…And since I have spent much of the last twenty-four hours clicking refresh on the #G20 twitterstream, I may as well turn it into some semblance of reportage for those with better things to do.

It goes without saying that the Twitterers – including some good work by the Guardian team – were quicker with the news than any other channel. I first learned about the smashed windows at RBS, the police baton charges, and the police dogs from Twitter. “Dogs, horses and water cannon” is the procedure in public order situations, according to a friendly policeman talking to one of the Twitterers.

The consensus for much of the day was that the BBC were being slow and Sky News being sensationalist – the Beeb are always slow but I felt not all the Sky people were slavering with anticipation. “I must stress,” one of their on-the-ground people said, outside the sacked RBS branch, “That it’s a very small number of people causing the trouble.”  Still, they were the first after Reuters to get hold of the ghastly news that a man collapsed and died in the Bank protest at around 7.30 in the evening.

And on that subject, Sky and other mainstream news outlets, including the Times (hat tip to that well-known long-haired hippy, Sam Coates of the Red Box) are reporting the official police statement that protestors threw missiles at the police as they tried to treat/move the unconscious man.

Red Pepper Magazine’s twitterfeed carries an unsubstantiated eyewitness account that may contradict this. Red Pepper saw an unconscious man being treated at about 7.30 on Cornhill Street near Bank, and asserts that the crowd were not throwing bottles. This morning, Red Pepper has checked the official accounts, and is pretty certain they saw the same incident:

Reports on protester death: sounds like the guy we saw. Protesters alerted police to him & didn’t pelt as police got him out! Pls RT

Has the Met met its match in Twitter? The Telegraph was  groping towards this possibility yesterday in positing the G20 as  Twitter’s “turning point”, though its main criterion appears to have been the fact that all the mainstream media news outlets were collating their journalists’ twitterfeeds as well as watching other people’s. Nearly there, guys. And while we’re on the subject of the  Torygraph, another of its regular bloggers highlighted just what an uphill struggle the right-wing intelligentsia have with their tinpot authoritarian grassroots, by twittering that:

After today, the right to protest should be rescinded. #g20

It’s horribly sad to see how successful Labour have been in tying certain sections of the right wing to their agenda. Show them someone with a bad haircut and a slogan t-shirt looking a bit cross and they actually queue up to throw themselves under the wheels of Jacqui Smith.

Anyway, Twitter really came into its own at two points. The first was during the four-plus hours of “kettling” operations carried out by police around Bank, where a good thousand-odd protestors were hemmed in by police lines, without food, water or toilets, and only let go in the early evening. Several people with press credentials, including two of the Guardian reporters and Red Pepper, only got out eventually by waving their cards. All credit to the single mainstream source that covered this part of events in any detail, Al Jazeera, whose London correspondent got the blunt end of a police charge in this report.

The second point was when the “24 hour media” had clocked off for the day. From about 8pm onwards, riot police appear to have congregated in Bishopsgate and moved on the (entirely peaceful) climate camp, gradually forcing it towards Liverpool Street Station. From the tweets I read, there was no truly outrageous violence but it was not a terribly pleasant experience. More worryingly, protesters were being asked to delete pictures of police officers from their cameras before they left, prompting the organisers to contact the Association of Chief Police Officers – who confirmed that police cannot do this without a court order. The news was retweeted round the camp but cannot have reached everybody in time.

Contrast the lack of cameras at that point with the flashing jungle of cameras surrounding the lone nutter who smashed a metal barrier through the window of RBS earlier in the day. In fact, if we want to get really paranoid  about it, What Really Happened have an alternative theory:

Check out the photo with the caption “Storming the banks” [in the Daily Mail]. It looks like the “crowd” consists mostly of news photographers, which suggests they were told ahead of time to expect that window to be broken.

It’s even more obvious in this picture, though how one tells the press photographers from protestors is anybody’s guess (at least one guy taking a picture in this shot is wearing a cycle helmet, which suggests he has just taken part in the cycle protest). Nonetheless, a suspicious protestor tweeted:

interesting that th #RBS was completely unprotected on threadneedle & bartholomew… every other shop on th street was boarded up #g20rally

From looking at photos of the rest of the area, this seems to be the case.

Meanwhile, David Howarth appointed himself the unenviable task of brokering talks between police and climate camp protestors yesterday, and has interesting things to say about police priorities that may ring true with the twitterers who were moved on from climate camp. The Guardian reports:

David Howarth MP, who yesterday mediated last-minute talks between protesters and police, warned there was still “mutual misunderstanding” between the sides. He said the meeting between Climate Camp organisers and Scotland Yard’s Commander Bob Broadhurst and chief superintendent Ian Thomas, had been “business-like” and both sides had exchanged numbers.

But he was concerned police appeared to believe that causing disruption to commuters would warrant intervening to stop a demonstration.

“I still think the two sides have different views on what’s proportional,” he said. “Police still seemed to think that any disruption of traffic is worth stopping a demonstration for. It’s a shame this meeting did not happen earlier – there are points of mutual misunderstanding and the police really don’t like the way in which Climate Camp is a non-hierarchical organisation.”

It’s just been announced by another set of organisers with some nifty  Leveller woodcuts on their Twitter homepage that a “memorial protest” will take place at 12.30pm today along Bishopsgate to “mark the death of a protestor and demand answers”. Does not sound much like a recipe for calm, does it?