May 21, 2005
Mobile blogs give citizen journalism legs
A wonderful article by News.com on moblogging.
"Text messaging and camera phones have put two powerful storytelling tools in the hands of millions of potential correspondents around the world," Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review at University of Southern California's journalism school, said in an e-mail exchange.
"So it is now inevitable that when something newsworthy happens in public, someone will be there to document that event online instantly.
The recent tsunami in South Asia gave evidence of moblogs' power and widespread use. Shortly after it struck, dispatches began appearing on blogs, often beating mainstream media to the unfolding story. One such blog was Waveofdestruction.org, created by Australian Geoffrey Huntley and made up of video and photos taken at the scene."
And interesting, some moblog history:
Adam Greenfield, who helped organize the First International Moblogging Conference, is credited with coining the term in 2002. But moblogging--defined as using a mobile device to publish on the Internet--dates back to the 1990s.
Most believe Steve Mann was the first to put photos on the Web from a mobile device, a bulky computer he carried with him. His first entry is hardly dramatic: "feb. 22, 1995: most of my day was quite boring, walking to lab, pizza at food trucks etc." But when he later comes across a building on fire, he records the scene in about 45 Internet photos--in what would now be thought of as moblogging."
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