Witness Tags? No, A General Microsyntax For Emergencies

Jeff Jarvis wants a microsyntax to easily learn that a Twitter message was posted by a witness at a major event, such as the earthjquake in Japan:

Jeff Jarvis, Tweeters: I want a witness tag

A proposal:

It would be terribly useful if there were a separate convention for tweets from witnesses to major events so their reports can be separated from the discussion that follows. How about !jpquake for witnesses vs. #jpquake for discussion?

Moments after the tragic earthquake hit Japan, folks are reporting on TV, people turned immediately to Twitter to tell friends and family and perhaps the world what was happening to them and to use it to get information and services.

But, of course, in only moments, people around the world talking about the event and the hashtag gets overrun with folks who are talking *about* the event than *from* it. That’s all good and wonderful as well. But I want a way to separate the two.

If witnesses used the !tag, it would also be possible to identify and compile a Twitter list of them. This would be helpful in stories where personal security is an issue. Witnesses in Bahrain would be unwise to use geocoding. But the !tag would merely reveal what they are already revealing in their tweets: that they are there. Somewhere.

Note importantly that the !tag would help people in the middle of a major event — people who need information and services — to also filter out the noise of our discussion from outside.

As for reading !tag tweets, I’d want to filter out retweets and just get the originals.

I also would like to run !tag tweets through translation engines. I suggested that to Ubermedia’s Bill Gross and he and his crew had great ideas on that in return.

The challenge in all of this, of course, is inducing millions of people to add this behavior. Thoughts?

My response? Revisiting my proposed microsyntax for emergency messaging, called Bang, and considering its use for journalistic and humanitarian purposes, as well as for emergency messaging. As I responded in the Buzzmachine comments:

I offered an outline for a more general microsyntax for disaster related communication many many disasters ago, called Bang: see http://www.stoweboyd.com/bang.

The thinking is more general, in that it is not intended for journalists, but it certainly is geared to folks on the scene, asking questions and providing information, like this:

!bette /usps, provincetown MA/ !@hassan haque: compound fracture of the lower right leg

The idea of this microsyntax is to structure the messages using ‘punctuation’ instead of natural language tags. The ‘!bette’ at the start states that the message is associated with a disaster called ‘bette’, in my example a hurricane in the NE US.

These Bang disaster codes could be parsed — or created — by simple software tools, or manually by anyone with a wallet-sized instruction card.

It was years ago that I attended your Disaster 2.0 session at Winer’s Blogosphere conference, and we still haven’t gotten very far.

The ease with which people can creat and use tags is actually a negative when dealing with large-scale emergencies: hashtags are made from natural languages which have to be translated, they are potentially long (using precious characters in Twitter and other SMS-based systems), and have weak syntax, so parsing by dumb programs is difficult. These are arguments for Bang, or something like it.