Twitter Helps Chinese Blogger Tell His Story

Twitter gets a bad rap for its often less-than-substantive musings, but every now and then the service proves its "true potential" as an Internet tool, writes Mathew Ingram in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Case in point: When a Chinese citizen journalist recently traveled to Beijing, the authorities hustled him out of the city on false pretenses. Fellow Twitterers picked up his story and translated his posts.

"A fascinating story—or at least the core of a fascinating story—and all told entirely via Twitter," writes Ingram. "The 'first draft of history' indeed." (More China stories.)