Social networks providing backdoors to get news out

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/12/guatemala-protests-f.html

In guatamala a couple weeks ago there were several protests over the death of a prominent lawyer who claimed posthumously that he was victim of an assasination. The article goes on to say that while the state run tv censored the protests, they were being streamed live through several social networking sites as well as being posted on twitter. This is a great example of the power of the internet and how something local can spread very quickly throughout the world without access to standard news channels. the post was written in a quick enough fashion to link to the live feeds and even beat cnn to the punch

It makes sense that the social networks would get the news out faster than the big networks because there are so many more nodes in the social network that are receiving news than in the news network. This means that there is a higher probability that someone in the social network will broadcast the news before the news networks can pick it up and broadcast it. Its pretty cool to see it in action.