This just in - CNN/most MSM drops ball on Iranian election story, Twitter recovers and scores.

On Friday, Iranian’s went to the polls to vote in their Presidential election.  Most of the mainstream media outlets have had tragically poor coverage, but CNN has had a near black-out on the story.  It’s only today that CNN has begun covering this election - on-air and online…  and mostly tossing out information that was available yesterday.  Right now, about 25% of the “Today’s Headlines” section of the CNN home page are about the Iranian election.  Also, in that same section, is an interesting question/story - “Do journalists Twitter too much?”  Interesting because, over the last 48 hours, Twitter users have been tearing CNN a new one.

On Twitter you can ‘tag’ your Tweets, to make them easier to find when someone does a search on Twitter, and an amazing number of people have taken to using “#CNNFail” over the networks lack-of-coverage on the election story.  Of course, there is no editorial-process on Twitter… and it’s hard to say how much of these “#iranelection” Tweets are true, or propaganda… are dorms really being attacked?  Are the opposition candidates under house-arrest?  The point isn’t that the ‘news’ on Twitter is accurate, the point is that there is ‘news’ on Twitter about the Iranian election.  And, the traditional ‘news’ organizations, at a time when they most need to demonstrate their utility, are completely, and totally, missing what is, potentially, the story-of-the-year - Iran’s very own Tiananmen Square.

The future of Social Networks

To know the future, just look to the past.  Each of the big Social Networking, “Web 2.0″, sites share commonalities with Web 1.0 sites that were popular ‘in their day’…  and this is not necessarily a good thing for the Social Networks.  For example:

Flickr is the new GeoCities…  a very popular place for people to upload their content.  Getting people to upload and view content is one thing, but turning that into a profitable business is another.
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