This past weekend was full of HUGE news:The oil leak in the Gulf An attempted car bombing in New York City Flooding in Nashville The White House Press Corps dinner

What was on television. The DC event. Nothing else really.

So how did I know about the rest of what was happening in the United States? Twitter was on it. Facebook was telling me a lot.

The average person in social media was telling the story without layers of people preventing the information from going public quickly. Could I trust the facts? Well, I trust most of my Facebook friends because we have a face-to-face relationship in some way (or family ties). I trust many of my Twitter friends. But for those Twitter people I didn't know who had some connection to a national news story, I had a friend help confirm it.

CNN, MSNBC or Fox didn't help inform me this weekend. Social media did.

And when I spoke to my students, the Twitter followers knew what was happening, the others had no idea Nashville was under water.

Is Twitter a must follow tool for news hungry/informed people? I think so.