London bombings: through the news

An interesting aspect of today's shocking terrorism in the capital, was the way in which the news filtered out (ie, the falsehoods were eliminated). I first heard from a colleague the news that Liverpool had been victim to a bomb at about 9:30am. A quick scout of BBC News online showed that it was in fact Liverpool Street, London, that had been targetted.

Throughout most of the morning, the BBC website was particularly slow in its updates. Despite the obvious demands on its servers and those of rival news sites such as Sky, ITV and CNN, I thought this would have been the ideal opportunity to see if the press are right when they claim that it's the world of blogging that beats the traditional media. When it comes down to it though, how do you find out what's happening now? Type in
"london bombing blog" on Google, and at this moment in time (11:33pm), you get 257,000 results, of not very much relevance. Of course, at 10 this morning, the hit rate was a lot lower.

I tried out technorati.com, which was better, but the blogs I trawled through at mid-morning were cut and paste jobs -- with no unique comment.

The newsgroup uk.local.london was my next port of call. Discussion was on here, but it was rife with further red herrings, such as similar incidents occuring in other parts of the country including Brighton.

It was also about mid-morning when the words "bombs" and "terrorism" were being officially used -- a major U-turn on earlier comments of a "power surge".

The London newsgroup was eventually ditched after comments about bombing Iran and killing Jews started to be offered as solutions to all our problems.

Luckily, I stumbled across blogs.guardian.co.uk/news and I stuck to this for the rest of the day. Yes, it struggled at times with the worldwide web demand, but it kept me up to date on exactly what was happening. It also led its readers to the excellent flickr photo service of the day's unfolding events.