photo credit: seektan 

Twitter is finally coming of age, and is demonstrating why the microblogging medium is fast catching up to be the fastest news breaker in the world. Something like 7 hours back a huge earthquake struck in China. The earthquake measured 7.8 on the richter scale and thousands have been feared to be dead. The epicenter was 50 miles from Chengdu, which has about 10.5 million residents. 

Robert Scoble a noted tech blogger and a Twitter addict first broke out the news on Twitter, even before the news could reach BBC. I was in college when I first received the alert via a text message. When I logged onto the internet the Twitterverse was completely busy with reports of the earthquake.

I won’t really go into much details as to what happened on Twitter this afternoon, but I’d like you to point you to sites that have covered this in detail.

• Online Journalism Blog has a lot more details about what happened on Twitter tonight. The Frontline blog has even more.
• Global Voices Online has links to videos and other Twitter and blog reports.
• Here’s a timeline of what first Tweets looked like.

News continues to fly in by the second, and I wonder if Twitter is slowly going mainstream. By their own admission BBC agrees that it was Robert Scoble who broke out the story first sitting thousands of miles away from China.

“Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media,”

That moment surely came a while ago, with Californian fires, more earthquakes, explosions and many other things. This is probably the first one that is gaining mainstream attention from news outlets like BBC etc…

As Twitter continues to battle its scaling problems, incidents such as this surely put Twitter in a position wherein everyone in the world can benefit from it. I know the investors behind Twitter are looking to make money from the service, but the social value derived from the service far undermines the economic value.

I think that “who’s first” is not exactly the point: “how fast, how many”, and “how open” for the spontaneous collaboration is much more interesting than who broke the story first.

We’re are going to see more of Twitter in the Twitter in the coming days. Here’s to hoping to that things go back to normal in China and may the god help the ones in need. I’m waiting for an official channel through which I can donate for relief purposes. Please let me know if you come across it.

To see the story unfold on Twitter visit Tweetscan. Do you think Twitter is slowly going mainstream and is ready to take on traditional media outlets like Reuters, BBC etc..

For more details on the earthquake visit NYTimes.

I am going on a vacation with my family today, so you probably won’t be seeing anything much for about a week from today. I’ll be back on the 16th, and hopefully bring you an overview of Macworld ’08. I know i’ll be late, but there is nothing much I can do.

If possible Thilak from Tech Buzz would contribute some guests posts while I’m not here. Thanks a lot guys, for keeping up with dailyApps, I assure you once I’m back posting will resume full speed. Life’s been kinda hectic with Exams first and now a Vacation.

See you guys on the 17th. Cheers !!

Here is a rundown into what WordPress 2.3 Has to offer :

• Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
• Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.

• We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
• A new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
• There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

If you are looking for instructions on how to upgrade WordPress, then head over to this page or I suggest you read this page that highlights how can you Upgrade WordPress the Failsafe way.

I want to analyse myself and take any corrective measures and get ahead with blogging on dailyApps. So I would like to ask you guys some questions. It would be nice if you could answer these for me because it really will help. Ok then here are my questions :

• What do you think about the Apps being featured here on dailyApps ?
• What do you think about my writing style ?
• Is there any app that you would like me to review ?
• What do you think about the design of the site? Is it easy to navigate around ?
• Is there anything else that you would like to tell me ?

Please answer these questions for me by either dropping in a comment or contacting me directly by email. Either way you are going to help me a great deal. So I am looking forward to hear from you.