News. Technology. Ramblings.

What a horrible news!

Another school massacre! Out of 31 notable school massacres listed in Wikipedia, 23 occoured in United States and Canada. Its a hard fact to swallow in a country which I have found have one of the best education infrastructure, however I can’t say the same thing about education system.

I found the story at Digg in the morning and the first thing I did was look up Wikipedia. Not to my surprise, it was being documented there with the change in the news.

The next place I looked up was the The Collegiate Times , Virginia Tech’s News portal. It recieved so many hits that it went down. So the site was hosted on CollegeMedia.com , the parent company of The Collegiate Times. The page was simple text page with very few graphics. It was a perfectly smart move to serve sudden spike in traffic.

One of the site which held up its servers and served as one of the first sites to provide live video footage was WSLS-TV ’s website . They kept on serving video content at decent rates even when MSNBC went into low bandwidth mode.

Next I moved on to check what info I can get from the blogging world. On Technorati, it was the number 1 most searched term of the day.

Blogger’s blogs of note had nothing to say about the shooting.

Opposite to the contrary believe that YouTube is becoming multimedia news hub, I did not find any video in YouTube when searched for “virginia tech shooting”. When searched for “virginia tech”, the very recent video it did show was from 18 days back. This does not mean people did not upload video, however they lacked to put tags - the only way for others to locate their uploads in space.

Newsvine, a 100% citizen journalism news portal, where readers submit and vote to define what news is, still had some other lead story. That is the reason I have started wondering, if totally unmoderated citizen journalism will ever be able to become a reliable news source option.

Bloglines.com threw back decent number of news sources back, and WordPress.org listed as its 2oth most talked about subject.

Facebook was one of the fastest and most intertwined network that people turned on to share their heartfelt feelings about the victims of Virginia Tech shooting. At 6.10 pm, facebook already had 302 groups and 3 events tagged “Virginia tech Shooting” - one of the groups with about 28000 members and more than 4000 responses.

How could I leave the 11th largest virtual nation in the world, MySpace.com . However, the response was totally different. When searched for the same terms in Myspace blogs, nobody seemed to be talking about the shooting.

At 6.34 pm, it seems to be the headline of most of the world news portals. CNN and BBC both had exclusive coverage on it. UK newspapers Guardian and Telegraph are running it as their lead stories. Even India’s news portal Times of India is showing picture coverage borrowed from AP. The controversial Arab news channel Al-Jazeera is running a picture story on it.

This is a much smaller list of where I could had dugg up for news. One of the places I would want to analyze is Second Life.

News provides us information wake up and respond to events, to analyze them, and to look at all different facet of the story. And all these times, the focus has been to keep it as neutral as possible, to keep the emotion out; to keep it unbiased. And the reason was that there used to be a story teller and then there used to be story listeners.

And that is the reason, some of the news I read today had lot more human element, than traditional news could ever cover. It had the pain and hope shared by the people who felt it rather than the people, who listened to the sufferers. And listening to first voice makes it feel like my own pain, my own agony.

May God bless the souls of all those, who left their loved ones in the morning, in hope to see them back in the evening, but never came back.

May they all Rest In Peace.

Picture Courtesy : Masacre at Virginia Tech, originally uploaded by Sully Pixel.