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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."
I would think that after a while, there would also be a system that would separate the wheat from the chaff for you, based on a system whose preferences you yourself set. (Kinda like meta-moderations!)
Many blogging sites already tell you which have been updated recently, but more importantly, which are the most popular. They also will break them down based on content and/or channels. Google just bought blogger.com, and with their ranking system, it will only accelerate the trend.
Furthermore, there is also word of mouth. When the second Gulf War started, it didn't take long before someone pointed me to The Agnonist, and I got a lot of good news from that site. All without even looking - I merely heard about it.
libertarianswag.com
What I want to see is video from the people involved in protests. That's what this is going to be good for. I don't give a crap what the guy holoding the phone/cam thinks, but it will give me a view of an event the mainstream media might have glossed over. Things are so whitewashed it's ridiculous. Try watching the BBC vs any of the US channels. The US won't show anything that might upset us. That's not really telling the truth, it's just partial truths.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Maybe I'm alone, maybe I'm not, but I've never visited a blog on a regular basis, unless the blog is in front of something else that I want, I probably wouldn't ever see one. So, maybe you can help me out? Where do I even begin looking for useful/meaningful blogs?
To me, I hear all about blogs, but have never ever found an interesting or useful one. Come to think of it, I haven't even seen that many. So maybe there's an index I'm missing? Or maybe I need to get more saavy friends?! whatever.
It seems like blogs and their importance are all hype.
While the panelists agreed that blogging and moblogging doesn't automatically qualify as journalism, they did say that it CAN be journalism if journalistic principles are applied.
One of the more interesting comments was from technology journalist David Akin, who said that experiments that enlist moblogging citizens with camera phones to send their photos to news sites may be cool and fun and interesting, but it's not news by longshot, mainly because they lack the professional journalistic skills to identify what qualifies as news.