Does citizen journalism represent a return to journalism's roots/

Is journalism coming full circle?

The question is asked by Gautam Lamba who argues that far from being the disruptive thechnology that many think they are,the likes of blogs and citizen journalism concepts are merely journalism returning to its roots ie that of crowdsourcing.

Only as it grew did it

transform from the crowd and into a specialized, organized collaborative group of people that banded together to report on vagaries of government and the elite.

Ht-Sarah Hartley

Why crowdsourcing may be doomed to failure

One of the problems identified with this cconcept that we call crowdsourcing is the very fact that people get rather fed up with doing something for nothing over time and a rapid enthusiasm will eventually turn to apathy.

Maybe Wikipedia is going to be a prime example of this as this graph show



As Matt Buckanan says

The decay of time, bitter infighting, and the increasing scope and strength of regulations slowly strangle the life out of Wikipedia, with editors—its braintrust—fleeing in droves, even as traffic at the world's fifth most-popular website keeps growing

November in Manchester-or lost in social media love

Last night's Social media cafe returned to the Northern in Tib Street Manchester and was ostensibly to be a discussion on the future direction of the event which has now been going for 12 months.

Prior to the discussion,November in Manchester gave a short presentation.

The idea is to create six fictional characters who will be blogging, tweeting and filming their lives across Manchester during the four weeks in November.

It is perhaps the ultimate in social media crowd sourcing with people being asked to send in photos and video.These will become the background of the novel

It will revolve around two characters and will be a romantic drama.The two will not initially know each other but will ultimately fall in love.

The aim is two fold.To explore what social media can do but also whether it will support a novel.

So if you want to get involve take a look at the site and get in touch through twitter

Onto the discussion hosted in three groups by Sarah Hartley,Ian Forrester and Julian Tait

Sarah has already posted a good round up on her blog

The opinions being that the venue needed to rotate,and that the skills, knowledge, talents could be utilised for a wider purpose in helping the Manchester community.

The latter being an important point and one which I for one am wholly behind.

I have probably been as guilty as anyone of talking about social media,new media,new journalism but perhaps now is the time for action.Let's put all these ideas and fantastic tools into practice.

Crowd sourcing the Credit crunch

Via Johnson Press Digital digest.

Radio 4's IPM blog has created a new use of crowdsourcing techniques by asking the general public

what single factor is hurting you most about the credit crunch?

Obviously not a scientific survey the map aims to show nevertheless the issues effecting the general public at large

You can see the current map here