After the earthquake hit yesterday, a big red dot appeared over China on the Managing News dashboard map that dwarfed all the other dots around the globe. Next to it in the tag cloud, I saw a few new terms in red that I knew were probably related to the China story, and I started clicking to learn more. I quickly learned that Sun Weide is the Olympic spokesperson giving updates about the changes in the Olympic torch relay plans due to the earthquake, and that the construction project at the Three Gorges Dam wasn't affected. But who was Ronen Medzini, and why was "cellular telephone" showing up as a relevant term?

It turns out he is an Israeli student in the Chengdu area who sent a text message to the AP after the earthquake: "Traffic jams, no running water, power outs, everyone sitting in the streets, patients evacuated from hospitals sitting outside and waiting."

Granted he did send it to the AP, but his name was now being used in multiple stories about the event and citizen journalism via mobile phones was now an established element of the story -- except it wasn't making headlines. If I had just scanned the headlines, I would have missed this.

We've been paying attention to mobile journalism for years and always like to find stories like this. A couple weeks back, I wrote about tracking breaking new stories using Robin Hamman's UGC Finder Yahoo! Pipe, and I've been paying particularly close attention to ways to harness user generated content sites to identify breaking stories since then. But once we're listening to social media, we still need tools to help sort through it all and make sense out of what we find.

By using the map in context with other tools like the automatically generated tag cloud, I was able to quickly scan the dashboard and identify a story of interest that would likely have stayed buried under the big headlines otherwise. This story is partly a redux of a similar post from a few months back when we were still developing Managing News and the geotagging tools that drive its mapping display, but this time around there was an interesting new twist since in this case the map worked with other tools to help identify a relevant bit of information related to the wider earthquake story.