Al Tompkins showed us the geofeedia site, http://corp.geofeedia.com. This costs money. But it mines social media (Facebook and Twitter) in real time and allows you to search for people posting in a specific geographic area.
Click on the icon that represents each poster and you see his handle.
The GPS locations can be slightly off.
But imagine if there was a huge crowd gathering on 12th street, angry, and ready to throw cans at the police because someone had posted into the unseen but very real newsfeed in Little Rock that the police had just gunned down a 9-year-old boy.
Not hard to imagine, right?
Typically, news reporters would use a tool like geofeedia to locate some active witnesses and use that contact info to get them to comment to us.
But I wonder if Features could use it to locate the headspring of that local, citizen-band newsfeed, the one with the potentially very bad info, that is obviously a real force in our area?
And could we thus not be out of the loop?
Al suggests that we request the free demo, then as we create the account, say that we learned about it from him at Poynter. He says he's hearing that people who ring that bell are being allowed to keep the demo going longer.
And, yes, I realize that several of you already know all about this. But we have not used the tool in this manner.
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