A proposal for a real revolution in 'user-generated content' and news

The 7 July 2005 bombings in London helped the mainstream media understand how millions of mobile phone cameras could dramatically expand the coverage of an event. It was a pivotal moment in journalism. However, most media outlets now rely on blanket pleas to the public for pictures, video and comments. It’s a brute force approach that will break when user-submissions begin to swamp the limited resources most media organisations have to evaluate the content. But news organisations are also only using the content to support a narrow, traditional news agenda.

There’s a smarter way. People could send their images with geo-tagging information either manually by postcode or via applications such as Zonetag or Shozu to a website. They could also include basic information either explaining or questioning what they are witnessing, such as: “Why have the police shut Holborn Underground Station?”

Using a Dodgeball-like service, the message could be relayed to anyone signed up to the network within a certain radius of where the message was sent. It serves two purposes: it would allow people to route round trouble spots, and anyone who had additional information could feed back into the network.

This is only one potential future news application made possible by ubiquitous internet access and location-aware devices, but it shows the potential of smart applications to help make sense of the news all around us.