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6.30am: Tuesday morning. The alarm goes off, and on local ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio, Paul Ross and Gaby Roslin are telling me there's a light dusting of snow in some areas of London and it should ease off. I check out of the window and that's about right.

7.00: Computer goes on for early blogging. Ross and Roslin still telling the same story - they're indoors and without windows, it's fair enough - but Twitter and Facebook are telling a different story. People are outside, actually on the spot with their mobile phones and they're tweeting away telling me exactly where the snow is, how deep and whether it's still falling.

The internet is an unbelievably useful place for finding out about what's going on around you in real time. There are pretty much two avenues to consider - "official" sites and the more social stuff.

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

This column is clearly on a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ website, so I'm bound to send you to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ weather bulletins first, at bbc.co.uk/weather. That's not just vested interests speaking, though. The layout is clear and the best bit is that you can put in a postcode or area and it'll tailor a five day report (including the current weather) for you.

You can set somewhere as your current location and have favourite locations, perhaps a workplace or relative's home. Your local ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio's website will take a feed from this if you want information on travel and related bulletins as well.

The Met Office

The other official weather site is of course the Met Office. This isn't as search friendly as the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ but you can select from a dropdown menu of areas which is just as useful. This will also tell you - as it did as I was writing - when severe weather warnings had been issued.

Social networks

My own source of more-accurate-than-the-radio information this morning was social networking. People struggling to get into work were tweeting and Facebooking about just how cold they were, and how tricky it was negotiating the journey. This, as I said, got the information to me faster than it was getting to the radio. There's a nice website based on people reporting weather conditions to Twitter, called UK Snowmap - which looks for people commenting on snow and puts a marker on a map.

The only problem is that it's completely haphazard. The reason Twitter told me about the snow more quickly than the estimable Ross and Roslin was because people I follow happened to tweet it a bit more quickly than people picked up the phone to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio London. It could just as easily have gone the other way.

Likewise Facebook. Yes, a lot of people mentioned that it was snowing. A handful of them mentioned where they were at the time, which is essential information if it's going to be useful, and a lot of the messages just said "snow!" Oh, and I had only their word that it was snowing anyway - you can put anything on Twitter or Facebook; the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, Met Office and others are honour bound to do some checking.

This isn't to criticise the people putting the messages up. They didn't undertake to deliver a personal weather service to me, and there's no reason I should expect an accurate report. The fact that Twitter delivered it is a bonus for membership, not some sort of right. So although the informal, social approach can be very informative indeed but you can't take it for granted.

It's worth noting that hybrid services taking the best of official services and social networked services are starting to emerge. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has, for example, been involved in Crowdmap.com - with which it built a coherent picture of where crowds were during the London tube strikes; it did the same thing during the floods in Cornwall only weeks ago and the results are still there.

The information is drawn from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, mobile phones and a number of other sources and then put out there in graphic form. So you get all the "official" people's efforts combined with a real-time snapshot of what individuals are reporting. Presumably this is the way things will develop.