UPDATE: Julia Gillard is now PM!

Oh my, having had a lovely dinner out involving the most delicious tempura camembert from Iiza, I returned to discover twitter going mad with news of a potential #spill about to happen. Many journos were tweeting, plus live tweets from the press conference as Rudd announced that Gillard was challenging for the leadership. I still haven’t got round to connecting my TV to the antenna and I don’t have a stereo. Live feeds from the ABC website and twitter were my main sources of news this evening.

Based on the tweets I saw, the regular media were struggling to keep up with the breaking news and even The AB friggin’ C had to interrupt The Movie Show for Kevin Rudd’s press conference. Been ages since politics has been this exciting…had all gone rather dull. Now there’s a splash of colour, passions inflamed (though no sign of Kev’s) and a do-or-die showdown in the morning. Current word on the twitter stream is that Gillard already has 60 out of 115 votes.

Twitter is the new black for now…a few years ago, it was facespace, years before that it was usenet, and let’s not forget everyone discovering the joy of TV and watching man land on the moon in 1969. In a few years time, it may well be something else again.

I’m struggling to summon the muse this evening…if this had been last night when I was writing my 1800 word epic… Others too, are blogging their own thoughts regarding the excitement of the evening. For myself I have spent the last two hours glued to the computer screen, feeds automatically updating in several tabs…keeping up with every scrap of info I could. Was a blast and the ending, it must be said, was a little anti climactic – “no news for now but we’ll chat about it in the morning”. Hmmmpf.

There was a time there where I was wondering if it was simply a big twitter hoax – which is a real danger when restricting yourself to a single news source. Thankfully I was able to find confirmations via other sources such as the ABC, 3AW, and of course the SMH…all online though. The twitter feed is fantastic for getting the news of the moment but it should always be backed up via other sources.