I still have many reservations about social media, at least as it formed any kind of go-to resource for alternative or untold stories. My own thoughts on the matter can be found here [ http://fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org/?p=340 ]. Darren Barefoot also makes the great distinction between “covering” and “uncovering” the news. Alternative media should be doing the latter [ http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2010/02/citizen-journalism-covering-and-uncovering-the-news.html ]. In this respect I am not sure social media succeeded; most of the tweets and blog posts either rehashed existing stories, retweeted each other’s photo essays, or offered a personalized though contentless (for a journalist) reportage of the Games.

Indeed, perhaps social media’s greatest impact was as a public relations tool for social media marketing firm Palladian Creative, which created the fake character of French journalist Gaston Tartarin of the “Gaston Report” as a marketing scheme [ http://www.pallian.com/2010/03/02/the-story-behind-gaston-report/ ].

And perhaps the second greatest of impact of social media was on the athletes themselves, many of whom tweeted throughout the Games, and some of whom even tweeted between races, such as Julia Mancuso’s angry (and later censored/deleted) tweet over Lindsey Vonn’s fall that upset her run…

As for “citizen journalism” — did we really see much of it in the social media? Or was it just amateur types being social *with* media?