#apple + @anncurry = Twitter for breaking news

It’s been an interesting few weeks in Twitterland proving that today, everybody is a publisher.

When an earthquake rocked Haiti, Brian Williams, Katie Couric and the rest of the world’s news organizations were getting up to the minute information not from their bureau in Haiti, but from Twitter.

Steve Jobs announced the new iPad at an invitation only event last week.  That presentation was broadcast to the world live (unofficially) by cell phone web cams.

I was glued to my computer screen; fascinated by the iPad announcement (especially the price), but even more fascinated by the number of people who were joining the live stream from that event.

How did they hear about it?

Twitter.

I tweeted as the number of viewers continued to grow.  You can view my twitter stream from that day here.  Some of my tweets were “re-tweeted”.   In about an hour, the short-link I offered to Leo Lapport’s live stream drove 277 views to his live Apple Coverage.  In that same hour,  total clicks to his long URL through short-link service bit.ly numbered almost 16,000.  In that one hour, Lapport’s viewership grew from 70,000 to over 115,00 at its peak, leveling off to about 102,000 through the conclusion of the Apple presentation.

And then there was the story of Ann Curry, the NBC newscaster, making news live via twitter as she sat stuck in a New York Times Building elevator.  Great coverage of the “event’ including the following tweet from Gawker.

What’s interesting is that Ann Curry had just taken part in a panel discussion about the use of Social Media surrounding the earthquake in Haiti.

At the end of the panel discussion Ann got stuck on a New York Times Building elevator with Social Media guru Jeff Pulver and Phil Thomas Digiulio, founder of pegshot, a web service that allows you to instantly upload video from your cell phone to share on Facebook, Twitter etc.  Phil shot live video of the “entrapment” and posted it to the pegshot site.

You can see the actual video shot on the elevator and posted to Pegshot by clicking here.

Here’s a 9 minute clip shot on the elevator and posted to You Tube:

And here’s coverage of the entrapment on the Today Show

In this one hour, the newscaster became the news maker while those surrounding her became the reporters.

Fascinating stuff!

Which brings us back to Social Media 101.  Today, everybody is a publisher!