Last week the Italian Festival of Journalism took place in Perugia. In the debate "Journalists Vs. Bloggers" (yes, we're still there) one of the main issues was whether blogs and social networks could be sources of news or, rather, tended to create just noise and to cause loss of information, instead.

Unfortunately, a sort of test bed came sooner than expected.

It was 3.32AM (01.32 GMT, EDT Sunday) when a 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck in Abruzzo, a quake-prone region in the center of Italy, killing 150 people and causing severe damages to several cities. The epicenter was about 70 miles (110 kilometers) northeast of Rome.

Surprisingly, it took one hour and a half for the news to be reported by national television and more than three hours before the main newspapers did the same in their online edition.

People awakened by the quake used Twitter to spread the news even before news agencies. For a couple of hours Twitter was the only source available to Italian people to share news and information and, most of all, try to contact friends and relatives living in Abruzzo.

On Twitter Italian bloggers also lamented the lack of news in Italian while foreign media like CNN and BBC were already providing updates.

[Italian blogger Alessandro Bonino used Twitter Spectrum to compare the words “earthquake” and “terremoto” (Italian for earthquake)]

After the quake

For the first time social networks also played a role during the whole day spreading information about ways to make donations and give blood, food and help (Italy's Civil Protection agency reported at least 1,500 injured and 50,000 without shelter).

Facebook was the most effective, being the most popular social network in Italy (with a 30% growing rate every month), but also Friendfeed has a peculiar story to tell.

In the last several months Friendfeed has started to host a close-knit - albeit small - community of Italian tech bloggers, early adopters in the Italian blogosphere. Maxime, one of them, was the first to report his esperience on the web (he lives in a city nearby that wasn't affected by the earthquake as dramatically as other cities). The thread quickly reached 150 comments: people used it to give support and to ask each other after friends they couldn't get in touch with.

Noise or information?
One of the most controversial piece of information was the statement of a scientist claiming that thanks to his research he had foreseen the disaster but he had been ignored by Civil Protection. The video caused indignation but later in the morning it was found out that the man was a lab technician, not a scientist, and his research was far to be proved as truth (his statement is still being discussed in these hours).

During the day some people contended that the web had succeeded in being a source of information while others remarked that the considerable amount of twits didn't provide actual information.

Twitter has not been a source of relevant news on a national scale, as journalists would have done later in the day, but today it has surely provided useful information to people, making them feel connected. “It's good to know that I'm not alone” said Fabio, a physicist from Rome, at 4AM.

It may not be enough to be a source of news (yet?) but in a country like Italy it's certainly something new.