Confession: I am a news junkie. When CNN started out, I was enthralled by the idea of real news available any time - what a long time ago that was, now Headline News has become the misplaced outrage network and lately CNN just...baffles me. Even with the explosion in all news TV, the actual news is abysmal. I completely understand the people who get their TV news from The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert.
Fortunately, the options for news are no longer primarily focused around TV and radio. Now when I want reliable sources for what is happening right now, I go to the Internet. (Yeah, I said reliable...) Since there is an awful lot of noise (see the list of twitter hashtags if you feel the need for a firehose of tweets about egypt), I thought I would share some of the sources I have found useful. (I will be updating this as I find more.)
Videos are coming in at a surprising rate, as you can see from the recent videos tagged with Egypt.
Being the twitter addict that I am, I put together a quick list of accounts that are tweeting useful information about Egypt It will be updated as I find more accounts with good, original information. The list is not on my @notlikenormal account, that would have been too logical - so follow kitchenMage's Egypt list. The first accounts on the list include:
- Sharif Kouddous, a Democracy Now producer, is tweeting from Egypt while his Internet lasts.
- There is talk of Egypt and Tunisia being the start of something bigger. The Arab Revolution twitter account is tweeting about this side of the events.
- Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues. She is writing about Egypt on her website and twitter.
- Al Jazerra AJELive
- Christiversity has a large list of people who are tweeting from inside Egypt.
- ...and a hat tip to Liz McLellan, aka hyperlocavore, who is a veritable retweeting machine and one of my best sources.
There are a bunch of twitter hashtags but these seem to have most of the good stuff: #egypt, #cairo, #jan25, #tahrir, Egyptians, Muburak.
On a side note, twitter put together a list of folks they are labeling as 'freedom of expression' that might be interesting to follow.
Elsewhere on the web:
- Compelling photography by Matthew Cassel
- Human Rights Watch has quite a bit of information, including a live feed of news from Egypt (right sidebar).
- Much as I hate to send people to the Huffington Post, they do have a useful backgrounder: EGYPT: A Complete Guide To The 2011 Revolution I just hope they paid the writer.
- The New York Times has collected a wide range of resources in Ways To Teach About the Unrest i Egypt. I haven't looked at most of the links, but it seems to have some useful information.
- How Not to Say Stupid Stuff About Egypt
Want to do something more useful than clicking on links?
- Do you speak an Arabic language and English? Help translate some of those voicemail tweets.
- If you would like to show your solidarity with Egypt, check out this site for events.
- Brian Conley is coordinating some aspects of in-country support, so if you or someone you know is headed that way, you might want to drop him a tweet.
If you are in Egypt:
- First, congratulations for being online! While you can do so, #openmesh is useful for information about getting online from egypt (See this image for basic connectivity info.) Just in case you need a way...
- Google and SayNow pulled together a service called speak2tweet, which lets people in Egypt send tweets via voicemail. It is simple: leave a message and the service will instantly tweet it from the speak2tweet account using the hashtag #egypt. People can listen to the messages via twitter.com/speak2tweet (or by dialing the same phone numbers, but don't do that unless you have no twitter access, the Egyptian folks could use those numbers.) The phone numbers are +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855.
As you can see, this is an utterly incomplete and eclectic list. So help me out, enlighten me and share your favorite sources. I am particularly interested in people who are there and ways that people who are not can help.
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