The New News

I got a tad emotion in my last post, I probably didn't really explain myself very well.

Allow me to clarify.

The screencast of the July 7th page on wikipedia pretty much summed up my feelings. What I was witnessing was the endevour of normal folk to provide each other with the most up-to-the-minute information they possibly could. They weren't journalists or professional photographers, just people on the street with their phones or at home behind their computers who wanted to help.

Then it dawned on me. For the first time I noticed that the media wasn't bothering to wait for their various correspondants to get to the scene, they were asking for our help, we were the correspondants. They wanted our photos, videos, opinions and accounts: and in many instances, wikipedia is just one of them, it was the blogger type sites that were providing the most up-to-date content; especially when you consider how difficult it could be during those hours to access the beeb and other main news outlets.

The screencast summed this all up, it was poetic, bittersweet.

Along with the warm feeling this sort of grassroots activity gives me, it reiterated my love for the internet.

No other for of communication is so dynamic, so bottom up, so pluralistic. TV is great, but it is also passive, in many cases you are force fed and while 'have your say' type bits attempt to bridge this gap they are a pretty poor showing. The internet offers everything and most importantly it offers it for everyone.

Screencast of Wikipedia's page on the London Bombings

This is so cool.

Duncan Rawlinson on his blog The Last Minute has a screencast of Wikipedia's page on the London Bombings. The page is listed as a 'current event' which means that it is one that is subject to much change as the incident occurs. The twist is the page is usually created within minutes of the news breaking and updates constantly as more information becomes available.

What Mr Rawlinson has done is capture each of the 936 updates individually and then string them together into a movie which is available for download here. (it's pretty meaty, 40MB)

This is yet another example of grassroots media. We (collective, not me and Noel) are taking control of the news. When the news broke it was people on the streets, the bloggers that were feeding our desire for info; it was people with camera phones that were providing the first images and videos, in some instances where the press could not get.

Were taking back the reigns of information distribution and it makes me want to cry.

via the social software blog

Really Simple "Outer Space" Syndication

Back in the fifties someone thought it would be a great ideal to beam everything from the news to mork and mindy into space in the hope that intelligent life may tune in and be drawn towards our little blue planet.

If you like me thought that beaming episodes of Friends into space was likely to reduce rather than increase the chances of aliens coming towards earth, nows your chance to make a difference.

Blog In Space is offering the blogsphere the chance to beam their RSS feeds into space in the hope that what we all have to say is more interesting than the opinion of FOX and Paramout.

May I take this opportunity, in what is Nearly Noel Edmonds' first interstella post, to welcome our alien friends and reassure them that English T.V. is much better than that of our friends across the Atlantic.