Last week, NPR‘s Brian Unger recorded a hilarious mock-piece about the uselessness of Twitter — the ‘microblogging’ site on which people can continuously inform their friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and complete strangers of whatever they wish at any given moment, as long as they do it using fewer than 140 characters. (A representative selection from my current Twitter feed: “At the Austin airport”; “Girl scout cookies have arrived!”; “the science minister of canada is a creationist”.)

It’s easy to make fun of Twitter, and difficult to understand why it’s become such a phenomenon. But apparently somebody’s figured out how to do something useful with it! Hooray!

In early February, frustrated with how few journalists were covering the escalating violence in Madagascar, a 31-year-old medical research assistant from Indiana named Lova Rakotomalala began Twittering translated reports about the crisis. Here’s the full story from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (which got me thinking, once again, about how quickly new media is changing journalism):

Mr. Rakotomalala made contact with a number of those who had posted reports from the ground, forming an informal news bureau of sorts.

The group’s new skills were tested on Feb. 7. One of those reached by Mr. Rakotomalala, a 33-year-old lawyer named Andry Rakotoniaina, observed the protesters around midday at their weekly meeting place. The crowd numbered in the tens of thousands, he says.

When the mayor began to speak, Mr. Rakotoniaina dialed his fiancée, Lalatiana Rahariniaina, a 28-year-old bank cashier, on his cellphone and held it up so she could hear the speech. She was stationed at a computer in a nearby Internet café, and was able to post portions of the speech on Twitter from there.

“We people will take the power,” she quoted the mayor as saying at 12:40 p.m.

The crowd began moving toward the guarded presidential palace nearby. At 2:33 p.m., referring to the soldiers guarding the palace, Ms. Rahariniaina wrote, “Militaries are prepared to fire if needed.” Shots rang out from within the palace. Two young men standing several feet from Mr. Rakotoniaina crumpled to the ground and then were trampled by the crowd, he says. He snapped several photos and ran.

“Militaries shot from …” was all Ms. Rahariniaina could manage at 2:46 p.m. She lost phone contact with her fiancé. When she reached him, she says, all she could hear was his heavy breathing, and gunshots in the background.

“Go home directly!” she says she shouted at him. Instead, he went to the morgue to photograph the dead for his blog.

In Indiana, Mr. Rakotomalala couldn’t believe what he was reading. He translated posts and emailed contacts, asking for confirmation of the casualty reports

“Before, when you Googled my country, you just got the movie,” Mr. Rakotomalala says, referring to the 2005 animated film about four Central Park Zoo animals shipwrecked on the island. “We are correcting that.”