My Snow Saviour: Social Media

Like pretty much everybody else who works in and around London, I’ve been caught in the travel problems caused by the onset of snow. I abandoned the car in the Sutton carpark last night, and took the trains back to Lewisham. I managed it in a little over two hours, but only because Twitter had told me that it wasn’t worth trying to get a train from London Bridge. The [#southeastern hashtag](http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23southeastern) on Twitter was eye-watering but informative reading, and suggested to me that a Thameslink/DLR combo would be a better way to go, and sure enough it was. With colleagues reporting up to 13 hour journeys home, I’m pretty thankful.

In fact, I’ve got pretty much all my travel information over the past 24 hours from Twitter and blogs, like Daryl’s excellent tracking of [SouthEastern’s ongoing failure](http://853blog.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/southeastern-boss-to-be-summoned-to-westminster/), rather than mainstream media. It’s this sort of granular level of coverage, right down to line and operating company, that social media excels at – and which mainstream media has neither the resources and the inclination to do. In fact, all the mainstream news can do is tell us that people are having travel problems all across the south east. It’s social media that’s helping us figure out how to get to a warm bed…