The last time Chennai had an earthquake on 13 Jun 2010, I was wide awake at 1:05 am. I quickly went online to find out which news site would report it first - NDTV or IBN Live or BBC?

Five minutes after the quake, I was quite disappointed. None of them showed any signs of movement. What a shame.

Wanting to know the fastest source of news, I browsed around only to find that Twitter was the best place! Within 5 minutes of the quake, there were thousands of tweets, with every 10th tweet pointing to a seismic website which gave loads of information about the magnitude, the center of the quake, etc etc etc.

So, now, when I want to know what's the latest in the city of Chennai, I just search twitter! http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23chennai