A couple of tweets, discovered well after we all learned that Whitney Houston had died Saturday, illustrate a challenge journalists face in a breaking news situation. The tweets added significant details to the story, but were hidden among thousands of other extraneous tweets on many other topics.

There’s a potential new tool for finding the “vital few” tweets on a subject, a prototype tool, developed by researchers at Rutgers University and Microsoft, that aims to solve this problem. Called SRSR, for Seriously Rapid Source Review, the tool:

  • Identifies different types of Twitter users
  • Surfaces tweets with links to images or video
  • Filters out retweets
  • Picks out tweets posted from mobile devices

Read the whole story by Steve Myers at Poynter.org’s site: New Social Media Tool

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