What a few weeks this has been. Twitter has become my primary news source.

I have been able to get way ahead of the curve as Hanna and Ike developed. A huge number of news and personal feeds aggregated into a very complete view of what was happening. Many news organizations are now twittering as are of course us as individuals. The combination is excellent.

As the financial crisis took hold – I have been days ahead of what is happening. It was almost like being in the room with Hank Paulson this weekend. Now there are tweets from staff too.

I would say with breaking news a Twitter perspective is at least a day ahead and is much more complete.

The Conventions were very well covered. All the key media outlets joined the Twittersphere – some better than others. The best ones did more than retweet items – they provided color on the Tweets. There is a richness, immediacy and personality in the political coverage that is missing in conventional converage

So if you wish to experience this – try Tweetdeck that allows you to set up specific groups to follow. I have Fannie Mae group, an Ike Group, A Lehman group. I did have conference groups. You can follow any topic really.

Twitter has become my first port of call for news.

Most news organizations are going there too – Now Citizen Journalism is I think being defined. For instance Huffington Post has a bunch of “Stringers” such as Dave Winer and Jay Rosen tweeting. The News Hour has its own Tweet.

More immediacy is being delivered – here is the NYT blogging in real time about the day on Wall Street today Sept 15 2008

It’s like being there – so different from a headline

Many of the conventional news services will be going all out in Denver this week at the Democratic Convention. Many Bloggers are there too. But I think that this may be the Twitter Convention too.

Here are just a few from the PBS system:

Laura Hertzfeld, Vote 2008 producer: http://twitter.com/Laura_PBS
PBS Vote 2008: http://twitter.com/pbsvote2008
NewsHour: http://twitter.com/NewsHour
Tavis Smiley: http://twitter.com/tavissmiley

My Twitter feed has many more and all the breaking news services. But what I want is for those Twittering to give me a feel. To be like a composite eye whose many perspectives ad up up to a collective.

The “headlines” will be covered by the regular news channels. The feel of the floor and the deep background can be offered by a Twitter “Collective”. In time a station need not send its own staff at their own cost. It can use local volunteers to Twitter for them – creating a new kind of “Wire Service”.

But how to make sense of all these Twitter inputs? I already have nearly 400 feeds – how can I see the patterns from the noise? How could a station with say hundreds of volunteers Twittering the worlds news or simply using search to find the coverage separate the news from the noise?

I think that an answer may be TweetDeck

I have been using TweetDeck for a few days now and I am really impressed. I can easily create groups of meaning – beats for news – and I can easily use the search capability to extract content that has a focus. As Twitter users breach the 150 Dunbar number of followers and chaos and noise build, they can use TweetDeck to recreate meaning again.

I restrict my “Friends” group to my real friends. I have set up a Beat to cover media – all my pub TV and radio and Media folks go in here. I have set up a news channel.  To learn more bout Joe Biden, I did a serach for Biden and have a column there. It could have been any topic of course.

Is not the real value of social media in Convening or Meaning Making?

Assuming Twitter can solve its stability issues, the risk will always be noise. Success for twitter will bring too much noise for most people to handle.

A tool like TweetDeck starts to address this noise issue and starts to help us use Twitter to find more meaning and hence value.

Update: Jon Husband asked me to look at monitter – a tool that enables you to set 3 search variables and have access to everything that is happening in the Twitterverse. I have set it to Denver, NPR and Obama – I am really there!

Is there room for a “retail” Fast Search Tool that will enable me to “Parse the Web” for other content that fits my profile? A tool that would have a Dashboard that would feed back by my self selected groups things that I would like based on my prior actions and the actions of say a group of selected friends?

What would my web world be like then? What would be the value of such a tool?

Disclaimer – I have no connection to TweetDeck other than I have just donated some money to them!