Twitter is back in the news today, this time for its coverage of the earthquake in Sichuan Province, China.

Robert Scoble is leading the charge claiming that Twitter and other web 2.0 suspects are ahead of the news agencies, CNN and others. Rory-Cellan Jones at the BBC provides a good assessment of what's happening on his blog.

But I'm not so sure. Take Twitter itself. There's a filter on earthquake tweets at summize.com. If you've got time to sift through the noise there are good first-hand accounts and the videos and photos are startling.

But you still need someone (not something) to mediate and make sense of what's going on. If you ever needed reminding about the difference between information and news, here is the perfect example. And the irony is that it's not Twitter that I turn to for the latest, it's the alpha-bloggers who become the focal point for a breaking story. 

As a footnote, there's plenty of chat about who posted the news first, a typical contest on the web wires these days. Scoble says that he was tweeting about the earthquake as it was happening. Impressive, I suppose, but probably not that much of a consolation to the people of Sichuan Province right now.