CTZ news for Citizen Journalists

It seems that the field of technology is moving with the speed of light. When you get a GREAT idea and you ‘think’ it’s ahead of its time…and sudden you read some article on the same subject…and then you keep thinking…IS THE WORLD MOVING FAST or I’M TOO SLOW…

I am working on a project for the past one month on building a comprehensive system to support Citizen Journalism and Freelance Journalism… its more or less complete now… during all those one month, I kept telling my self ‘woow this should be ahead of its time…’

But then I read this News on BBC... (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4330690.stm)
...and I thought…oh my GOD…my idea won’t be new for a very long…

Before my so called ‘new idea’ gets OLD…I decided to publish it on my blog…so that I can sleep in peace…believing that it was ‘NEW’…though my project goes beyond what is mentioned in the article…but it’s no doubt a step towards my concept.

So here are some extracts from the Report of that project

A concept of an open NEWS portal for Citizen and Freelance Journalists

Abhishek Kumar,
National Institute of Design,
Ahmedabad,
India

Introduction
With the evolution of web and mobile technology, citizens have now tremendous power to speak out their view points and be heard. The London bombing and Tsunami saw the citizen journalism coming to limelight. Again Web 2.0 technologies including social networking sites have opened up the web for public. Even though ‘Blogs’ have now slowly being recognized as good source of expression and reporting, but still the concept of it is more ‘private’ (to author) in nature. The concept of the portal is to build a platform where every one is free to express and a portal which is ‘by the people and for the people’. In relation to the changing trends in technology and society; this project was to create a medium for the society to report and discuss events that shape up peoples lives. It tries to converge the existing technologies to answer the changing scenario in journalism. The difference between this portal from existing ones are that it minimises the human interference in selecting, deciding and editing the content. This is an attempt to remove human biases from the reporting and to bring in multiple perspectives of events and happenings from local people.
It tries to holistically conceptualize a sustaining system which can assist people not only to access the News but also allows people to post articles in all forms and also provides them with facility to sell those articles. It uses newly evolving Information Architecture paradigms of tagging or popularly known as folksonomy. Folksonomy is an excellent tool for reference purpose; but in this project it is also used for controlling and to create a browsing experience. As the content of the pages would be dynamically (that too with very less control on content) changing the tagging becomes very important controlling factor. Also as the ‘NEWS’ is primarily a browsing experience it tries to build up a system which supports ‘browsing’ than search. The project is built up along with a business process which would support such sites, because such project would be difficult to sustain without a proper support.

© Abhishek Kumar, 2005

Thanks
c ya
bye