Tracking News in Realtime: Discovery Gunman

After first noticing Tweets relating to the developing story of a gunman storming the Discovery Channel building not far from our office in Georgetown, we have launched another instance of Slurp140 dedicated to tracking all tweets using the #discovery hashtag: http://www.slurp140.com/discovery/ 

For live video, our friends at TBD have been doing an excellent job: “Live Video: Discovery Channel gunman hostage standoff”

A couple quick thoughts:

• A picture from @jdivenerea purporting to be of the gunman has received over 27,339 views in 1 hour and 50 minutes.  Watching the commentary unfold, a rough consensus has formed that this may actually be of an undercover police officer. http://yfrog.com/2mhdmdj

 

• The alleged shooters- James Jay Lee’s  Myspace profile and personal website (http://savetheplanetprotest.com/) have emerged. The website as a single page of hate speech, that has since crashed due to high traffic. Huffington Post has reposted the text in full. other sites have posted the text in full.
• DCist points out that the suspect has a prior history of being arrested at the Discovery Channel building
• Since we started tracking tweets shortly after TBG broke the story at 1:00pm, we have seen 9,000+ tweets by 5,477 people