Prior to his appearance to talk about Twitter on BBC West Midlands’ breakfast show this morning, Birmingham City journalism lecturer and Online Journalism Blog blogger Paul Bradshaw put out a call on the service to see if he and his followers couldn’t predict what questions he’d be asked.
[You can listen to the audio of the interview at this link until February 25 2009 – Paul’s interview comes in around the 2 hours 15 mins mark]
Here’s the full audio of the interview courtesy of BBC West Midlands and the Phil Upton Breakfast Show:
150 responses later and the #bbcwm tag became the seventh most popular search term on Twitter. Here’s the predicted interview (full names of Twitterers and responses can be seen on Bradshaw’s blog):
- Isn’t it a waste of time?
- What’s Twitter all about?
- What famous people are on it?
- Have there been any catfights on it?
- How do you ever get any work done?
- What advice can you give me on using Twitter?
- Can’t these people make real friends?
- Why would you want strangers knowing what you do?
And, of the five questions presenter Phil Upton got to ask, numbers 1, 2, 3 and 5. A bonus question – also predicted by Bradshaw’s followers – included ‘what’s the best tweet/tweeter you’ve seen?’. Aptly, Bradshaw used responses that had been sent by Tweeters to illustrate his answers.
Upton, who tweets at @flupton, had been following the responses to Bradshaw’s shoutout and may have used them as free research. Even if he didn’t base his questions on the #bbcwm replies there’s a strange ‘self-fulfilling interview’ prophecy going on here, with questions answered before the interview has even taken place…