Not only is my university OK with blogging, students doing my current unit have actually been asked to get out there and participate in the political blogosphere.
Which reminds me of the Australian Blogging Conference a couple of weeks back. Vidcasts of some sessions can be got from a link on larvatusprodeo including the session on political blogging (that I didn’t go to).
I enjoyed the session on citizen journalism, particularly the section on photojournalism led by Rachel Cobcroft. Citizen photojournalism is changing the way breaking events are being reported. Rachel says, for example, that nowpublic.com will post on your Flickrstream and ask if they can blog your image of whatever issue they are reporting on. Rae Allen said that the recent Pasha Bulker incident was 80% citizen journalism on the ABC web site – he works there, so he knows.
It is also changing the whole flavour of election reporting – for example the Blair Watch Project which has a great Flickr archive . (I just love the Blair Watch motivation: “ We felt the election was going to provide the nation with a tidal wave of bullshit and someone had to provide an umbrella.” )
Jean Burgess asked how do we get it across to people that it is citizen journalism. I took that up, suggesting that we are witnessing a convergence (yes, that word again) of journalism and citizenship, and that it need not be political as such but covers the whole spectrum of people’s activity. Mark Bahnisch made the point that we need to separate civic action from political action, to separate citizenship from voting. Jean sees an opportunity to link up all the active citizenship that is already there. I am not sure if she means establishing a site to do that, but Axel Bruns mentioned the possibility of repurposing youdecide.2007 for ongoing activity.
Somebody reminded us of Clay Shirky’s observation that in traditional media you filter and publish, whereas on the web you publish and filter. I just realized that is something that I will take and apply to research blogging as well.
Tags: blogoz, citizen journalism, citizenship, research blogging
