Crisis,Twitter and Noise

Ever since the #mumbai became the preferred source of information for netizens some people have been rejoicing at the so called victory of  Social Media over Traditional Media while a few others have been pondering on various aspects of Citizen Journalism using Social Media tools and how could the noise be reduced from this chaos.

I too remember having a tough time keeping track of hundreds of updates per minute with loads of re posting, rumors and hate posts. But as soon as I realized that people are re-posting just about anything I modified the search query to exclude “RT” & “re”, the most common forms of re-tweets and life got a lot easier. These are a few easy and practical tips that can be done to reduce the noise while tracking the updates

1) Exclude RT and re(or any other prevalent acronym for re-tweet) from search query
#[event tag] – RT – re
Since re-tweets are redundant when you tracking the tag from search, excluding them is the first step
2)Exclude any/every one who starts making hate posts
#[event tag] – RT – re -@xyz -@abc
3) Follow less common/trending tags
For ex #taj was initially not as crowded/frequently posted at tag(which changed eventually) but it was still easier to track and had less noise for obvious reasons.

Taking it forward from Tim’s post,  I feel an easy and practical way of generating quality news in case of an event like this that I could think of would be if a group of people( a bit experienced and well known in the community) start using a new #(event tag) to post relevant, original and verified bits of news.

What has been your experience with tracking updates and how did you deal with it?