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David Spark is the owner of Spark Media Solutions, a firm that helps companies build voice through storytelling and social media.

Tracking the Israel Gaza Conflict via social media

January 5th, 2009

The days of local news and 24 hour news networks to be the first to break news is long over. Social media tools, especially Twitter, have trumped all media outlets becoming the leading sources for breaking news. And as we watch the conflict in Gaza unfold, any of us, thousands of miles away, can actually stay up to date with eyewitness accounts of what’s happening in the territory.

Mashable has a fantastic post outlining all the ways you can follow the conflict. Read the article to learn how to do it, and to tweak the settings to customize your specific news feed. But below is a summary of links that will deliver you all the social media news (and sometimes traditional media) of the ongoing conflict.

• Crisiswire’s Gaza coverage – Get links to traditional media, blog posts, Tweets, and Flickr photos.
• Who’s Talkin? – Go to this search site and enter the search terms GAZA, ISRAEL, PALESTINE, HAMAS. It will find all the results, by social and traditional media site. Results will be sorted by blog, microblog, news site, video site, and image site.
• Social Mention – Similar to Who’s Talkin?, go to this site and enter the same search terms: GAZA, ISRAEL, PALESTINE, HAMAS. The difference with this site is you have to repeat the search for each type of content you want to look at (e.g. blog, video, pictures, etc.). But it searches all sites across a single form of media. For example, you can do one search across all the video sites and get a single page with results from all video sites. Who’s Talkin? requires you to click through pages of results from each video site.
• Digg (Gaza) – This link will list the most crowdsourced news stories, blog posts, and videos. Meaning, it’ll return what other Internet users think are the most interesting and valuable breaking stories.
• Twitter search (Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Hamas) – This is the most up to date information of opinions and news as information streams from people all over the world with updates and debate. If you’re a Twitter user, make sure you start following the users @fromisrael and @israelconsulate.
• Friendfeed (Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Hamas) – Friendfeed covers all the social media tools. Twitter is just one of many. This may be overwhelming for you. See how long you can handle it.

This news item is for the Spark Minute week of 1/5/09 which can be heard daily on Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco, CA.

1. Using social media to experience the Obama inauguration before, during, and after
2. Spark Minutes on the air for the week of 1/5/09
3. Looking for social media rule breakers
4. Web 2.0 companies from Israel
5. Social Media During a Crisis – Interview with Curtis Sliwa, WABC Radio

Filed under: Bloggers, Search, Spark Minute, Tech debate, Tips, Twitter-Tweets, Video, Web 2.0