July 15, 2005
Citizen Journalism and Technorati, a New Public Utility
A well written article in Wired on the London bombings, the rise of new citizen journalism and how Technorati has become a public utility on a global scale.
"When former Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael K. Powell watched television coverage of the London bombings last week, he noticed that most of the significant pictures didn't originate from professional photographers employed by news agencies. They came from witnesses at the scene using cell phones and digital cameras to document the tragedy.
"Journalists are trained not to be emotional, like a doctor doesn't fall in love with his patients," Powell said. "But people experiencing a tragedy can convey what actually happened while at the same time express deep emotion and engage in spirited storytelling. A photo of someone climbing up through train wreckage is extremely powerful. A reporter rolling up to the scene behind a police line can rarely give you that.
To Powell, London showed that blogging has morphed into the art of raw, personalized storytelling.
"You really felt as if you were there," Powell said of the blog posts and Flickr photos he surveyed, "as opposed to watching CNN or reading MSNBC.com, which are fine for the facts but stale and a bit removed."
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