Riot Tagging

Tokyo is currently the largest city of origin of Twitter messages in the world, more than twice that of second place San Francisco and New York in the U.S. as of this summer.

(Incidentally, while the Japanese Kanji language Twitter service, which only launched in April of this year, contains advertising, the rest of the planet’s Twitter service currently does not.)

International usage of Twitter is pretty extensive, with multiple languages and character sets available. The recent attacks in Mumbai, India, had a pretty substantial online communications element to them, with the tag #mumbai widely used to track events in multiple languages, and with the attackers using BlackBerrys and mobile phones to collaborate and to monitor the media.

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