Twittering China's quake -- pure crowdsourcing?

On U.K's The Online Journalism Blog, by prof Paul Bradshaw details how Twitter has helped get the word out about the quake.

Here is crowdsourcing without the editorial management. How quickly otherwise would a journalist have thought of using Twitterlocal with a Google translation? And how soon before someone improves it so it only pulls tweets with the word ‘earthquake’, or more specific to the region affected? (It also emphasises the need for newspapers and broadcasters to have programmers on the team who could do this quickly)

(I don't even know what Twitterlocal is yet!)