In ‘The Internet as a right‘ Jeff Jarvis argues that the Internet should be a right for every citizen, just like how in developed nations we expect to have water, electricity and in some, phone services and television access.

Jarvis raises many points to demonstrate how the Internet as a right can benefit nations.

My favourite aspect of this blog is the interactivity Jarvis encourages with his audience by asking them to leave their comments.

This enables a broad spectrum of opinions are voiced and therefore, creates enhanced knowledge amongst viewers.

Throughout this unit, I have been bewildered not only by the emergence of blogs and how popular they have become in our society, but mostly by how they have changed the content of news.

Blogs create a space for opinions to be heard and discussion to take place on events and issues that in a newspaper or on the evening news, audiences might never have been exposed to.

Jarvis’ ‘The Internet as a right’ is the perfect example of an interesting debate that, in my opinion, would not be considered newsworthy enough be to broadcast on the news or published in a newspaper and this demonstartes how blogs can enhance our knowledge and create opinions on a wide spectrum of ideas.  

‘Innovations in Newspapers‘ by author Juan Antonio Giner, is an extremely political blog, with vast majority of attention being on the US Presidential Campaign.

Although I do not consider myself to be politically minded, I found this blog fascinating.

Juan Antonio Giner follows blog conventions by writing in single sentence paragraphs and presenting news more as conversation, not as a lecture, with the laid back writing approach.

The most fascinating aspect of this blog, in my opinion, is that the author is able to tell a story through a vast array of images used and there is little need for words.

In, ‘Getting nasty, but good for obama‘, the only words published by the author are,

“More and more nasty signs against Obama.

Republicans are doing a lot for Obama with these signs.

And they don’t know to stop this crazy trend.

Democrats must be very happy to have such a stupid enemy”.

By using such strong, visual images, even the limited words published did not need to be.

I also think it is ironic that the publisher of this blog and founder of the media consulting company Innovation International, Juan Antonio Giner, has an archive that dates back to June 2005.

That is definitely very innovative. 

When I first viewed the site, I was overwhelmed by the vast array of options this site provides the audience, from breaking news and news feeds, the journalist’s and editor’s blog, to the ability to search for jobs and the amount of advertising on the home page.

The editor’s section contains blogs hand picked by the editor, John Thompson and they provide discussion on the latest news, particularly stories related to journalism.

One of the blogs I found most interesting was ‘SEC investigates fake jobs data‘.

One of my most significant concerns about citizen journalism is the verification of the material.

How are news organisations and then the audiences supposed to know what they are consuming is true, factual reporting?

‘SEC investigates fake jobs data’ discusses how an unsubstantiated report of Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, suffering a heart attack and how it effectively sent Apple stock prices plummeting after the report’s publication.

This blog effectively demonstrates the importance of verifying information from citizen reporter’s before distributing the content.

I thoroughly enjoyed reviewing the UK journalism site, for it was informative and interactive.

Hopefully Australian media will take note and follow the path of the innovative British!

The Reuters news agency in London equipped its journalists with a mobile journalism toolkit approximately one year ago.

The toolkit includes the Nokia N95/N82, a Bluetooth keyboard, a digital microphone and a phone-adapted tripod.

The greatest advantage of mojos, in my opinion, is that reporters no longer have to carry around heavy equipment and because they can record interviews and events without the need of a film crew, it makes it easier to be on the scene as an event is unfolding.

Robert Scoble has been broadcasting live video from his cell phone since last year and claims he can get live video onto the Internet faster than he can make a phone call.

The immediacy of the Internet enables audiences to be exposed to news almost instantaneously.

The most significant disadvantage of mojos is that in remains limited in some developed nations, such as Australia, due to the high cost of data charges.

My biggest concern is that being solely responsible for filming, interviewing and editing may result in me (as a future journalist) becoming a jack of all trades and master of none.

See the video below for an example of mobile journalism.

My favourite videoblog was ‘Alive in Baghdad‘.

The production is of high quality, therefore messages are not lost.

The most significant aspect of this vlog, in my opinion, is that mainstream media only shows a limited view on what is taking place in Iraq because of the war, with the focus usually being on the money spent and number of killed or wounded people.

Alive in Baghdad is reported by locals and shows stories and the realities of people who are living in a war zone.

In particular, I was fascinated by ‘Iraqi refugees forced into prostitution‘ and ‘Getting to school in Iraq‘ as they both show the detrimental effects they are suffering due to the war and are unlike any other story we have been exposed to from Iraq.

This vlog effectively fills the gap in war reporting and enhances our knowledge and creates alternate opinions on the war in Iraq by offering audiences to view the matter from the lives of the innocent people directly affected.

Before viewing the vlogs recommended by Maderazo, I did not understand the difference between amatuer videos posted on YouTube and vlogs.

I can now appreciate how high quality production values and being informative, as well as entertaining reporting, can make such a significant difference.

Singapore Press Holdings, the country’s main media group, launched Stomp (Straits Times online mobile and print) in June 2006 and within six months it was attracting 300,000 unique visitors a year.

*  Jennifer Lewis (then editor) and Felix Soh (SPH deputy editor, multi-media), courtesy of Quinn S., ALJ301 Multi-Media Journalism, Lecture 2, ‘Asia’s Media Innovators’

Citizen journalism constitutes 80 to 82 per cent of Stomp’s content.

Singapore academics think it’s a cultural thing unique to Singapore, where citizen reporters would rather talk to a reporter, therefore peolpe send an email or SMS about an issue or story and Stomp producers interview them and re-write the story for them.

Citizen reporters, however, have the power to clarify the story and check it for accuracy to ensure it has reflected what they were meant to say.

My favourite aspect of the Stomp site is that it focuses on social networking.

Stomp has created an online community, where they have formed their own football group, tuition groups and they have outings they organise among themselves.

In this sense, convergence has united fragmented audiences and created a community.

Stomp is not serious journalism, however deals with journalism that affects people’s lives.

Although highly innovative and unlike anything we have seen from Australian media, Stomp is not something I would read regularly, as I have no interest in articles such as ‘How do you view unfaithful women‘ and  ’Is it important for a guy to be a gentleman?‘.

For me it screams mindless entertainment.    

Niles was searching for a Web-based tool that allows a user to upload photos  and have them displayed as a Flash photo gallery that can be embedded on another website.

Ideally, the tool would allow the creator to add captions and to control the display style, size and speed of the images. 

I decided to investigate for myself and like Niles, I found that Picasa was the easiest to use and had the most effective results.

Bubbleshare has the ability to quickly and easily upload multiple images, however my captions were not able to be viewed and I did not like how the slide show would not start automatically.

The biggest frustration of Bubbleshare is that photos are not placed in the gallery in order and I found it quite confusing to work out how to correct this.  

I found Slidelickr quite complicated to use and the gallery was tediously slow to open.

You can view my first attempt at creating a picture gallery below.

RSS feeds include headlines, abstracts and other information, allowing RSS readers to search the feeds you have chosen and pull in the latest information from them.

Nearly all weblogs publish RSS feeds and most news sites now publish them, meaning that you can get just about any type of online content via RSS.

As a self-confessed techno-phobe, the simple thought of experimenting with something new on the Web terrifies me!

With assisstance from John Dube, I suprisingly found RSS feeds easy to manage, not to mention extremely efficient and highly informative.

As I have discussed in a previous post, we are a time poor demographic and RSS feeds certainly enable a user to be exposed to an array of information in the most time efficient manner.

In 2004, the Communications Industry Forecast found that 10.04 hours of media was consumed every day and predicted that by 2009 we will all be consuming an additional hour of media a day.

As argued by JD Lassica, RSS feeds can be used to eliminate information overload.

“The explosion of weblogs and niche news sites poses a problem for any info-warrior: Who the heck has time to read all this stuff? Instead of the hunt and peck of Web surfing, you can download or buy a small program that turns your computer into a voracious media hub, letting you snag headlines and news updates as if you were commanding the anchor desk at CNN”.

As an impending journalist, however, it is my concern that my future career may be spent filtering through numerous RSS, not creatively investigating the next big story.

* Oh Yeon-ho introducing visitors to the OhmyNews forum

Oh Yeon-ho, the founder and CEO of OhmyNews, wanted to start a tradition free of newspaper company elitism and created OhmyNews to change society.

Oh launced a test version in December 1999, with a staff of four and had received 20 articles from citizen reporters.

By mid 2007, the number of Korean citizen reporters reached almost 60,000.

OhmyNews International was launched in May 2004 and by March 2007, had 3,000 citizen reporters from 100 countries, attracting more than 700,000 repeat visitors each day.

At a time where international news is rapidly losing ground, at rates greater than any other topic area, OhmyNews International enables an audience member to receive foreign news that they might not receive from a local or national paper in their location, by visiting the site to further enhance their knowledge.

An average of about 200 stories are submitted by citizen reporters each day and about a third of these are rejected for reasons such as poor sentence construction, factual errors or the lack of news value, ensuring the quality of journalism is not diminished.

Citizen reporters must sign a code of ethics and violation of this agreement can result in the membership being revoked, an important aspect in regards to accuracy, credibility and verification.

OhmyNews enables an audience to consume newsworthy articles that they may not normally be exposed to.

“OhmyNews strives to listen to the voices of no one but our readers and citizen reporters”. 

 In my opinion, OhmyNews has changed society by combining traditional journalism with citizen journalism, to create a unique website.

* Image courtesy of www.treehugger.com/us-money-photo.jpg

 Fred Wilson discusses the media business model in, ‘Make money around free content‘.

Wilson explains how both media and most online businesses are based on ‘software economics‘, where the cost of creating something of value is relatively high, but the marginal cost of distributing to each consumer is very low.

Generally, when people think of the ‘media business model‘ they usually just think of advertising, but Wilson explains how it goes far beyond that in his list of all the revenue models that can be found in the media industry, all based around a core of free or almost free content.   

Chris Anderson in ‘Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business‘ discusses how the rise of freeconomics is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web, such as the cheap price of bandwith and storage.

With more people turning to the Web as a news medium, broadcast commercials and print display ads have given way to a blizzard of new Web-based ad formats, such as Yahoo’s pay-per-pageview banners and Google’s pay-per-click text ads.

These approaches are based on the principle that free offerings build audiences with distinct interests and expressed needs that advertisers will pay to reach.

Advertisers are now more able to aim advertising at certain demographics, thus place more advertising on the websites of news organisations.

“The ability of technology to track readership of specific stories has given editors a powerful weapon in future financial battles, for the first time making an indisputable link between strong editorial content and the kind of higher readership that attracts advertisers”, (http://journalism.org/node/11977).

The Future of Media Report informs us that 37 per cent of consumers would rather pay for online content than be exposed to advertisements, I know that I certainly would.