Twitter as Ceefax replacement
I was up stupidly early the other day, and having already played World of Warcraft quite extensively, I stuck on the telly. I was delighted (and maybe a bit embarassed) to discover that they still show ‘Pages from Ceefax’ when there’s nothing else to put on in the morning. I was flooded with fond memories of reading Digitiser and the music pages on C4, and also of those times when a lack of TV or radio coverage meant that the only way of following some football matches was by sitting watching the Teletext pages tick round and cheering when you got a score update (one in your favour, at least).
Fast forward a few days, when I found a good friend stuck for coverage of a Scottish lower-league play-off; too low key for even local radio coverage, and no chance of even a sniff at live TV coverage (even BBC Alba have turned their nose up at it!) What solution then? It turns out that his local newspaper have a twitter account, and have sent a reporter to live tweet coverage from the final. Amazing stuff, and a brilliant use of the technology. I had a wee look at it and all in all, it’s not a terrible way to follow a game of football (better than watching teletext flick round anyway!) We came to the conclusion that the experience is not unlike watching a game of Championship Manager (and yeah, I know it’s called Football Manager now, but I like that think that since playing it since v1.0 on the Atari ST, I can call it Champ if I want. Same goes for Opal Fruits. n00bs.)
This is unlikely to become an entirely widespread way of consuming football. Most football that ordinary people care about is covered to the point of saturation in mainstream media, but I wonder how useful it would be for people who do support they many, many less-well-supported teams around the world. It all points to the power of Twitter as a medium, the power to live broadcast facts, views and thoughts from just about anywhere, and to build sporadic communities round about events through hashtagging. Wow. Credit to the Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser (twitter: @acadvertiser) for coming up with this. One thing though, if that was my paper, I would feel absolutely no shame about chucking out an occasional advert for the paper itself during the coverage, seems like a fair exchange; since not everyone is going to follow them, preferring instead to follow using a service like twitterfall.com