The bad news: this was a missed opportunity for us. The good news: I think it validated several of our ideas.
A quick recap: on April 9th, the Olympic torch made its run through San Francisco, and a fairly sizable protest followed. The interesting thing was that the protest took two sides… those protesting China’s treatment of Tibet, and those protesting the protest of those protesting China’s treatment of Tibet. This set of demonstrations caused the route of the torch to be modified, resulting in an entertaining running commentary of the events played out over the internet.
Validation came in several flavors
- Coverage played out live on the internet. I followed this with twitter, mostly from @laughingsquid and @davewiner. Route changes were broadcast, photos were posted… far before major news outlets had a decent story.
- This was an event that had multiple sides. Some of the coverage tried to be balanced, but there were definitely two distinct sides. The ability to collect all the info and then slice it into different views would have been very interesting in this instance. I’d be interested in seeing the pro-China side of the debate, which I feel is fairly quickly dismissed here.
- Grass-roots coverage is fragment. Sfist had a collection of tweets they displayed. LaughingSquid put some pictures up on Flickr. Having a unified place to collect coverage from people on the ground would be very interesting to me.
So while we’re disappointed we missed out on this particular event, we’re very excited about the potential use of our platform going forward. Stay tuned!
