January 26, 2013
Vine is a great way to capture the moment of a news event
Twitter has introduced an app called Vine that makes it easy to share six-second videos — so what’s not to love?
Jeff Sonderman at Poynter sees the potential. Steve Kovach at Business Insider comes close to gushing. But Mathew Ingram at Giga Om is downright grumpy.
The first thing that came to mind for me was a reporter at the scene of a house fire. A video, even only six seconds, of flames shooting through the roof would be dramatic. What a great way to put people instantly at the scene.
That scenario has not yet come to pass for me, but I did have an inspiration at a recent press conference announcing that our city had won the bid for a major sports tournament. Standing beside the podium were four teenage girls in their uniforms, all members of a curling team. One of them had a big flag, and was waving it back and forth.
She stopped, but I signalled for her to start again and got six seconds with Vine on my iPhone. It wasn’t much, but it helped capture some of the excitement at an event that was otherwise just a bunch of officials taking turns at the microphone.
— Mark Rogers (@newsonaut) January 25, 2013
By the way, another new Twitter feature makes it much easier to embed a tweet in your blog. Just click on More, then Embed Tweet.
As for Vine, I’ll be looking for more opportunities to tweet videos. Like anything else, the more you practise, the better you get.