News about the Tehran riots struck twitter in excess while CNN.com and traditional news venues had not yet reacted to the public outcry. Major news networks now focus equally on the riots in Iran following the controversial elections, as well as the new political power represented by user-generated news and twitter.

Visit http://twitter.com/tehranbureau to observe real-time news from Tehran before it hits other news networks.

My CTO Zac made light of the extreme easiness of submitting user-generated news to the BBC. See the module at the right side of the above image: you can submit or follow news via email, video, photo, flickr, youtube, etc.

From the perspective of a startup, company, organization, or nation, user-submitted news via real-time networks is a political power. The Iranian government has proved incapable of locking down twitter posts within Iran, the same way they may censor social networking websites, blogs, or online news websites within their nation. This is akin to the web 2.0 notion of ‘Groundswell’ where top-down authority finds itself incapable of silencing thousands of distributed ‘news producers’ within a population. By analogy, governments, corporations, news agencies, and hierarchical organizations will continue to find themselves exposed to the popular news and sentiments. That is the political power of twitter.

Here are some other resources:

Tehrans Twitter Blackout Averted

From Tiananmen to Tehran (CBS)

BBC’s Coverage of Tehran