Telling the London riot story on social media

A young man uses his cell phone to take a picture of a car burning after it was set on fire by rioters in Hackney, east London, on Monday. (Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press)

Like any breaking news story in the last few years, the latest developments on the riots in London are appearing on social media first, with first-hand accounts, media and analysis spreading at incredible speed.

The ITV News live blog of the London riots was the most active Cover It Live event Tuesday, with more than 32,000 people watching at once. The Guardian's live blog is the one most cited on Twitter.

The Guardian's Paul Lewis is often mentioned on Twitter for his reports from the streets of London. Other journalists on the scene include Sean O'Neill of The Times, and Neal Mann and Harriet Tolputt for Sky News. Nahlah Ayed and Alison Crawford are in London for CBC News.

Several Tumblr blogs have appeared to document the riots in London and other parts of England. Birmingham Riots 2011 documents the unrest in England's second most populous city. Catch A Looter is posting pictures and video of people caught in the act in the hopes of identifying them. (A similar Tumblr blog came out of the Vancouver riots after the Canucks Stanley Cup loss.)

Travel blog Time Out London has a comprehensive Storify post about the clean-up effort in London, compiling tweets, maps, Facebook groups, pictures and YouTube videos of the #riotcleanup.

A blog post by Laurie Penny, a London journalist, was one of the most linked articles on Twitter Tuesday. She describes "watching my city burn" and tries to explain how it all happened.

"Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you're no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another."