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Rheingold Preaches Mob-Logging
drjparker writes "Howard Rheingold author of Smart Mobs and The Virtual Community among other works has an article in the Online Journalism Review in which he ponders the effects of video over cell phones and adding video to blogs on the future of journalism. The article is titled Moblogs Seen as a Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism."
It seems like a good thing without giving too much thought at the moment.
This is a good thing for places where media censorship occurs regularly. The SARS crisis could not be contained by the Chinese government because of people sending SMS's to others with tales of a disease spreading in certain areas. The news of course didn't cover it, and when China finally acknowledged it, the news down played it. But the SMS's continued, and it gave people a way to do first hand accounts of an event in progress.
If this can prevent media censorship, I'm all for it.
But then... who's to say some group won't stage some sort of event in the future and use/force people to blog this to mislead others...
Slashdot is a real big success story. The moderation system makes sure I see only at least remotely relevant or funny stuff.
Now checkout tv.oneworld.net
that already does quite cool stuff with short videos uploaded by virtually anyone.If both are combined I could really imagine this to be useful. Imagine something like slashdot where editors select stories. Everybody would then sortof upload their clips that would get moderated. I dont see why this should not be possible.
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
Jesus, people, get a clue. The whole frickin' article is about the emergent problem of journalistic credibility vs. moblogging.
Blogs, RSS syndication, RSS aggregators, metablogs and reputation systems like Technorati and NewsMonster now offer a dynamic and rapidly evolving collective editorial filtering system.
His entire thesis is that the emerging moblogging culture will need to put safeguards into place, like reputation systems. He's not talking about aggregating rumor or mobthought, but the need for mechanisms to sift the wheat from the chaff so that you have rapidly emerging, true information without a paid editorial staff.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds alot like Open Source Journalism, collectively written and peer-reviewed.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
I think the term is moblogging ("moe-blogging") as in mobile weblogging. It's a little confusing in that it talks about mobs of people using mobile devices. You can follow the link to the origin of the word.
Indymedia has been doing this kind of stuff for years. Its a network of websites where people upload multimedia news content. It started off as an event based thing around protests (Seattle '99) but has grown into a network of over 100 sites worldwide, that try to provide community news coverage on an ongoing basis.
For most of the coverage is not done live, ie people take pictures, video, etc and then go back home or to a community media center and then upload it. There have been a wide variety of live wireless strategies used including:
- internet radio stream with live callins via cellphone (most popular)
- phone cams
- sms gateway
- onsite kiosk provided via 3G phone, for picture upload, live chat
- live 802.11b video streaming
Since Seattle '99 thousands of a/v clips, tens of thousands of photos and hundreds of thousands of text articles have been contributed to this collaborative news platform.
We've done some stuff with syndication of our content but the protocols don't exist yet to fully exchange multimedia content.
One thing that I think Indymedia has that blog culture doesn't is that its not "just a website". The websites function to allow anyone to participate but that's generally not thought to be sufficient. Each of the 100+ nodes in the network has a group of people that work to cultivate a liberated media space by doing things like provide training on how to do multimedia and reporting, holds film showings, provides technical support, publish newspapers, etc.
I work with DC Indymedia.
it's a riff on Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner. The four parts are Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdammerung.
sulli
RTFJ.