BusinessWeek isn’t buying the story that Twitter is the essential organizing tool for the protests in Iran over suspicious election results:
“I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect,” says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. “The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size.”
Their assessment is that people are organizing the old-fashioned way, by word-of-mouth and SMS. Ancient technology, that SMS. But it is a great story, either way.
You know, I was walking to lunch today, and I realized that I had never met a person who was able to make a fortune from following trends and advice in Business Week.
It’s an corollary of “being on the cover of the Economist is a contrarian indicator.”
Anyway, Business week didn’t hear of the stats I read here:
Tripled penetration rate in 3 years.
Impressive.
Now it’s true they don’t have smartphones by and by, but they did have SMS.
The real story here is bloggers are several hours ahead of the major media.
SMS yes, Internet no. That’s not so bad, is it?
I like Peggy Noonan, sensible as always: “If they Twittered and liveblogged the French Revolution, it still would have been the French Revolution: ‘this aft 3pm @ the bastille.'”