How did I find out about the Mexico City Earthquake? On Twitter. As soon as people started reporting it on Twitter, I looked at the USGS maps. The Twitterers beat the USGS by several minutes. But now USGS Is reporting somewhere around a 5 to 6.0.

andresb my whole apartment creaked and bent a little half a minute ago from twitterrific

andresb The strongest tremor I’ve felt since I’m here

BioXD Acaba de temblar :S….estuvo muy fuerte 1 minute ago from web

andresb woooooow, earthquake in Mexico City

CyberMJ75 Damn! Just experienced an earthquake. That sucker lasted some minutes.

paranoideo Very strong earthquake in Mexico City, paranoideo.com is reporting live (:P)

earcos Very strong earthquake in Mexico City, VivirMexico.com is reporting live (in spanish, sorry)

Satrina Earthquake in Mexico City, was long and a little bit strong

dotmotion That was a hell of an earthquake.. and I’m on a 7th floor… I still feel sick

rogeriogal Earthquake in Cuernavaca, just passed. I’m still dizzy.

trisignia wow, earthquake in Mexico City…my first ever

helmi Mexico earthquake now on german news tv

robblatt Earthquake still not on cnn.com (at approx. 11:10 p.m. Pacific)

Later…

GraceD mexico earthquake reports coming in on Google News: http://tinyurl.com/yqxakr

A Web report of timeline (in Spanish). I had a report up on my blog within about three minutes after the quake was felt thanks to my more than 3,000 friends I’m following on Twitter. I immediately started watching Twitter Search, which lets you look at stuff in almost real time, which is how I found some of these reports. I also put TwitterVision up on a screen here to see any other real-time reports.

UPDATE: Chris Pirillo has a live video call going on right now and is urging Mexico City residents to call in and tell him what they felt had a live video call. Mike Doeff recorded part of it where @Earcos from Mexico City is on a video call with him.

I just learned of a new Twitter service called Twitterment. Here’s a page that shows Twitters that mentioned Mexico along with some trends of same.

Now if you’re a Twitter freak like I am, you can get my link blog pumped into your Twitter account. I didn’t create this. @Natetrue took my RSS feed from Google Reader and made this Twitter feed.

Imagine this. You’re watching a Pop!Tech video, like we are right now (we’re watching Ask a Ninja’s Kent Nichols talk to the crowd about podcasting and how Ask a Ninja came about). But, instead of doing advertising at the beginning of the video (like Pop!Tech has thanks to a sponsorship) there’s a set of Google ads along the side.

But, as you watch the video the Google ads change. And don’t change randomly, but change in reaction to what Kent is talking on stage about. He says “camcorder” and the ads change to a set of camcorders that you could buy — all without interrupting the video playing.

Anyway, this future is really much closer to happening thanks to Nexidia. Drew Lanham, Senior Vice President came out and demoed Nexidia’s system for me recently.

This technology also enables video search. In the demo Drew shows off a TV station, Channel 11 Alive, where you can search the video.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/04/PID_010897/Podtech_Nexidia_demo.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1442/demo-of-contextual-advertising-on-video-streams&totalTime=280000&breadcrumb=5bbc7ea1-7b73-4749-994e-ed67643a4e4c]

Here’s an interview with further info about how the system works and what else it could be used for.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/04/PID_010896/Podtech_Nexidia_interview.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1441/making-video-searchable-with-nexidia-executive&totalTime=787000&breadcrumb=04c4c1e4-6cff-48c6-b63a-9f2c7f874090]