The terror attacks in Mumbai shocked the world at large on more than one level. The violence, injury and loss of human life which we brace ourselves for every time something like this happens somewhere in the world was this time overlaid with something completely unexpected; a collective surge of reporting of events from unofficial sources providing the first bulletins on which mainstream media built its coverage. In the aftermath of the attacks, even CNN, that bastion of what was once known as live and up-to-the-minute reporting, acknowledges: “It was the day social media appeared to come of age and signaled itself as a news-gathering force to be reckoned with.”

Not to be too lavish in its praise of a medium which, as MG Siegler at VentureBeat says, it cannot match in terms of speed and potential number of ‘reporters’, CNN is also quick to point out the negative aspects of the medium, quoting Tim Malbon‘s blog post Mumbai: flash mob or social media in action?.

Malbon writes: “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets. What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.”

On this point, Siegler sides with Mathew Ingram: “The old adage, ‘don’t believe everything you read’, is still important to keep in mind when getting information from Twitter. But it’s precisely an “old adage” because it’s been around long before Twitter ever existed and will be around after it’s gone. Twitter is just another source, a very fast one, but it still requires the ultimate filter: Your brain.”

It wasn’t just Twitter that showed its true colours in the Mumbai reporting. As Paul Lewis at The Guardian reports, Flickr and Wikipedia users were equally fast in their contributions to the coverage. And Canadian user-generated social news site NowPublic showed its true mettle in its moment-to-moment crowdsourced coverage.

Demonstrating the power of the social media timeline to make sense of the crowdsourced coverage, Pete Cashmore at Mashable points to a Dipity video: “…tracking how events unfolded, pulling together news stories and YouTube videos and posting them along a timeline.”

Cashmore says: “Dipity is imperfect, for sure: you can quickly lose your place while navigating the timeline. And yet, there is so much social media content created during world events that new ways to view and navigate that data are becoming invaluable. Perhaps even more telling: use cases like these are helping social media to shake off its stigma of being a tool for narcissists or a wasteland filled with life’s minutiae.”

And now for something completely different
If all this social media deconstruction is a bit heavy for a Friday – check it out: The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, totally rickrolled.