Twitter coverage of St. Patrick’s Day

As part two of our Twitter lesson, we were asked to cover an event via Twitter. I chose to document my celebration of St. Patrick’s Day on Boylston Street in Boston last night, and sent a number of tweets about my experience.

The scene outside the Pour House last night

I left campus after class at around 8:30 pm, met up with friends and began the walk to Boylston from Northeastern’s campus. On the way I noticed the Prudential Center lit up in green for the holiday and snapped a quick photo. Upon arrival at Pour House I realized just how chaotic the scene actually was, and decided  to take a picture of all the people wearing green lined up outside trying to get into the bars. After about a 15 minute wait, we finally made it into the Pour House, where we somehow managed to snag a table in the back room. I decided to order a Magners and homemade mac & cheese for dinner, which I also documented with a photo. All my friends were drinking green beer, but I decided to skip the food coloring. In retrospect, I probably should have snagged a picture of that too! The front area of the bar was pretty full and there were people waiting in line to get downstairs but the back room where we were sitting wasn’t too packed. Other friends managed to brave the lines to get into the bar and meet us, but another friend reported that she was unsure she would get in because the line outside was so long, so I decided to share that fact as well.  At about midnight I decided to call it a night and catch the bus home – after all, I had to be at work bright & early the next morning.

As somebody who has been using Twitter for a while, I don’t usually send more than one or two tweets about a single event. In my coverage, I was just hoping to report what I was seeing since I knew lots of people were probably curious as to what the bar scene, specifically Boylston Street, looked like last night.

One huge benefit of covering a story on Twitter is how quickly updates & pictures are sent and received. Using Uber Twitter on my Blackberry is incredibly easy – all I need to do is open the application, snap a picture, type a few words and click send. The updates can then be received immediately – if I had Twitter friends who were on Boylston Street looking to get into the bars, they were able to read my posts about how long the lines were and head elsewhere instead.

One of the negatives of covering an event solely via Twitter is the limited character count. When you have lots to report on, you end up posting seven or eight tweets at a time, which can sometimes be obnoxious to your followers. I felt kind of silly posting numerous updates about my night, and wondered how many people were rolling their eyes at my tweets. Regardless, I had a good time and was glad I got to share it with the Twitter world!

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March 18, 2010. Tags: , . Class Posts.

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