This past week Al Jazeera English launched a Twitter Dashboard. The site states that, "As uprisings turn to revolutions in the Middle East, Al Jazeera's New Media team releases a Twitter Dashboard that illustrates what is being tweeted about and where." In real-time the dashboard tracks which hashtags are the most popular, and it provides totals for tweets per day and tweets per minute for Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Bahrain with the expectation that one can track uprisings and political unrest through these numbers. While an interesting way to try to keep abreast of tweets and social media, the dashboard lacks context and background information to really serve a reader much value. This type of tool becomes a means of simplifying rather complex and intricate situations, like political uprisings in the Middle East, to internet chatter and hashtags. Twitter is an interesting platform to monitor and news can be spread this way, but I think media outlets need to be careful to cover the complexities of a story and not let the popularity of one social media site dominate coverage and speculation.
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