News And Nanotails
Video Interview: Len Brody, CEO, Now Public: From Hyperlocal to Hyperpersonal
This is an interview by Rafat Ali of paidContent.org. I thought it was particularly timely considering the recent trendiness of CNN’s I-Reports (and the Second Life version), a citizen journalism site that’s making press for… well… being a citizen journalism site. Not that IndyMedia.org hasn’t been around forever already, not to mention Miro and YouTube (possibly too obvious)…
Where this all of leads is the interesting part, and often it’s the part that people leave out. The prediction goes as follows: cameras are everywhere, and people are finding new ways of releasing their content for anyone to use. Specialty blogs will skim the citizen journalism sites for content and post it. News outlets will skim the blogs for content, aggregate it and report it. Our news will increasingly become “at the scene”, without the extra foolishness of some perfectly-coiffed anchor in a suit pretending they know anything about what’s happening.
CNN is seeing this new work flow developing, and in the creation of I-Reports is hoping to place themselves at both ends of that work flow. I expect they’ll fail, partially because the web loves specialists. If you try to do too much at once, people turn away. NowPublic.com has a better shot at succeeding because they’re making citizen reporting their only priority. People can post text, video, still images, and even audio. They can also add to the content as well.
I can see tiny little communities springing up around stories in an environment like that. A fire down the street would have everybody in the neighborhood posting pictures, time-lines of the event, and video clips. I wouldn’t be surprised if these story-based communities split up and reassembled over time, eventually causing people to recognize each other as having similar interests. The stories themselves would have nanotails, remaining of interest only to a select group who would re-hash them over coffee and use them as ways to connect to one another.
Eventually people might even consider how events around them affect the people they care about. You never know, this might be the start of something much more personal than what one might assume.
