(meteorobs) Any benefits from "Meteorwatch"

[Daniel Fischer]

As twice in 2009 there is a widely advertised campaign underway
to get people out and observe meteors (certainly a good thing) -
and to report everything they see in real-time via Twitter:
http://twitter.com/VirtualAstro/status/20338388973 says how.

So if I get it right, after *every* meteor (or burst of meteors)
you saw you are supposed to - immediately, for the timestamp! -
compose a rather non-trivial text message and send it in. One
is not encouraged to count for a time and send the number seen
afterwards, as in traditional visual meteor observing (although
such entries are "permitted", too, I was just told privately).

The key idea seems to be to automatically display the incoming
tweets on a map at http://meteorwatch.org/meteor-map which is
somehow supposed to reflect what's going on in the sky and to
actually do "some science"; apparently the BAA meteor section is
involved now, as http://meteorwatch.org/about/meteorwatch-2010
says, but the IMO obviously is not and its key websites aren't
even linked to.

The 2010 campaign is certainly an improvement over last year
when it produced an enormous noise, failed utterly to reflect
the amazing three peaks of the PER and carried very little
information (though supporters claim it made many people look
at meteors for the first time and that some of those actually
became real observers).

The question is: Does the current approach make any sense -
or does it rather distract from the 'real' meteor counting
experience so much that it is actually counterproductive?
Imagine lying out there under dark skies with a ZHR = 100 and
having to fiddle with a cellphone all the time to meet the
tweeting-instantly demand ...

Dan