I’m snapping a picture of one of London’s Twitterati at the Twitter-organised flash Moonwalk in honour of Michael Jackson when a stranger, a short man with a beer belly and a camera much more impressive than my own, asks me who she is. It’s a valid question, she’s surrounded by cameras, has a microphone shoved in her face and generally speaking like she knows what the hell is going on. I know exactly who she is but all the same I stumble for an answer. “She’s famous,” I start and he looks at me expectantly. “On the internet,” I clarify. “I mean, she’s popular on Twitter and part of the London tech scene.” The expectant stare is quickly turning into a blank one. “Well, if you need tech stuff done she’s the girl to go to,” I finish lamely and quite likely inaccurately and run away from the bemused man before I start talking about Audioboo or twitnics.

On 26 June, just before 10 o’clock in the morning, an idea hatched on Twitter. Coordinated by blog posts, Facebook events and, of course, Twitter retweets, the London Mass Moonwalk in honour of the fallen King of Pop went from concept to completion in half a day and saw hundreds of Londoners and nearly as many members of the press outside Liverpool street station in an impromptu dance party. The event was a rousing success in many ways although what was possibly the most interesting element was the combination of London’s techies and Twitterites with the general public. Arguably this is the very first Twitter-organised event to truly combine both. Twestival, the absurdly named Twitnics, general meetups – all have been a private members club of people who introduce themselves with an @ sign in front of their name. Yet with something so universally intriguing as the death of one of the century’s biggest celebrities, it wasn’t long before mainstream media channels and plain old word of mouth got wind of the planned mass moonwalk and attracted the attention of a broader audience.

The location helped as well. London’s Liverpool Street Station is a hub of activity regardless of the time of day but disrupting the Friday evening commute is akin to the greatest sacrilege without a very good reason. As visibly confused commuters sought that reason, the moonwalking crowd, already swollen with computer screen-bleached techies as well as Wacko Jacko fans, picked up passerbys like the last train before the tube strike.

So, as I shoved my snap-happy way through the crowd, one hand holding my unstoppable digital camera and the other on my phone, tweeting merrily away, I was surrounded by a strange assortment of people. Film crews for the major networks, trying to make their way to the centre of the action. The public journalist, a many headed beast made up of hundreds of Flip Camera/iPhone/camera phone wielding Londoners putting up a good fight with the professionals to record the scene. The overwhelmed onlookers creating a Greek chorus of “what’s going on?”s. It was a glorious mishmash.

However it also served as a wake up call. By the time the closing notes of Billie Jean faded away over the sea of grinning, dancing mourners, the audience was more than certainly made up mostly of people who hadn’t found out about the event on Twitter. In fact the majority probably didn’t know the whole thing had been imagined, planned and organised through the microblogging site and viewed organiser himself, Milo Yiannopoulos, another staple of the London Twitter and Tech scene, a random geek who happened to have a sound system (a pointedly untrue assumption as his early Twitter pleas for audio assistance would imply). Twitter may be a microcosm of a geekish hierarchy, prestige filtering down from the early adopters and self-proclaimed kings and queens of the service to the fawning groundlings of internet marketers and self-help gurus but because every event and news story related to Twitter has really only been of note to people already registered for the site, it’s hardly surprising that I can’t get Mr. Beer Belly to get excited over the London Twitter celebrity in front of us.

Since they were easily tracked, on any given day, the trending topics on Twitter were unlikely to mirror trending topics of conversation amongst the general public, were such a thing to be easily measurable. Tech conferences, iPhone releases, Steve Jobs’ health and internet memes dominated the charts. There has been a slight shift, however, towards topics that are of a broader interest. Whether this is due to the nature of current events or the nature of those on Twitter it’s hard to say but it’s certainly easier to take a conversation about Wimbledon, the elections in Iran or, of course, Michael Jackson, offline than, say, #threebreakupwords.

Maybe this is why Mr. Yiannopoulos was able to coordinate an event on Twitter that included the general public as well. Perhaps instead of a handful of geeks, a dark room and an open bar, there is a potential for a wider range of Twitter-organised events that actually appeal to a broad audience and don’t feel so much like an insiders club – certainly something that would be beneficial to Twitter-run charity events such as last year’s Twestival.

So, Tweet It, people. We all want to be Retweeted. But… go ahead and let your non-Twitter friends know too.

- Meaghan Fitzgerald