When gunmen started spraying Mumbai with bullets and seizing the city’s landmarks, countless citizens around the globe turned not to the television or the radio for news, but to each other.

Blogs and social networking sites like Twitter and Flickr buzzed with eyewitness accounts from India’s financial capital, providing some of the first photos of the besieged targets and serving as a forum for pleas for updates on friends and family.

Photos posted on Flickr just 90 minutes after

the attacks had been viewed at least 110,000 times by Sunday.

Twitter users, who simply tagged their comments “mumbai,” traded knowledge at a rate of 50-100 posts a minute in messages that were sometimes wrong, often fragmented, but always instant.

The lightning-quick updates of the attacks that killed 174 citizens read like a sketchy but urgent blow-by-blow explanation of the siege, providing further evidence of a sea change in how public gather their […]

Orginal post by dhiram