"Rien ne pèse tant que un
secret."
That's what La Fontaine said. For Luddite Americans like
me, it means, "Nothing weighs more than a
secret."
On the theory that a picture is worth a thousand French
quotes, take a look at the illustration to the left. That is a
graphical representation of how Twitter broke the Bin Laden story before
President Obama did.
Someone leaked to Donald Rumsfeld's former Chief of
Staff. He tweeted the news. It was re-tweeted 80 times in one
minute and generated 300 reactions in three minutes. When a New
York Times reporter came across the information in the
Twittersphere, he re-tweeted to his 50,000 followers and the cat
was well and truly out of the bag.
