Is live blogging the future of media?

Every momentous event nowadays is tracked by live blogs, posts and messages.

There are minute-to-minute updates as events unfold, from the earthquake in China, to the cyclone in Burma. The terror attack in Mumbai was no different, as eyewitnesses and citizen journalists communicated with millions around the world.

But is all of that good, does it help? Is it reliable or can it also be abused?

For media commentators, two events have really led to the coming of age of live blogs. Firstly, the recent election in the US, which saw a massive number of news websites and individual bloggers cover the events minute by minute all over the globe. They were not only from the US, but also from the UK and around the Arab world.

The terror attacks in Mumbai has cemented the position of micro-blogging and live blogging as an invaluable medium to share information.

The first tweets about the attacks appeared early, and subsequently gave a tremendous amount of information, about a highly complex and rapidly changing series of events. But there are questions about verification and clarity.

According to the British Broadcasting Corporation's tech blogger Rory Cellan Jones, a story that kept popping up was of the Indian government trying to ban twitter, because it was aiding the attackers.

However, there was no confirmation of the ban from any government source.

Jones also says that the story appeared on the BBC's own Mumbai live event page. The event page had pulled together all kinds of sources, official and unofficial, to give readers a picture of the developing story. The pages are designed to allow readers to keep up with all the latest information circulating about the story in real time. So, to some extent it's up to the reader to decide how much credence to give them.

Thus, it may be prudent to treat everything one hears on a social network with a degree of skepticism. It throws open the discussion on the relevance of the mainstream media. There, some say that, because of the volume of information on those networks and the number of users, the mainstream media is increasingly irrelevant.

Sites claim to have full stories out before the television networks got out of bed. But the fact is that, while thousands post on twitter, and it may have alerted many people to the attacks, as time went on, the posts made the story more confusing.

Finally during the Mumbai attacks, many people had to switch back to the TV and newspapers to get a full sense of the story.

So, what twitter has done is to provide instant information to millions. No one doubts the fact that it's one of the best things to have happened to the internet. But as Cellan Jones says, that what it doesn't do is, tell us what is true, and what isn't. That makes the work of mainstream media outlets and professional reporters all the more relevant.