
- According to OzTAM an estimated 569,000 people watched Channel Seven’s news on Saturday night in Melbourne, 509,000 watched Channel Nine’s, 486,000 watched Channel Ten’s, and 445,000 watched ABC’s.2
That is: There were more people watching one TV channel’s 30-minute TV programme in Melbourne than were using Twitter worldwide all day.
Given limited time and a fairly big disaster to deal with, if you were the Prime Minister, would you direct your media attention to Twitter?
1 Tweetrush’s stats don’t include private tweeters. Additionally, it’s quite difficult to estimate how many of those people are Australians, since country statistics usually depend on either the profile being filled in correctly (unreliable) or on web traffic measurement (also poor, as it doesn’t measure API clients or SMS). ↑
2 The real source of these numbers is OzTAM, but their nightly numbers are a subscription service. ↑
4 Comments ( feed)
This is not the only thing I twittered about the bushfires, it was just one small observation :(
Great to see that the PM's twitter steam is now giving some very useful info, like this:
ACCESSING EMERGENCY GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE: Contact Centrelink http://cli.gs/7bXgjQ #KevinPM Team #Bushfires
and this:
Victorian Bushfire Information Line - call 1800 240 667. Official Govt info and updates http://cli.gs/3SjSHJ #KevinPM Team #Bushfires
That's the kind of stuff I meant.
And yes, you're a right, the dude does deserve a break - tough times for everyone involved. I saw him nearly break down with emotion on tv news this morning. Awful, awful tragedy.
JJ