Hey Blenders. I was checking out the comments in the “Haiti: CNN’s Sanjay Gupta left to care for patients as doctors leave because of security fear” thread, and a few of you asked about putting up a widget for breaking news (general and Haiti) on Twitter, since the Prop 8 trial is not back in session until Tuesday. The widgets that were in the columns are just disabled for now and will return on Tuesday.

New widgets

Rather than just make a widget with an RSS feed to stories of news sites, it’s been much more useful — since the the breaking news cycles are now in minutes, even seconds — to make a Tweetroll of what’s going on. Included in the right column we now have a Tweetroll of several news outlets and people who have been doing in-depth reporting. If you have Twitter sources that you can recommend as additions to the PHB Breaking News Tweetroll, you can suggest them in the comments. To get on the Tweetroll the sources need to updated regularly throughout the day, and more references to news rather than personal goings-on.

In the left column I’ve replaced the old Google Gay News Widget with a Gay News and Blog Tweetroll. These have the top sources I go to, and I’ll add more as I find the accounts of others in my RSS feed that have Twitter accounts.

Differences in comment flavor between PHB the blog and my Facebook page.

It has been interesting to see the growth of the net ecosystem for news delivery and sharing in social networks. For instance, I’ve noticed quite often that when I post one of my stories to my Facebook wall, the number of comments it generates varies wildly from what the Blend does.

One of the things I usually do in my FB post (whether it is about something I wrote or a news story)  is add some commentary of my own, and choose to excerpt and substitute a couple of sentences of my choice from the article in the default FB post, something many people may not know that you can do.

Another big difference between commentary on PHB and my FB account is that there are usually more comments on FB, except on major posts here by myself or baristas that heads upwards of 30 comments. Otherwise the thread that develops on FB is much more interactive, more snarky and rapid fire. I can see responses popup on FB to one of my posts in seconds. Out of my 3,784 “friends” I have a fair number of regulars on FB that I’ve not ever seen delurk here to comment.

Anyway, it’s just an interesting phenomenon I’ve notices in the last several months, and even in terms of hits to the blog, many more now come from FB or Twitter than actual blog pages where someone links to me. The exceptions are controversial or in-depth posts that are picked up by larger blogs or the MSM; those can push unique hits to 2,000/hour at times or more. But that’s unusual.

I find myself re-posting many more stories on my FB wall that I could ever write about here on the Blend, since it doesn’t require more than writing my own first acerbic reactions in a couple of sentences. When I find a story that does pique enough interest for me to sit down and do a longer post for the Blend it usually comes from one of the Twitter or FB feeds, as opposed to RSS, it’s definitely a trend. On the social media sites the limited amount of information that can be passed along makes it easy to “poke” those in your network instantly about a story that will lead to followup and fleshing out later, even into the MSM, since they may be folllowing someone in your network even if you’re not connected to them. It happens all the time now, though I don’t know how much Twitter sources are cited on a regular basis at this point unless you have crises like Haiti, where many of the reporters have “verified source” added to their account to prove they are who they say they are.

In any case, the passing of news and blog links along to others through social networking to spur instant conversation has changed news dissemination so radically and so quickly that a lot of people in traditional media are both playing catchup (and falling behind) in this new world. It means that a lot of journalists who have been fighting adoption of new technologies are going to be in even more professional dire straits.