Posts in the category: Citizen Journalism

Obama's Digital Density: A Large Footprint from an Aggregated View in Berlin

Eric Gundersen — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:15:04 +0000

Today the Associated Press estimated 200,000 people attended Obama's speech in Berlin. One of the iconic photos from this historical speech will surely be Jae C. Hong's (with the AP) image that you see above, a similar version to this is already on the New York Times website right now and will probably end up printed on the front page tomorrow.

The only thing more powerful than this picture of this amazing crowd would be an aggregated of collage of the 458 people that have their cameras in hand, which are marked as white dots here. At 1:00 am on July 25th, there are currently 1,060 photo's tagged with Obama + Berlin. You can be sure tens of thousands more will be shared and posted in the coming days on flickr and other sites.

Turn to New Media for Updates on Hurricane Dolly

AJ Herrmann — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:26:56 +0000

With the first big hurricane of the season touching down today, I knew we'd see some interesting news coverage. As I was scanning the chatter about Hurricane Dolly over lunch, a tweet by the Red Cross caught my eye.

My first reaction was, "the Red Cross uses Twitter?" I followed the link to its blog covering Hurricane Dolly. Although neither the blog nor the twitter feed is a great source for breaking news, I found it very interesting where they were directing folks to get updates on the storm: to the Flickr, Twitter, and Youtube feeds mentioning the hurricane from the public at large.

Managing News Maps China Earthquake and Helps Identify Citizen Reporter

Ian Cairns — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:21:36 +0000

After the earthquake hit yesterday, a big red dot appeared over China on the Managing News dashboard map that dwarfed all the other dots around the globe. Next to it in the tag cloud, I saw a few new terms in red that I knew were probably related to the China story, and I started clicking to learn more. I quickly learned that Sun Weide is the Olympic spokesperson giving updates about the changes in the Olympic torch relay plans due to the earthquake, and that the construction project at the Three Gorges Dam wasn't affected. But who was Ronen Medzini, and why was "cellular telephone" showing up as a relevant term?

It turns out he is an Israeli student in the Chengdu area who sent a text message to the AP after the earthquake: "Traffic jams, no running water, power outs, everyone sitting in the streets, patients evacuated from hospitals sitting outside and waiting."

Using Yahoo! Pipes to Track Breaking News Stories

Ian Cairns — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:03:01 +0000

Robin Hamman from the BBC wrote on his personal Cybersoc.com blog today about some aggregation work he's been doing with Yahoo! Pipes. We love what he's up to. (HT: I got the tweet from Rheingold's feed.)

With the rise of so many citizen journalists, Robin is trying to solve the problem of information clutter by filtering through social media sites looking for keywords that might be signals of a real breaking story. By using Pipes, he has built a single RSS feed that searches for a keyword across several social media sites where citizen reports are likely to pop up: Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and on blog search engines Technorati and IceRocket.

Using good keywords that could signal a big story -- he picked Explosion, Evacuation, and Bomb to start -- gives him feeds that let him know whenever chatter about one of these terms spikes online. Using a couple other tools that Pipes offers, he's able to do a little extra filtering and make sure he's cutting out as much clutter as possible and still finding the good stuff. Here's a picture of what part of this Pipe looks like: