It’s been around two years since I created my Twitter account and exactly one year since I started taking it seriously. The event that made me take notice of the microblogging platform was the Tour de France. As a fan I was intrigued by the continuous updates by the American team director Jonathan Vaughters of team Garmin Slipstream was updating throughout race from the team car. It was a look into the coaches box per se and offered an immediacy television coverage couldn’t match.
This year the Tour has taken it to a new level and created what popular cycling blogger BikeSnobNYC calls “nano-coverage” which I think is a fascinating concept that we’ll see more of. With Lance Armstrong’s 1.4 million strong Twitter following and 48 cyclists who aren’t Lance there is now a constant flow of coverage that actually competes with the heavy TV coverage. And when you combine the two there is a certain surround sound effect that creates a level of coverage and access that we’ve never seen before.
Athletes are adopting Twitter in big ways but I think we’ll see more and more nano-coverage in other arenas such as the recent live feedback from politicians during joint sessions of Congress. But at the end of the day I think the fundamental change that Twitter (and whatever it becomes or is eventually replaced by) is that people can now be their own real-time journalists.
